Snarked at by the alpha bitch ...

I teach and assist doggie classes where I train to help support my agility habit. Mostly it's fun, and most of the people are just great, willing to try new things and wanting to have fun with their dogs. But every now and then there is someone who is just wound up waaaay too tightly and makes it less than fun. (Hmmmmm ... maybe sort of the way our dogs feel when WE get wound up too tightly? If you haven't done so already, go on over to Laura's place and read "Thinking different to make a change" and "Thinking different part 2-this is sort of about dog training if you can just get past the part about the naked, sandy people".)

I'm an assistant in a foundation class, and last night I got snapped at by one of the students ... the human kind, not the dog kind. Frankly, I'd rather have been bitten by her dog because it would have been much less disconcerting. (For the record, the dog was very easygoing and not at all inclined to bite me, and fortunately didn't seem at all fazed by her owner's obvious tension.) Today I'm still thinking "Wow, I didn't deserve that" (I really don't think I did) and wondering if maybe life would be easier if I stopped teaching and just focused on training my own dogs.

We were doing an exercise that involved capturing and shaping (basically waiting for the dog to interact with X object, rewarding it, then rewarding increasing interaction, paws on, etc.) I was observing everyone and offering tips and encouragement, and everyone seemed to be having great success. One of the things I'll do is point out something a person may be saying or doing with her body that she may not realize, because a lot of people become so focused on what the dog is doing that they don't pay any attention to what they are doing. Sometimes these inadvertent cues change what the dog is actually learning from the activity. I try very hard to be pleasant and positive about it, because I know from personal experience that, just like dogs, people learn best when they are having fun.

At the outset of the exercise, I said that what we WERE NOT doing was asking, indicating or commanding the dog to do anything--we were rewarding offered behavior. So when I saw one of the handlers using big arm motions to point her dog toward the object, I said "Oh, you're indicating ..." and she looked up at me and said in an outraged voice "WHAT, now we're not allowed to INDICATE? What ARE we supposed to do?" So I started to say "Well, the exercise is about shaping offered behav ..."

"I KNOW VERY WELL WHAT SHAPING IS!!" she said.

"I was only trying to point out [something something er, something] ..." I don't remember what exactly came out of my mouth, because my brain was thinking "JesusChristWhatTheHellIsYourProblemHolyF-ingMotherOfF-ingF! If you don't want my help then what the F are you taking this class for?" But I couldn't say that out loud, so I was trying to spit out something vaguely conciliatory to reassure her that my goal was to actually help her.

But I think she didn't really want my help, and I wish now that I had just left her to her own devices from the get-go and and focused on the nice people. I had sensed her tension from the beginning of class and gotten the feeling that her goal was to get the exact perfect behavior from her dog on the very first try every time, and anything less seemed to be very frustrating to her. Looking back, I think what I considered "helpful comments" were interpreted by her as an insult to her training ability.

I had surmised from observing her interactions with her dog (always working on the left, always insisting on precise heeling and side sits, holding food in her mouth and spitting it at the dog for a reward, etc.) that this woman had probably come from the formal obedience world. In my experience, these types of people (yes, I'm stereotyping, and of course there are exceptions) seem to hate allowing their dog do absolutely anything it wasn't told to do. So rewarding offered behavior may have been a difficult concept for her. She had been having problems getting her dog to even look away from her face and notice the object in question, so I had been trying to gently coach her through the whole exercise ("Don't stare at your dog, look at the object," etc. Also, whenever her dog did a rewardable action, she seemed reluctant to actually reward it (i.e., give it some food, as opposed to just saying "yes"). I kept telling her "reward your dog!" but she wouldn't do it. Maybe she's one of those people who thinks that a dog does thing for the sheer joy of pleasing its master. I dunno. But she certainly didn't seem to want any of my advice.

So now I certainly don't want to give it. You know how dogs will turn their head away slightly and refrain from eye contact when near a dog they want to avoid? That's what I feel like doing with this woman. She has lunged and snarled at me, and now I want to steer clear. It makes me NOT look forward to the next meeting of this class ...

I guess I'm just like the dog who learns that agility class is fraught with tension and would rather sniff the corners or zoom around the field ...