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The Other End of the Leash (Paperback)
by Patricia McConnell
| Category:
Dog training, Pet, Animals, Home |
| Market price: ¥ 168.00
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¥ 158.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
An excellent exposition on dog behaviour and ways to improve human-canine communication. |
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Author: Patricia McConnell
Publisher: Ballantine Books; Reprint edition
Pub. in: April, 2003
ISBN: 034544678X
Pages: 272
Measurements: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00616
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0345446787
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- Awards & Credential -
One of the most acclaimed references on dog training. The book ranks #1,696 in books on Amazon.com as of January 11, 2007. |
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- MSL Picks -
Patricia McConnell is probably best known the co-host of Wisconsin Public Radio's "Calling All Pets." But she has also written a series of books. "The Other End of the Leash" is probably the best known. As an ethologist specializing in canines, she brings a different, professional viewpoint to people's relations with their pets.
Her point is simple: dogs and humans both communicate, but because we are very different animals, we often misread each other's nonverbal cues. The nonverbal greeting signals for a human, for example, are threat signals to a dog. What she does is help dog owners learn to send the nonverbal messages they intend to their dogs, to speak to dogs in the nonverbal dialog that dogs understand.
It's an important, even critical point, in dealing with dogs. Mixed signals, unintended signals and the wrong signals can confuse a dog, and even trigger hostility and attack. It's especially important for stranger dogs. Her points can help you a lot in dealing with dogs.
But what this book isn't is a primer on training your dog. It's a guide to dog behavior, it's not a book on how to train your dog. Make no mistake, Dr. McConnell's insights can be of immense help to you in training and dealing with dogs. A dog that is relaxed and comfortable, that isn't getting the wrong nonverbal signals, is easier to train. But it's not a training book.
As other reviewers have noted, sometimes Dr. McConnell repeats her points a few extra times. Perhaps it is a consequence of dealing with difficult dogs and difficult dog owners for a long time. But that's a minor annoyance. This is a valuable useful book to anyone with a difficult dog or any dog owner who wants to understand his or her dog better.
(From quoting Jim DeWitt, USA)
Target readers:
All dog owners and dog lovers.
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Patricia McConnell, Ph.D., is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert applied animal behaviorist. Her company, Dog’s Best Friend, Ltd., specializes in family dog-training and treating aggression in dogs, and she is an immensely popular speaker around the country. She is the co-host of Calling All Pets, an animal behavior advice show syndicated to a hundred public radio stations, and works daily with four dogs (three border collies and a Great Pyrenees) on her sheep farm outside of Madison. Her Web site is www.dogsbestfriendtraining.com.
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From Publisher
The Other End of the Leash shares a revolutionary, new perspective on our relationship with dogs, focusing on our behavior in comparison with that of dogs. An applied animal behaviorist and dog trainer with more than twenty years experience, Dr. Patricia McConnell looks at humans as just another interesting species, and muses about why we behave the way we do around our dogs, how dogs might interpret our behavior, and how to interact with our dogs in ways that bring out the best in our four-legged friends.
After all, although humans and dogs share a remarkable relationship that is unique in the animal world, we are still two entirely different species, each shaped by our individual evolutionary heritage. Quite simply, humans are primates and dogs are canids (like wolves, coyotes, and foxes). Since we each speak a different native tongue, a lot gets lost in the translation.
The Other End of the Leash demonstrates how even the slightest changes in your voice and the way you stand can help your dog understand what you want. Once you start to think about your own behavior from the perspective of your dog, you’ll understand why much of what appears to be doggy-disobedience is simply a case of miscommunication. Inside you will learn:
• How to use your voice so that your dog is more likely to do what you ask.
• Why “getting dominance” over your dog is a bad idea.
• Why “rough and tumble primate play” can lead to trouble - and how to play with your dog in ways that are fun and keep him out of trouble.
• How dogs and humans share personality types - and why most dogs want to live with benevolent leaders rather than “alphawannabees!”
