Animals in Translation (26 page)

Another reason to stop at two is that dogs in a pack are much bolder and more aggressive than one dog on its own.
Pack mentality
is real. I mentioned the collie who pretends she doesn't notice the two barking German shepherds whenever her owner takes her for a walk. One day my friend took the collie and her other dog, the golden retriever, out for a walk along with the neighbor and
her
two dogs. The four dogs knew each other well, and probably felt like a pack.

This time the collie was a completely different dog. When they got to the German shepherds' yard and the two shepherds rushed the fence, the collie went nuts. She was slamming herself into the fence, barking, and racing back and forth from one end of the fence to the other chasing those dogs. She was really cussing them out, and it was all because
she was in her pack.

She refused to leave, too. Her three friends got totally bored taunting those poor fenced-in dogs, and kept trying to get the collie's attention so they could go on with their walk, but the collie wouldn't budge. It was like she was making up for lost time. Her owner finally had to drag her away.

A dog pack can be incredibly dangerous to humans. A couple of years ago a ten-year-old girl in Wisconsin was killed by a pack of six Rottweilers while she was playing at her friend's house down the
street. There were two adult dogs and four puppies in the house (which was a violation of a city ordinance limiting the number of dogs per household to three) and apparently the little girl began to pet one of the puppies, and one of the adult dogs got jealous and bit the girl. That set off the pack and they attacked.

Opinion varies on how to keep the peace if you do have more than two dogs. Most people, though not all, say you should always handle and pet the dominant dog first. The king must be treated like the king, although the ultimate leader is you. If you don't respect the dogs' natural hierarchy you can put the underdog in danger. Dr. Dodman has a horrible story about a pack of Chesapeake Bay retrievers living with a lady who indulged them totally and never gave them any obedience training. She lived alone, and the dogs were her surrogate family. Of course, in a real family children don't just naturally sit around behaving themselves nicely and saying “please” and “thank you.” Children have to be obedience-trained, too.

The pack in this lady's house had formed a natural hierarchy, with two dominant dogs on top, two or three middle-ranking dogs, and two underdogs. But the lady refused to respect the ranking, and always lavished lots of time and attention on the two underdogs whenever she came home.

All that attention was provoking the top dogs into launching vicious attacks on the bottom dogs. Dr. Dodman told the lady she needed to greet and feed the dominant dogs first when she came home, but she wouldn't listen, and kept on showing favoritism. The whole thing ended in disaster. First one of the underdogs was badly injured and the lady decided the only way to deal with the situation was to have the little underdog put down. Then the one remaining underdog was horribly injured by the two top dogs and the lady had the two
top dogs
put down. All three dogs died just because this lady wouldn't listen to good advice.
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W
ORKING WITH THE
A
NIMAL'S
N
ATURE
: F
ARM
A
NIMALS

A human owner has the responsibility to understand and respect his pet's nature.
Dogs and cats are predator animals.
Dogs are hyper-
social predators who live in dominance hierarchies. If you interfere with the hierarchy you can get the low-ranking dog or dogs killed by their own pack mates. You have to work with an animal's emotional makeup, not against it.

Domestic animals such as pigs, cattle, and horses are less controlled by purely social stimuli than dogs, so with these animals it's especially important to exert dominance the way another animal would do it. I learned this lesson when I was raising piglets as part of my Ph.D. work in animal behavior. My piglets lived in a Disneyland of straw with lots of different objects to root and tear up. I would sit with my piglets for hours and watch their behavior.

The one I named Mellow Pig would instantly roll over when her belly was scratched and would actively solicit people to rub her belly. But the largest pig in the pen did not like being petted at all, and she was the dominant boss hog. She thought she owned the place. Her coloration was what an Illinois farmer calls a blue butt; she had white forequarters and a grayish blue-gray rear. I named her Big Gilt.

When Big Gilt reached a hundred pounds, she started biting me whenever I entered the pen. The other pigs sought petting and stroking but Big Gilt disdained it. She just wanted to be boss. The bigger she got the worse the biting got and I had to stop it.

I tried waving my arms at her and shouting, but it didn't help. In desperation once I even tried slapping her big blue butt. That did no good, either. Finally I figured out that I had to act like a pig. I needed to assert my superior dominance by biting and pushing against the side of her neck the same way another, bigger pig would.

So, to simulate another pig biting and shoving against Big Gilt's neck I used a short piece of a one-by-four-inch board, about eighteen inches long, to poke and shove her against the fence. That's what the winner pig does: the winner pushes the loser away, or up against a wall. I shoved the end of the board repeatedly against her thick neck and I made it very clear that I was stronger, which I was. A full-grown human can still push around a hundred-pound hog. I didn't hurt her, but I did dominate her.

It worked like magic. Big Gilt stopped biting me and I was now Boss Hog. Using the hardwired instinctual behavior pattern was much more effective than slapping her. The only problem with this
method is that it has to be done when the animal is young enough so you can still easily push the pig away. Again, I want to emphasize that I did not beat her up. She was overpowered by a stronger being who applied pressure to the right spot. Pushing the board against her neck turned on a hardwired instinctual submissive behavior.

After that Big Gilt was now polite when I entered the pen and she never bit me again, but she still did not like petting. One day while I was stroking Mellow Pig on the belly I started to rub Big Gilt on the belly, too. Since I was now the boss she didn't run away, but she clearly didn't like it. The strangest thing happened. Hardwired instinct collided with clear conscious will. Rubbing her belly triggered the instinctual rolling over behavior, but only the rear end of Big Gilt rolled over. Her front end remained standing when her hind end collapsed. The whole time I was stroking her a horrid growling sound came out of her throat. I had turned on the pleasure response to a belly rub, but the other end of Big Gilt did not want to give in. She did not dare bite me and she did not try to run away, but she surely did not like it.

