Books About Dogs

30 December 2015

My partner and I adopted a dog this past May. In the lead-up to, and since, I’ve read a bunch of books about dog psychology and training. Some were invaluable, and caused us to make much better decisions than we would have otherwise. Others were simply entertaining or thought provoking, without being directly prescriptive. These are some brief reviews with recommendations for anyone who finds them useful.

Quick links:

• The Other End of the Leash – Patricia McConnell, PhD
• The Art of Raising a Puppy and How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend – The Monks of New Skete
• After You Get Your Puppy – Dr. Ian Dunbar
• How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan
• The Culture Clash – Jean Donaldson

The Other End of the Leash

This was the most well-written of the books I read, the one I’d recommend most to a non-dog-owner, and also the book we probably use the least in our day-to-day with Ada. It’s a fun read because Patricia McConnell is clearly an accomplished animal behaviorist, and also a great writer. She weaves in an understanding of many different animals’ tendencies and behavior, often based in her own research, to paint a nice picture of her view of dogs’ perspective on the world.

Her observations of her own dogs are fascinating and fun to read. They are also difficult to adapt to other situations unless you also happen to own four dogs and live on a farm. The descriptions of training activities are often too situational or not specific enough to be useful, to the point where I think the book could be improved by removing them. It’s an excellent book for giving the reader a window into the canine reality, but doesn’t have much information that I found particularly actionable. That said, if you’re reading this and you aren’t a dog owner (or are one, and just looking for a fun read), give it a shot.

The Art of Raising a Puppy and How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend

Both of these books are written by the Monks of the New Skete monastery, a place that focuses on breeding and raising exclusively German Shepherds. The two books blur together a little bit in my memory, which may say something about the relative value of reading one after having read the other. I remember a few things most vividly from The Art:

• The extremely explicit puppy crate training schedule. This single page, which lists the times to crate a puppy, when to have it out, and when to feed and offer water, is the most-opened page in the book and is still dog-eared. It was useful mostly because it was prescriptive amongst a sea of sometimes overly descriptive prose. Over the course of dog ownership, perspective on dogs’ experiences and descriptions of their general behavior and temperament is useful. But when raising Ada in the first month or so, all I wanted was to be told what to do in some cases. The detailed schedule was useful for that.

• The suggestion of putting puppies on enforced down-stays during meal times and other quiet times (like movie times). Enforced here means, at first, having the dog on a leash or holding your hand hovering over them to make them stay in place even when they try to get up (they get rewarded for staying in place for various durations). This was a great idea; forcing Ada to go to her crate while eating, or stay in her bed while we work on the couch, saved us a ton of headaches, and got Ada a lot of treats once she figured out the game.

• Holding a dog’s mouth shut as a form of feedback and punishment when play gets too rough. We actually used this one when Ada was little and still play-biting people to let her know when it wasn’t OK. But we learned more on the topic from Ian Dunbar’s book, discussed below.

Probably the most notable other feature of the book was the section on physical punishment. The notable thing about it is that the monks used to recommend flipping a dog on its back as part of a dominance display, and in the updated version have explicit bold text renouncing this practice. Interestingly, they still recommend grabbing dogs by their scruff, using sharp leash corrections, and hitting the dog on the chin in extreme cases. We don’t do these (I didn’t trust myself to get the dexterity bit of the leash correction “pop” right), and the trainers we’ve met roundly reject them as bad ideas. I wonder if more bold text will appear in future editions.

After You Get Your Puppy

This book, by Ian Dunbar, was a terrific resource. It is a great resource for planning out and managing the first few months with a new puppy. With the exception of the section on potty training, which interestingly didn’t emphasize crate training like every other resource we found, we followed essentially all the advice of this book. Given that Ada is a sample size of one, it’s hard to say what would have happened in some cases if we hadn’t followed the book’s advice, so take my experience with a pinch of salt.

This book harped on two things as far and away the most important activities in raising a puppy: socialization, which I expected, and bite control, which I didn’t at all.

• As far as socialization goes, the main useful point this book makes is that it is effectively impossible to oversocialize a puppy, and socialization with people and dogs (in that order of importance) is the first priority with a dog. In a single day or hour it may be possible to overstimulate a puppy (if, say, 25 small children try to pet the pup), but there is only increasing gains from finding as many situations as possible to expose a puppy to early on. Getting this exposure, Dunbar claims (and I’m inclined to believe), is super important for raising a dog that can integrate new experiences into its life later on.

• Bite control wasn’t something I was expecting to think about when I got a puppy, nor the method Dunbar proposes. I kind of assumed that I’d have a Good Dog that didn’t bite because we loved it enough, and that would be that. Still, it made so much sense that I can’t help but think it’s a good idea.

  The basic practice is two stages: first, make sure your dog has a soft mouth when they bite, and second, wean them off biting altogether.

  It seems to be a fact of nature that puppies are hard-wired to play-bite people. It’s just something they do. They also don’t “know” how strong their bite is, and are wired to learn to weaken their bite in response to negative feedback. Dunbar’s recommendation is to play with your pup with your hands, and let them bite you. When they do a bite that’s harder than the others, yelp in pain (even if it didn’t hurt), and stop playing. The play-break is the punishment. Do this for decreasing intensities of bite, and the pup learns that biting has to be soft, or the game stops. It’s not totally clear to me how this mouth-softness interacts with an actually fearful dog biting in defense or aggression, but it does make sure that when a dog is playing with a 8-year-old, if she decides to play-bite, her play-bite won’t ever break skin with its own force.