In her own insightful, compelling style, Patricia McConnell combines wonderful true stories about people and dogs with a new, accessible scientific perspective on how they should behave around each other. This is a book that strives to help you make the most of life with your dog, and to prevent problems that might arise in that most rewarding of relationships.
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Monkey See, Monkey Do
The Importance of Visual Signals Between People and Dogs
Being an Applied Animal Behaviorist who works with aggressive dogs in my office is one thing. Working with them on a stage in front of a couple of hundred people is another. In a private consultation, all your attention is focused on the dog, but when you're doing a demonstration, your focus is divided between the dog and the audience. Important signals may last only a tenth of a second and be no bigger than a quarter of an inch, so you can get into trouble trying to attend to both an audience and a problem dog at the same time. There's a kind of Evel Knievel feeling about working with an aggressive dog up on a stage. You prepare meticulously to have all the odds in your favor. You get a good night's sleep, eat healthy food, and interview the dog owner extensively beforehand. You work with good, reliable people on whom you can count. And then you hit the ramp and hope you'll make it over the canyon.
The Mastiff I was working with at one seminar must have weighed more than 200 pounds, with a head the size of an oven. He had been lunging at strangers for the last several months, scaring his owners as much as their friends. Tossing treats steadily, I got closer and closer to him while I talked to the audience about what I was doing. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that the Mastiff looked relaxed, anticipating another treat, breathing normally. I turned my attention to a question from the audience, as I continued tossing treats, and took one step closer. I was now only a few feet away.
Donna's eyes alerted me. I had glanced at Donna Duford, a wise and experienced professional dog trainer, and by the look on her face, I knew I was in trouble. The Mastiff was standing right beside me but had become chillingly still. I glanced in his direction, but looked directly into his eyes, although only for a microsecond - a mistake, and a stupid one at that. Direct eye contact with a nervous dog is a beginner's mistake that you either learn to avoid or you get out of the business.
The dog exploded like a freight train of teeth and muscle, lunging right at my face. His growl-barks shook the building. I did what every highly trained professional does in that circumstance. I backed up.
Little Movements Have Big Effects
If I had not made eye contact with the Mastiff, if my eyes had moved some fraction of an inch over to the left or right, he wouldn't have lunged. All that ballistic power would've sat, quietly watching, if I had changed the path of my gaze a quarter of an inch. A barely perceptible change in my behavior would have resulted in the stunningly obvious difference between a 200-pound dog sitting quietly or launching toward my face.
That story may be a bit dramatic, but the same impact of subtle movements underlies each and every one of your interactions with your dog. Dogs are brilliant at perceiving minute changes in our bodies and assume each tiny motion has meaning. Small movements that you make result in huge changes in your dog's behavior. If you learn anything from this book, learn that. The examples are endless. Standing straight with your shoulders squared rather than slumped can make the difference in whether your dog sits or not. Shifting your weight forward or backward, almost imperceptibly to a human, is a neon sign to a dog. Changes in the way that your body leans are so important that an incline of half an inch backward or forward can lure a frightened stray dog toward you or chase her away. Whether you breathe deeply or hold your breath can prevent a dogfight or cause one. I've worked with aggressive dogs every week for thirteen years, and I've seen repeatedly that sometimes tiny movements can defuse a dangerous situation - or create one.
When I asked a veterinary student what she had learned after spending two weeks with me, she said, "I never realized how important the details of my actions were - how tiny changes in things like shifting your weight can have huge effects on an animal's behavior." This information doesn't seem to be obvious to any of us. But how strange, given how important minuscule movements are within our own species. As I asked in the introduction, how far do you have to raise an eyebrow to change the message on your face? Go look in the mirror, right now if it's convenient. Raise the corners of your mouth just the slightest bit and see how much it changes the "look" on your face. Watch the face of one of your family members and think about how little it has to change to convey information. That information, what we learn about others by watching for small movements in their faces and bodies, is critical to our relationship with them. It is also deeply rooted in our primate heritage. Primate species vary tremendously, from a 4-ounce, sap-eating pygmy marmoset to a 500-pound, leaf-chomping gorilla. But all primates are intensely visual, and all rely on visual communication in social interactions. Baboons lift their eyebrows as a low-intensity threat. Common chimps pout their lips in disappointment. Rhesus macaque monkeys threaten with an open mouth and a direct stare. Both chimpanzees and bonobos reach out with their hand to reconcile after a spat. We primates use visual signals as a bedrock of our social communications, and so do dogs.
