Walter by Dr. Miles Arakaki
Big, crazy Walter at his best!
A long time ago, I was working at a military working dog kennel in the Midwest, and we had just returned
with a trailer-load of dogs for an upcoming handlers course. Amongst the group of new recruits, was
an 80-plus pound 9-month old intact male Belgian Malinois named Walter. Walter was selected for his extremely high prey and hunt drives, with the end goal of channeling it towards finding explosives. I was optimistic that
Walter would become one of the top performers of the group, however, within a few days, trainers and handlers began complaining of his highly aggressive behavior when handled by the collar.
Not sure what was going on, I went into his run and tried to clip a lead onto his collar. Sure enough,
Walter went crazy. . . Cujo crazy; spinning, snarling and biting with the whites of his eyes flashing. I
grabbed him by the collar and wrestled with him until he settled down enough to attach the lead. Afterwards,
I looked at the trainers and shrugged, “Yep, he’s got some problems.” At that time, we explained his behavior
as a dominance issue. Not that there aren’t real dominant traits in dogs, but looking back at it, every dog with
aggressive behavior problems, we explained as a dominance issue, for lack of anything else.
I’m not sure exactly when dominance theory first hit the dirt, but it is related to previous studies of wolf-pack behavior dynamics. The concepts of individuals jockeying for the Alpha position within a pack has since come under fire due to the questionable validity of the way the studies were conducted, but the idea
of dominance behavior issues has become entrenched in modern dog training methodology. In addition, there is an institutional bias within the military and police working dog circles for compulsive training techniques as influenced by Konrad Most, a founding working dog trainer for Germany through both
World Wars and beyond. This bias leads to doing techniques without a thorough understanding of WHY we are doing them, and restricts our ability to adjust for variations of the individual dog.
Going in with the plan to establish dominance, every morning Walter and I would perform our ritual “dance”, but after a week of this nonsense, I began to question “dominance” as the cause of his behavior. If I was truly establishing dominance over Walter, the effort should have become easier every day, but it wasn’t. Every morning, Walter put up the same fight with the same intensity; I had just gotten better at anticipating his moves and avoiding his bites.
Bottom line, I was not solving anything using the traditional techniques.
Finally, I decided to try a different approach. I went into Walter’s run and stood there. Immediately Walter became excited and started to jump up on me in anticipation of going outside. Getting jumped on by an 80-pound dog is no fun, so my first priority was to get his excitement under control. Deliberately avoiding compulsive techniques, I focused on positive reinforcement and extinction training to coax Walter into a sit. His reinforcement was praise and petting his head. When he broke the sit, I immediately stopped petting him (negative punishment). When he went back into the sit, I resumed petting (positive reinforcement). After 3 or 4 repetitions, Walter would sit in front me and wait calmly, without any positive punishment or negative reinforcement (compulsive techniques) having been administered. I conducted 2 ten-minute sessions of this drill on Day 1.
On Day 2, I walked into Walter’s run, and without any commands, he came to me and sat patiently. I petted him, and as we repeated the drill, I began extending the petting down the side of his neck and shoulders. By the end of Day 2, another 2 or 3 ten-minute sessions, I would walk into Walter’s run, he would come up and calmly sit in front of me, I would pet his head and down his neck, then click his lead to his collar. . . all with zero fighting or physical effort, and less than 60 minutes of total training time over two days. I was blown away by the results, and when I showed the other trainers and handlers, they looked at me as if it was a parlor trick. They didn’t buy into it, and even though his new behaviors were repeatable with me, they continued to fight with him every day until he eventually flunked out of the program for being a hard case, and was returned to the Military Dog Center in Texas.
I have long since come up with different explanations into Walter’s behaviors (involving defense drive, fear, hyper-reactivity, and over-correction), but the biggest lesson I learned is that going through the motions based on institutional bias is not effective in development or correction. Training because, “That’s how we’ve always done it” or “I saw this on YouTube” will invariably lead to failure. If you cannot explain WHY you are doing what you’re doing (and/or the explanation doesn’t make any sense from a scientific point of view), it’s probably not going to work.
Dog training is a complex activity. Variables that contribute to the success of a training activity include genetics, individual traits, environmental history, medical conditions, and handler proficiency, but THE key component is a solid understanding of behavior science and training theory as developed by comparative psychologists, ethnologists, and operant conditioning experts. This understanding is necessary in the development and execution of a realistic training plan to maximize the probability of success, and to recognize and correct deficiencies with minimum pressure.