  Once a dog has a soft enough mouth that you barely feel the play bites, you can start stopping play altogether if teeth ever make contact with skin. This is included in most of the recommended “rules” for playing tug-of-war with dogs as well. But Dunbar makes the point clear that the goal is first a soft bite, then no biting at all, so that the dog has been trained explicitly in restraining its bite force.

After You Get Your Puppy also comes with a useful appendix of socialization activities and checklists. Unless your job is raising dogs full-time, I don’t think it’s possible to meet the goals laid out (I don’t know enough children under 12 to have introduced Ada to 5 a week or whatever was recommended; it felt like a lot), but it’s extremely useful as inspiration for the categories of situations you should introduce the puppy to in its first few months.

How to Raise the Perfect Dog

This was Cesar Millan’s (of Dog Whisperer fame) book. The main thread I remember from this book was the importance of a calm, confident attitude when working with dogs. It also recommended bully sticks, which are quite possibly the grossest but most effective reward for Ada (they are, essentially, 6” or 12” lengths of dried, stretched bull penis). Using them as lures or rewards is pretty much the main way we get her to do uncomfortable things like sit still while we clean her ears or clip her nails.

The Culture Clash

I read this most recently (after owning Ada for 8 months). I found it to be the best of the bunch. It is unrelenting in a few of its key points, most of which revolve around breaking down what Jean Donaldson calls “the Disney dog” who is intrinsically loyal and good.

• Dogs are amoral. They do what works to get what they want. What they want is fleeting and constantly changing between individuals (much like humans), but food and attention are usually pretty good (much like humans). They don’t plan beyond a few minutes’ time, unconditionally love their owners, or even have a concept of what it means to “please” them, beyond Good Things happening to dogs as a result. One way to put this is that it’s unlike that a dog’s internal model of a human’s emotions is much better than our model of dogs’.
• An owner is in control of a dog’s food, shelter, and access to entertainment. This should be all the advantage needed to motivate and train one; in particular, prong collars and shock devices are overkill given the owner’s already considerable advantage.
• The first, most important, step in training a dog comes from finding what motivates it, in what preference order. This varies between dogs. But once a dog’s (sometimes contextual) motivators are found, little stops the trainer from manipulating the hierarchy of motivators to get whatever behavior they want out of the dog.
• Just because dogs are amoral doesn’t mean they aren’t interesting, smart, or worth making part of your family. It’s just that applying anthropomorphic labels to them, like loyalty, desire to please, or spite, is a bad model of their behavior. A much better model is that they are amoral, do what works to avoid unpleasantness and get motivators, and are very adept at learning what works from repeated trials. Accepting this and moving on makes for much happier dogs and people.

The first two thirds of the book is a good read for anyone. The last few chapters deal with the nuts and bolts of training exercises, which are quite good. They are broken into education levels – there is a “kindergarten sit/stay,” a “primary school sit/stay,” a “college-level sit/stay,” and so on. There are even some suggested dissertations at the end.

Common Themes

There were a few things that came up over and over again.

• Crate training: This worked very well for Ada, and is unanimously recommended with the exception of Dunbar, who offers it as an option. The recommendation is consistently to make the crate a wonderful place for the dog, and the payoff is greaet – the dog never gets a chance to get up to no good when left alone, and can be left in a place that isn’t distressing.
• Positive reinforcement training: The best way to train a dog is by giving some kind of reward when they do the right thing. The reward is far more important than the actual command or cue you use, and it’s important and difficult to remember that dogs will never guess what you want based on the English meaning of a cue.
• Generalizing is hard for dogs: A dog that learns to sit only in the living room might not sit on the sidewalk. A dog that learns the command “up” for going up stairs might not be able to use it to jump in the car, or even go up a different set of stairs. Dogs need to be given lots of examples with different contextual cues to distinguish what’s the same and what’s incidental to the activity.
• Excercise is the best obedience tool: Dogs that don’t get enough exercise burn off their energy in other ways. Other ways include destroying property, eating out of the trash, jumping on the couch, running around the house, and soliciting play by nibbling on your arm.

Conflicts

Not all the books agree; in general, we tried to take the advice in the intersection of the books that didn’t have any direct contradictions. But there are a few areas where the books disagree.

• Handling Scary Stuff: Does a treat during a scary/stressed moment reinforce the scary/stressed moment or make the dog feel more comfortable with the scary thing? The monks are clear that giving a dog reassurance during a scary event reinforces their whimpering, crying, or retreating behavior. Other books didn’t say explicitly one way or another, but another inference to draw is that giving a treat would cause a positive reinforcement with the event rather than with the dog’s action.
• Using Force: Should we use physical punishments at all or not? Was holding Ada’s mouth shut as feedback on the “no-biting” rule a mistake? Sometimes you just do need to restrain a dog. How should that be done so the dog doesn’t end up afraid of you? These are touchy topics and a frank treatment of them would be useful; a sort of “How and When to Physically Coerce Your Dog.”
• Pack Theory: Do dogs actually understand pack ordering? Dunbar and Donaldson say no; the monks and McConnell say yes. It seems like Dunbar and Donaldson have slightly more recent research cited, but citations in general are a little thin across the board, and I haven’t done a deep literature search, or figure out if recent means good in this context.

Some Conclusions

If I were to recommend books to a new dog owner, I’d recommend After You Get Your Puppy and The Culture Clash. For non-dog-owners, I’d recommend The Other End of the Leash and The Culture Clash.

If you really like reading and have a dog, I’d read them all, though it might be worth skipping Cesar Millan’s book, I really don’t think it added much beyond what was covered in the others.