Dog’s beautiful ways make uglier side easy thing to accept

By TOM KANDT

The placid Nellie is wonderful.

She’s that way indoors, where a calm and non-threatening environment allows her to relax. There you see a love bug, with serene face and deep brown eyes that hold you adoringly as you rub her tummy or talk softly to her.

Then there’s the other Nellie, the one that can quickly turn killer. Outdoors, her predatory instincts start firing and she moves intently, anxiously surveying her surroundings for cats, squirrels, deer, or small dogs. Off leash and unmanaged she’s a threat to smaller mammals and will kill them, plain and simple.

Behavioral geneticist and ethologist Ray Coppinger identifies several predatory behaviors, also called motor patterns, that happen in sequence when a dog sees prey. They are orienting towards the prey, eyeing the prey, stalking, chasing, grabbing and killing the prey, and finally tearing the flesh and eating it. These behaviors are critical for carnivores to survive in the wild.

Some of these behaviors are seen in dogs playing retrieve (orient/chase/grab). The hard-wired behavior of the Labrador stops short of killing with the “soft mouth.” A border collie working sheep demonstrates behaviors that end with the chase. In city traffic, the “chase” behavior can be fatal to the dog. If the behaviors are strong past chase, however, the dog is potentially dangerous and must be closely managed. So it is with our border collie/Lab mix Nellie.

Nellie has most of these predatory motor patterns, up through kill. Some call it a high prey drive. It took us time to discover this, with near tragedy to other animals. Luckily she hasn’t killed anyone’s pet while we’ve owned her. We’ve had some close calls, however, pulling her off several cats and a small dog. We know she doesn’t eat prey because of the few intact dead squirrels we’ve found in our yard.
God knows we’ve tried to change this behavior so Nellie’s leash walks are better for her and us, and she is less of a hazard to small animals. Unfortunately, hard-wired behavior is not easy to modify. Dogs with high prey drive can learn incompatible behaviors, like sit or tug on a toy, in the presence of prey triggers — if your training reward is powerful enough. After they pass a certain arousal level, however, it’s very hard to get them back until the nerves calm and the chemicals dissipate.

We’ve had some training successes despite Nellie’s strong prey instincts. After months of training she befriended our cat Shade and even sleeps with her. She now has a higher tolerance for prey at closer distances and will offer some incompatible behaviors if the prey trigger is not too close. So far, though, we’ve had to lower training expectations and manage, manage, manage. Nellie is never off leash in town (and that’s a law). Our yard is fenced and the gate is securely latched at all times.

We haven’t stopped trying — we keep training and experimenting, trying to make her calmer around prey triggers. That’s one of our commitments after adopting her from the shelter — she’s worth it. The Nellie with the loving brown eyes more than makes up for the beast that can turn wild and unpredictable outdoors. Many animals, including humans, have the capacity for both extremes. We’ll live with hers and become better owners and trainers because of them.

Tom Kandt is a graduate of the San Francisco SPCA Academy for Dog Trainers and volunteers at the Lewis and Clark Humane Society. E-mail Tom here.

Lewis & Clark Humane Society
2112 E. Custer Avenue • P.O. Box 4455 • Helena, Montana 59604 • Phone: (406) 442-1660 • Fax: (406) 457-9446
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