To this day I do not know what became of Walter. He’s probably hanging out somewhere, hopefully having had a meaningful job. With his drives,
I still believe he would have made an awesome detection dog if we had implemented a customized training solution for his individual character.
with a trailer-load of dogs for an upcoming handlers course. Amongst the group of new recruits, was
an 80-plus pound 9-month old intact male Belgian Malinois named Walter. Walter was selected for his extremely high prey and hunt drives, with the end goal of channeling it towards finding explosives. I was optimistic that
Walter would become one of the top performers of the group, however, within a few days, trainers and handlers began complaining of his highly aggressive behavior when handled by the collar.
Not sure what was going on, I went into his run and tried to clip a lead onto his collar. Sure enough,
Walter went crazy. . . Cujo crazy; spinning, snarling and biting with the whites of his eyes flashing. I
grabbed him by the collar and wrestled with him until he settled down enough to attach the lead. Afterwards,
I looked at the trainers and shrugged, “Yep, he’s got some problems.” At that time, we explained his behavior
as a dominance issue. Not that there aren’t real dominant traits in dogs, but looking back at it, every dog with
aggressive behavior problems, we explained as a dominance issue, for lack of anything else.
I’m not sure exactly when dominance theory first hit the dirt, but it is related to previous studies of wolf-pack behavior dynamics. The concepts of individuals jockeying for the Alpha position within a pack has since come under fire due to the questionable validity of the way the studies were conducted, but the idea
of dominance behavior issues has become entrenched in modern dog training methodology. In addition, there is an institutional bias within the military and police working dog circles for compulsive training techniques as influenced by Konrad Most, a founding working dog trainer for Germany through both
World Wars and beyond. This bias leads to doing techniques without a thorough understanding of WHY we are doing them, and restricts our ability to adjust for variations of the individual dog.
Going in with the plan to establish dominance, every morning Walter and I would perform our ritual “dance”, but after a week of this nonsense, I began to question “dominance” as the cause of his behavior. If I was truly establishing dominance over Walter, the effort should have become easier every day, but it wasn’t. Every morning, Walter put up the same fight with the same intensity; I had just gotten better at anticipating his moves and avoiding his bites.
Bottom line, I was not solving anything using the traditional techniques.
Finally, I decided to try a different approach. I went into Walter’s run and stood there. Immediately Walter became excited and started to jump up on me in anticipation of going outside. Getting jumped on by an 80-pound dog is no fun, so my first priority was to get his excitement under control. Deliberately avoiding compulsive techniques, I focused on positive reinforcement and extinction training to coax Walter into a sit. His reinforcement was praise and petting his head. When he broke the sit, I immediately stopped petting him (negative punishment). When he went back into the sit, I resumed petting (positive reinforcement). After 3 or 4 repetitions, Walter would sit in front me and wait calmly, without any positive punishment or negative reinforcement (compulsive techniques) having been administered. I conducted 2 ten-minute sessions of this drill on Day 1.
On Day 2, I walked into Walter’s run, and without any commands, he came to me and sat patiently. I petted him, and as we repeated the drill, I began extending the petting down the side of his neck and shoulders. By the end of Day 2, another 2 or 3 ten-minute sessions, I would walk into Walter’s run, he would come up and calmly sit in front of me, I would pet his head and down his neck, then click his lead to his collar. . . all with zero fighting or physical effort, and less than 60 minutes of total training time over two days. I was blown away by the results, and when I showed the other trainers and handlers, they looked at me as if it was a parlor trick. They didn’t buy into it, and even though his new behaviors were repeatable with me, they continued to fight with him every day until he eventually flunked out of the program for being a hard case, and was returned to the Military Dog Center in Texas.
I have long since come up with different explanations into Walter’s behaviors (involving defense drive, fear, hyper-reactivity, and over-correction), but the biggest lesson I learned is that going through the motions based on institutional bias is not effective in development or correction. Training because, “That’s how we’ve always done it” or “I saw this on YouTube” will invariably lead to failure. If you cannot explain WHY you are doing what you’re doing (and/or the explanation doesn’t make any sense from a scientific point of view), it’s probably not going to work.
Dog training is a complex activity. Variables that contribute to the success of a training activity include genetics, individual traits, environmental history, medical conditions, and handler proficiency, but THE key component is a solid understanding of behavior science and training theory as developed by comparative psychologists, ethnologists, and operant conditioning experts. This understanding is necessary in the development and execution of a realistic training plan to maximize the probability of success, and to recognize and correct deficiencies with minimum pressure.
To this day I do not know what became of Walter. He’s probably hanging out somewhere, hopefully having had a meaningful job. With his drives,
I still believe he would have made an awesome detection dog if we had implemented a customized training solution for his individual character.