Our dogs are tuned to our body like precision instruments. While we're thinking about the words we're using, our dogs are watching us for the subtle visual signals they use to communicate to one another. Any article or book on wolves will describe dozens of visual signals that are key to the social interactions of pack members. In the book Wolves of the World, one of the world's authorities on wolf behavior, Erik Zimen, describes forty-five movements that wolves use in social interactions. By comparison he mentions vocalizations only three times. That doesn't mean that whines and growls aren't critically important in the social relationships of wolves. They are. But the depth and breadth of visual signals - of subtle head cocks, shifts in weight forward or backward, stiffening or relaxing of the body - are vast in wolves, and every interaction I've ever had with a dog suggests that visual signals are equally integral to communication in dogs.
So here we have two species, humans and dogs, sharing the tendencies to be highly visual, highly social, and hardwired to pay attention to how someone in our social group is moving, even if the movement is minuscule. What we don't seem to share is this: dogs are more aware of our subtle movements than we are of our own. It makes sense if you think about it. While both dogs and humans automatically attend to the visual signals of our own species, dogs need to spend additional energy translating the signals of a foreigner. Besides, we are always expecting dogs to do what we ask of them, so they have compelling reasons to try to translate our movements and postures. But it's very much to our own advantage to pay more attention to how we move around our dogs, and how they move around us, because whether we mean to or not, we're always communicating with our bodies. Surely it'd be a good thing if we knew what we were saying.
Once you learn to focus on the visual signals between you and your dog, the impact of even tiny movements will become overwhelmingly obvious. It's really no different from any sport in which you train your body to move certain ways when you ask it to. All athletes have to become aware of what they are doing with their bodies. It's the same in dog training. Professional dog trainers are aware of exactly what they're doing with their bodies while they're working with a dog. That's not true of most dog owners, whose dogs minute by minute try to make sense of the stir-fry of signals that radiate from their owners.
Dogs never seem to lose their keen awareness of our slightest movements. I taught my dogs to sit when I unintentionally brought my hands together and clasped them at waist level. It seems that I made this motion, without even knowing it, when I called my dogs to come and was getting ready to ask them to do something else. Often I would first ask them to "sit," so my dogs quickly learned that clasped hands were usually followed by a "sit" signal. Apparently they figured that they might as well save us both time and do it right away. Every dog owner illustrates this every day. Maybe your dog runs to the door when you reach for your jacket. Perhaps you've played chase with your dog, and now, each time you lean forward, your dog dashes away from you. Most people move their hand or finger when they ask their dog to sit, even if they're not aware of it. But your dog is, and your action is probably the cue that's most relevant to him.
