Charlie, The Broken Dog

 

Michael Baugh CDBC CPDT-KSA

Every dog has a story. Charlie’s begins somewhere in Montgomery County, TX.

Someone loved him. He is brave, trusting of humans, and affectionate. That’s the nature of dogs. It’s also evidence of nurturing and of bonds made resolute. He knew people, lived with people, and loved them. Somewhere, someone misses him. Charlie went astray, got in trouble, and ended up hurt. He survived, but his family never saw him again.

Tim and I foster for Dachshund Rescue of Houston (DROH). I first saw Charlie in a group email to foster families this past October. He was broken, a front leg missing, scars on his back leg, and road rash just past his rib cage. Call me crazy, but I knew the second I saw him. That’s my dog, I thought, clicking on the photo. I’d never met him. And I knew.

Montgomery County Animal Shelter gets a bum rap like a lot of animal shelters do. It’s undeserved. They did right by Charlie. His front leg was shredded. Lots of soft tissue damage, too much to repair. They committed time and money to Charlie. The surgery went well. Caring humans at Montgomery County got him off the street and pointed down the road to recovery. An animal shelter can be a good first stop for a dog like Charlie. It’s not a place, though, for a long stay.

Good people who know good people got him out of the shelter and into the care of Dachshund rescue. Charlie learned to walk again. He moved slowly at first, but was unrelenting. Tired from the effort, he’d lay his head on my chest and fall asleep. We shared Charlie with another foster family, a lovely couple who have fostered scores of dogs. They loved Charlie as much as we did. We all agreed he was exceptional.

Something had hit Charlie, a car most likely. It rolled him. It might have rolled over his leg, the one he lost. He’d taken it hard and came out the other side stronger than most. Charlie amazed us with how fast he healed. His resilience, in fact, distracted us from yet another injury. He was favoring a back leg. A vet visit and x-rays revealed a break. Charlie had another surgery to repair it and spent seven weeks in a cast. (Dachshund Rescue of Houston absorbed the cost, over three-thousand dollars).

I’ve seen a lot of broken dogs in my time, hearts and spirits mostly. Each emerged from their own personal hell, survivors of trauma or neglect, physical and emotional. I’ve also seen dogs with exceptional fortitude and dogs who are unwavering exemplars of forgiveness. Never have I known a dog like Charlie.

Stella was gone more than a year when we met Charlie. Stewie left us seven months before. They taught me about behavioral flexibility late in their lives, through the long COVID months. Charlie, it seems, has even more to teach – broken and healing and yet, still so willing to get up and take on the full expanse of life.

I knew from the first moment I saw him. Mid January we made it official. Charlie the broken dog – King Charles – Chuckles the dog – Little Chaz is ours. And we are his.

Where will his story take us next?

 

Charlie is between 1 1/2 and 3 years old.  DNA analysis reveals he’s a wide variety of breeds, among them a trace amount of Dachshund. Special thanks to DROH for claiming his as one of their own nonetheless. You can follow Charlie on Instagram @travels_with_Charlie__

 

Dog Training for Life

 

Michael Baugh CDBC CPDT-KSA

I train dogs for real life. We aren’t running an agility trial. We aren’t competing in the show ring. Everything I teach, everything we practice, applies to our daily life with dogs.

We don’t need our dog to behave well just in training sessions. We want our dog to be comfortable, calm, and well mannered in our daily lives. When Aunt Milly comes over, we want our dog to accept a brief pet and then go lie down, for example. Or when the nieces and nephews come charging in the door, we might want our dog to go into his room for a while and rest quietly. We want to see our work pay off. This is true for all of us, most especially for those of us who have dogs who have behaved aggressively.

Make training look like real life. Make real life look like training. The bridge between our dog training sessions and everyday life without dogs can be hard to navigate. Dogs with emotionally driven behavior issues (think: aggression or other fearful behaviors) rely on patterns. We can train specific protocols for meeting new people. Dogs learn those quickly and depend on them when we have guests. In fact, dogs can learn all kinds of patterns. We can teach them to go to a room when they yard men come. They can learn how to disengage from other dogs on walks. Even our formerly aggressive behaving dog can learn rituals for interacting with new people. We teach these in contrived training set-ups. Our dog builds confidence and trust. When we are at our best, the training looks and feels exactly like it will in our regular lives. We aren’t just teaching tricks. We’re teaching life hacks.

Practice what you teach. Once we’ve taught our behavior patterns, we need to stick to those patterns day in and day out. Now we cross that bridge between training sessions and real life. For example, our dog used to bark and run away from friends who came into our apartment. We trained for weeks, teaching the dog how to wait quietly for the guest to be seated before we let her out of her room. Then we taught her how to sniff the guest politely, accept a pet, and go lie down. Great. Our dog knows the routine. She also depends on it. Every time a new person comes over, we run the same pattern, just like we trained it. It’s up to us to stick to the plan with every guest, every time. If we go off-plan and tell a friend they can go into our apartment on their own because they left their phone, we are setting our dog up to fail. We didn’t practice what we taught. It’s likely the dog will panic, bark, retreat, or worse.