P
REVENT
A
GGRESSION IN THE
F
IRST
P
LACE

If I'd known more about animals I would have started establishing myself as Boss Hog a lot sooner, since as I mentioned earlier it's better to prevent aggressive behavior in the first place than to try to change it once it's developed.

Once an animal
has
developed aggressive behavior, in most cases it's going to be easier to deal with in prey animals than in predators. A good example is my friend Mark's horse, Sarah, who's nasty around the feed trough. Sarah was not reared alone, so she doesn't have the kinds of problems Blackie did. She's just got a bad attitude when it comes to food, and she'll chase away all the other horses so she can have the food to herself. I've seen a lot of horses do that.

All Mark has to do to deal with Sarah's nippiness is feed her last. Then, after she gets her food, if she still tries to run the other horses off he chases
her
off instead. It works like a charm for about two weeks. Sarah has perfect manners at the feed trough. Then she starts getting nasty again, and Mark repeats the procedure.

I talked to a vet student who has the same problem with a horse she owns, and she uses a slightly different version of the same technique. She doesn't feed
any
of the horses until they're all standing nicely at the trough, with their ears forward. Then she feeds them all at the same time. If anyone has their ears pinned back—any of the horses, not just the problem horse—no food. It's not hard to get the group of horses to turn their ears forward, because that's what horses do naturally when they're paying attention to you. She just waits them out, until all of them are focused on her instead of on each other. She uses Mark's approach only if her horse tries to chase the others away after the feed has been put out. Then that horse does get fed last. She said her system works really well.

The point is, you have to do a lot of emotional damage to a prey animal to turn it into a killer. As we've seen, if you lock a stallion up alone in a stall for his whole life, with no socialization at all, he could become aggressive. He might rear up and strike at people. That's dangerous, but only because the stallion is so big. He isn't actively trying to kill the person he's kicking. There are always exceptions, of course. Just recently I read a report about a stallion in Poland who became aroused by a nearby mare and then attacked and killed his owner, who was trying to calm him down. The report said that the horse bit his owner's jugular vein and also damaged his spine, so this was obviously a vicious attack. Still, a horse attacking and killing his owner is so unheard of that even though it happened in Poland we read about it here.

Bulls do kill people with some frequency, but when they do they're almost never trying to kill; they're challenging the person for dominance. Bulls don't kill each other when they're fighting for dominance, but because a bull is so big, and because bulls use head butting to win dominance contests, the human gets crushed against a fence. The bull doesn't understand how much bigger and stronger he is.

Even though you can handle aggressive behavior in most,
though not all,
prey animals, it's always better to keep aggressive behavior from developing in the first place. With prey animals that means good training and socialization, but not dominance training per se. I think in the old days a lot of animal handlers didn't understand the
difference. They thought any kind of training was also dominance training because the trainer was in charge. That's probably where the idea of breaking a horse's spirit came from. You shouldn't break any animal's spirit, horse or dog, but a nervous prey animal like a horse or a cow doesn't need to learn obedience as a separate concept the way a dog does. A cow or a horse who's being trained just needs training, not dominating; a dog needs training, but he also needs dominating. A dog needs an alpha, or else he'll be the alpha himself. With prey animals even an aggressive, nippy kind of horse
usually
isn't much of a problem to manage.

It's
never
easy to manage an aggressive dog. The only person equipped to deal with an adult dog who bites is a professional who specializes in aggression, and even then your chances of turning the dog around are not good. Dr. Bonnie Beaver, a veterinary animal behavior specialist at Texas A&M, says that a typical case of dominance over humans gets worse, and Dr. Dodman, who treats dominance aggression, reports that only two out of three of dogs with dominance aggression end up getting a lot better, even with a formal retraining program. The other third still have problems, although most of them are safer to be around than they were. But many dogs do not improve at all. These are dangerous animals.

It's also easy for most dogs to become biters if they're allowed to hold alpha status over their owner. We don't know exactly why it's so easy to teach a dog not to bite in the first place, but so hard to teach a dog to stop biting once he's started. Why can't you turn back the developmental clock and retrain an aggressive dog the way you train a puppy?

Dr. Dodman has done research showing that in some cases the problem is the owner.
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“Emotional” owners aren't as successful at retraining a dominant aggressive dog as “rational” owners who can stick to a retraining program. Maybe people who were too “kindhearted” to be firm trainers and disciplinarians in the first place can't suddenly turn themselves into good trainers just because an animal behaviorist has told them that they have to do it. If they had established themselves as the alpha early in their dog's life, they would not have a biting dog. This is true for all
normal
dogs. There are some dogs who are genetically bad, dangerous dogs, the same way
the rapist roosters were genetically bad, dangerous birds. Such dogs have to be euthanized. But if you own a normal dog, you can prevent aggression by doing enough obedience training to establish yourself as the alpha.

I think the main reason you can't train a dog back out of aggression as easily as you can train a dog into aggression is that the genie has been let out of the bottle. All dogs have a natural drive to be the alpha. Owners have to teach their dogs to think that it's impossible for a dog to dominate a human. It's not just a bad thing, it's an
impossible
thing. Once a dog has discovered that he can dominate people there's no turning back. You can't un-teach this knowledge; you can only try to teach a biting dog to inhibit his impulse to compete with his owner for dominance.

This is what happens with the big cats. In
Out of Africa
Isak Dinesen tells a story about a young pet lion named Paddy. Paddy was tame, and was nice to everyone at the ranch where they lived, although he'd never been socialized to children. Then one day someone brought a little girl to visit, and Paddy accidentally knocked her down. He didn't hurt the little girl, and he didn't do it on purpose.