Dog Training – December 1999 – Colorado Central Magazine
Dogs Deserve Dialogue – Rover should hang on your words, not your leash
by Judy Moore
Published in 1999 by Tyke Publishing
ISBN 0967286808
And heaven knows I’d like some obedience from the family dog — a 10-year-old female chow-husky mix named Teddy (from her youthful resemblance to a teddy bear) — who occasionally comes when her name is called, but that’s probably by accident. She can sit and roll over, but never on command, and she loves to sniff strangers in embarrassing places.
So be advised that I really want to test this book when I have a little more time. And it will take some time, because this book is really more about dog-owner training than it is about dog training. Once the owner figures out how things work, the dog will fall into line.
Author Judy Moore operates the Wapiti Run Dog Obedience School near Buena Vista. I’ve met a couple of her human graduates. They speak well of the program, and their dogs perform the way you’d expect obedience-school graduates to perform.
The conventional wisdom on dogs is that they’re essentially animals designed to live in packs — domesticated wolves, in a sense — and that for a human to gain control, the human has to become, in the dog’s eyes, the leader of the pack.
But Moore argues that pack behavior is just one canine instinct among many that make dogs unfit for human society without training. “If a dog is influenced by an instinctive impulse toward establishing his dominant place in a pack, that instinct is no more beneficial to the dog in a human society than many of his other instincts…. the dog must learn to subordinate his instincts to his communication with his owner. When his instincts become subordinate, pack behavior becomes as irrelevant as the dog’s many other instinctive impulses.”
Moore’s training philosophy is based on a few tenets, among them that dogs are always obedient (either to instincts or their owners) and that dogs want to get along with people.
The key is to get the dog into the habit of asking questions of his owner. The owner must know how to understand those questions, and then provide the answers. In brief, it’s communication between man and beast.
That sounds sensible, but not all that practical at first. It isn’t as though we can borrow some Star-Trek universal translator to interpret canine growls and gestures.
In Moore’s eyes, dogs are born perfectly capable of performing well in dog society. They get confused by human society. But they want to get along — they need guidance from their owners, and they’ll be lost without it.
She builds on that to provide a regimen of specific exercises for owner and dog, so that by the end of the book, and after a few weeks of short daily sessions, the dog will know the basics: heel, sit, stay, stand, come.
The instructions looked clear to me — on a quick reading, I didn’t have any trouble figuring out what she wanted us to do, or why she deemed it necessary. I was favorably impressed that she put clarity ahead of political correctness (none of that his/her impediment, and she uses the word “owner” because it’s clear, even if she doesn’t like the term), and that she relies on technique rather than technology (no fancy radio collars).
Moore says that old dogs can learn just as quickly as puppies. So if I and our old chow mix holds out through the winter, I hope to give this method a try next spring. I’ve yet to find anything, even food — which generally dominates her thoughts — that persuades Teddy to do what I want her to do.
After that, I could provide a much better review of Dogs Deserve Dialogue. But now I can tell you that it’s informative, well-organized, and easy to read. Further, Judy Moore has a great reputation as a dog trainer. So if you’re looking for a way to make sure that everyone admires your pet as much as you do, this would be a good place to start.
Besides that, the training exercises look like a great reason to get outdoors and spend some time with our dogs — and any excuse for that is a good one.
— Ed Quillen
