Know Your Pooch
VK Joshi
The writer is former director, GSI, and an avid animal lover. His understanding of man's best friend comes from over six decades of dedicated association with it
As probably mentioned in an earlier article, I have been rearing dogs since 1946. However, till my late fifties, I had no formal training in how to train dogs. But instinctively I had been developing a communication with my pooch. Now I realise it was like my understanding their body language and making them understand my spoken language. Most of the time we understood each other but sometimes of course failures were there. It was easy for me to teach commands like Stay and Come to my pooches, but to teach Go and Go to a particular spot was the most challenging.
Bela was a very perky, playful, and intelligent dog. She was gifted to me as an Assamese Terrier, though I still wonder if there is a breed like that or not. Her demeanour though was like that of a Terrier. She used to bark at the slightest sound or any strange movement. But simultaneously, unlike most terriers, she was easy to control. She obeyed even a whispered command and used to stop barking at things that did not matter to us.
My training sessions used to be in the evening when I was back home and had time to relax and communicate with Bela. She had already picked the basic commands like, Come, Sit, Stay, and even Fetch. I didn’t know that such commands existed among professional trainers. One day, I made her Sit and Stay at a spot and placed a ball at a particular spot about 20m away from her. Pointing towards the ball I asked her to Fetch. To my surprise, she rushed, picked up the ball, shook her head and neck as if trying to stun a prey, and ran happily towards me and delivered the ball to my waiting palms. I repeated the same exercise several times for a few days and each time the ball was placed at the same spot.
Then one day I changed the spot and signalled her to Fetch, to my shock, instead of going towards the ball, she moved to the spot where the ball used to be placed earlier. After a lot of cajoling, she somehow located the ball and gave it back to me. This gave me another idea and instead of a ball, I made three large circles on the floor, and in one of them, I placed a small piece of biscuit. Before giving the command Go, I made her sniff my fingers. She immediately recognised her favourite reward and looked up at me. I signalled her to go to the particular circle where her reward was placed. To my surprise, she ran to the spot and sat in front of her reward, waiting for my command to Eat. After she had it, I made her Sit and Stay there. Hats off to her patience. And I went to another circle and placed the reward there and came back to the place where I used to normally stand. Signalled her towards the direction of the circle where the reward had been placed. And she sauntered happily to the circle and waited for my next command. Her performance pepped me up and it took me no time to teach her to Go to a certain distance and Stop and Stay and then from there move in another direction and Stop at my command.
I continued with my novice experiences with my other dogs too and sometimes I failed, while at others I succeeded. It just happened that a relative then left her six-year-old Cocker Spaniel with us for a few months. The dog was perfectly house trained and never ate without being asked to, beyond this he was not ‘trained’ as per my feeling. He was quite obese too. Thus, I began to exercise him more and began to teach him to Fetch. He learned soon and began to fetch the ball and deliver it to me. As usual, I tried to teach the command Go and to my surprise, he picked up the command in one go.
Emboldened by this I tried to use the signal and command on a stray dog that often used to lurk around our house. He was quite friendly with me but always looking for food. He was not bothered by the moving vehicles and car horns on the road. Compared to my dog he was certainly more ‘socialised’ to living on the street conditions. I didn’t try to teach him anything though, but one day just said Go with a hand signal, pointing my finger in a particular direction. First, he looked in that direction then the second time he ran a few paces away and returned to me looking for a reward. It was just an experience for me and I saved it in my memory, as I moved away from that house and then to the new life of a job etc.
Recently, I came across a study published in Frontiers in Psychology reported that not only the trained dogs, but nearly 80% of the dogs that participated in the study successfully followed pointing gestures to a particular location without ever having received any prior training. The study showed that the dogs understood complex gestures by simply watching humans. This has a wider impact on dog-human conflict.
We read in everyday news in every city that the stray dog bite cases have increased manyfold in our country. The situation getting worse every day and many neutral humans have turned dog-haters. Many dogs that could have survived in the human settlements have either lost their leg or have been badly beaten. The net result is that normal dogs turn into human haters. They cringe with fear to see a biped approaching them like we do. Dr Anindita Bhadra of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata, and colleagues studied stray dogs in several Indian cities. While conducting the studies, they located a solitary stray dog and placed two covered feeding bowls near him. A researcher then pointed to one of the two bowls, sometimes repeatedly. They observed that 80% of dogs understood the signal and reached the bowl. The remaining were the shy dogs, that had had bad experiences with human beings.
The dog, man relationship is age-old. In such a long association of 10 to 15000 years, dogs have probably picked up the body language of mankind and tried to follow the instructions. However, those tortured by humans tend to shy away. Dr Bhadra feels that dogs need a bit of empathy from us and a bit of loving expression in their eyes. They are highly observant and intelligent creatures and try to please humans in the best manner they can. Of course, the reason for this could be food. Many children or aged persons can be saved from unprovoked attacks from the strays if simple precautions of not hurting them are taken. You may not feed them, you may not even caress them, but a bit of love and compassion is what they need to coexist with us in peace! ([email protected])
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