Here are some other examples:

  • We taught our dogs to go to a room when the yard men come, but then left them outside. We broke protocol.
  • We taught our dog to disengage from dogs on walks, but then let a friend’s dog charge into our home. We didn’t train for that.
  • We taught our dog a specific pattern for getting petted by a stranger, but let a stranger tease and hug our dog. That’s off-plan.

Many dogs have great behavioral flexility. They learn lots of patterns and protocols for life with humans. Some they learn on their own. Others we teach them. Because I work with dogs who are fearful and behave aggressively, I see a lot of dogs who are not very flexible. These are the ones who need the most attention and our greatest care. They can learn. They can adapt. But they need our help.

Train well. Stick to the training in daily life, for your dog’s life, for a happy life together.

 

Michael Baugh teaches aggressive dog training in Houston TX.

 

Aggressive Dog Training – Eliminating Triggers

 

Michael Baugh CDBC CPDT-KSA

I teach several techniques related to aggressive dog training. They all help. However, none is as essential as preventing your dog from being triggered. Trainers call this managing your dog’s environment or, simply, management. Some add “just” before the word “manage.” We can just manage the problem. I think this dimunitzation is a mistake. Controlling and preventing environmental triggers is key to your dog’s success.

Here’s an example. Our dog consistently barks and lunges at guests we invite into our home. If the dog is in another room or in the backyard, our dog does not see the guest. Barking and lunging does not occur. It’s tempting to discount this technique by saying we are avoiding the problem. I get that. The technical term is actually antecedent control. We are preventing the problem one occurrence at a time.

Let’s say we have a broken pipe in our home. Our home is flooding. The first and most important step is to turn off the water. We can’t fix a pipe with water gushing out. Eliminating our dog’s triggers is like turning off the water. It’s the first fix. Our other positive training interventions are analogous to repairing the broken pipe. We do these with the trigger absent, muted, far away, or otherwise controlled. Staying with the plumbing analogy, the water is still off.

Remember our dog who barks and lunges at guests? We’ve stopped triggering him with unexpected strangers. Good. Now we can teach him some relaxation and other coping skills. We can even begin letting him see people in our home under controlled, non-triggering circumstances. I call these “controlled exposures.” All the while, we maintain our promise to protect our dog from surprises and his own hair-trigger responses. When we aren’t training, we are managing his environment. This is how we ease our dog into a new skill set of calm, confident behavior.

(Video: Your Dog’s Behavior Thresholds)

I frequently ask clients how long it’s been since their dog’s last aggressive incident. The longer the duration, the better off we are. Our dog needs a low-stress environment to learn new skills and new emotional self-regulation. They also need people and places that are consistently safe and stress-free. We can relate to this. It’s hard to work on our own anxiety or depression when stimuli keep coming at us. Overbooked calendars, traffic, loud noises, toxic people, distressing news reports. Any of those can disrupt our mental wellness. Two or three can derail us. We need people who will give us a soft place to land, a place where we can exhale.

Be that person for your dog.

Avoid this common mistake. Stop testing your dog. Too often, we intentionally expose our dogs to things we know upset them. We might think we are helping him get used to it. Pause and think about that for a minute. Does flying in a helicopter with the door off help us get over our fear of heights? No, of course it doesn’t. It’s worth repeating. Stop testing your dog. Let’s keep our promise to protect and help him. Let’s provide that safe place where scary things never happen. Be your dog’s safe person. Commit and stay committed.

I received an email recently from a client I hadn’t seen in a long while. She’d hired me back when she and her partner moved in together. They were and still are very much in love. Each of them had a dog. And, the dogs didn’t like each other. They fought. You can imagine the strain that puts on a relationship. We love each other. We love our dogs. Something’s got to give, or so the saying goes.

“They’ve progressed well over time with patience and not rushing it,” the email read. My clients had kept the dogs separate and controlled the environment. When everyone was together, it was in thoughtful and controlled exposures. “That has provided a lot of peace and happiness in the house,” she went on. They stayed the course, trusted the process, and never tested. “…thank you very much for your help,” she wrote before telling me about their new puppy.

The email ended with a photo. I stared at it for a long time. Two dogs curled on a bed, their backs pressed one to the other. Maybe they didn’t love one another like their humans did. Maybe they did. We don’t get to know those secrets. But the photo made this clear enough. They were safe. They were home. And “home” meant each other.

Michael Baugh teaches dog training in Houston, Texas.