When I started professionally training dogs and their humans, one of the first things that hit me was how the owners focused on the sounds that they made, while the dogs appeared to be watching them move. This observation compelled me and two undergraduate students, Jon Hensersky and Susan Murray, to do an experiment to see if dogs paid more attention to sound or vision when learning a simple exercise. The students taught twenty-four six-and-a-half-week-old puppies to "sit" to both a sound and a motion.1 Each pup got four days of training to both signals given together, but on the fifth day the trainer only presented one signal at a time. In a randomized order the pup either saw the trainer's hand move or heard the beeplike "sit" signal. We wanted to see whether one type of signal, acoustic or visual, resulted in more correct responses. It did: twenty-three of the twenty-four puppies performed better to the hand motion than to the sound, while one puppy sat equally well to either. The Border Collies and Aussies, as you might predict, were stars at visual signals, getting a total of thirty-seven right out of forty possible (and only six out of forty right to acoustic signals)... |
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| View all 8 comments |
Nicole Wilde (MSl quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
As a dog trainer who specializes in behavior issues, as well as being an avid reader (and fellow author), I cannot express how much I adore this book. I have attended Patricia's seminars and her warmth, intelligence, and ability to convey invaluable information related to canine behavior comes across in this book just as it does in person. I have a vast collection of dog training books. Some are referred to for specific information on behavioral issues. Some gather dust. This one will be read more than once, just for the sheer enjoyment. Patricia McConnell is an excellent writer, and anyone who wants to understand more about the relationship between dogs and people and how to improve them should absolutely buy this book. It is one of my most highly recommended books to my dog training clientele. |
Setna Khamwaset (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
Patricia McConnell has written a clear and thought provoking book on ANIMAL behavior. Take note, McConnell does not stop with dog behavior, but looks closely at primate behavior as well. It is important to know not only how to speak dog, but why our behavior, while understandable by us and other primates, communicates in a foreign language to our dogs. For example, did you know that every time you grab a dog by the face and press your face up to the dog that you are probably making that dog quite uncomfortable? Dogs do not greet each other face to face - it is an aggressive behavior and your dog will notice when you stop staring him in the eye (basically saying "you wanna fight!") and start kissing her on the cheek! McConnell's writing is fluid and clear.
However, I find sections overly pendantic at times and I would highly recommend further sections on practical, hands on things we can do to help correct problem behavior. This is important to note. This book is not really a training book - there is not even a single paragraph on leash pulling. While it has helpful training tips and advice, it is mostly a book about psychology and communication. For functional training methods, pick up another of McConnell's training books (or perhaps those of another well qualified trainer). But if you want to better understand what your dog's behavior communicates and how you can change your behavior to better communicate with your dog, this is by far the best and most accesible book on the subject. Learn the importance of tone of voice, length of sound, repetition, body language, facial expression and the often misunderstood concepts of dominance and leadership. After reading McConnell, you and your dog will finally be speaking the same "body" language! I highly recommend this interesting book.
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A reader (MSL quote), New Zealand
<2007-01-11 00:00>
The Other End of The Leash is a book that could easily disappoint the purchaser if they did not know what they were buying. This is not a book on the practicalities of how to train your dog. Ms McConnell does not tell you how to make spot sit, down or fetch, or tell you how to teach him competition obedience. It is also not a book on the theory of teaching dogs, or on fixing behavioural problems. You will not hear about the benefits of positive reinforcement versus punishment in this book, or learn how to stop your dog from chasing the postman.
However, if you accept this book for what it is, it is truly wonderful and quite unique. The Other End of the Leash is simply a informal discussion on the similarities and differences between canine and human communication. McConnell has studied human behaviour as well as dog behaviour, and has come to the conclusion that many behaviours and verbal tones that seem friendly and natural to humans are aversive to our canine companions.
When used inappropriately, these human signals can trigger a fearful or aggressive reaction in dogs. Less seriously, using inappropriate body language or vocal tone can undermine our obedience work. When teaching a recall for example, signals that might seem appropriate to a human (leaning forward, looking directly at the dog and barking a loud cheerful "come!") can in fact inhibit the dog from approaching.
This book also contains one of the most sensible discussion of dominance that I have ever read. McConnell contends that dominance is a much misused but still useful concept. She discusses the way that we can mistakenly give up our "Alpha" status to our dogs by using the wrong body language, and explains the severe behavioural problems that can be caused when we do this. Most importantly, she tells us how we can earn back Alpha status without resorting to physical violence. However unlike some other dog trainers ("Dog Listener" Jan Fennell springs to mind!), McConnell does not try to ascribe every behavioural problem to a lack of human dominance or leadership. She is careful to include anecdotes about dogs that were misdiagnosed as having dominance issues when they were merely untrained, and explains how this misdiagnosis actually exacerbated their behavioural problems.
Her explanations of canine body language are excellent, and far superior to any other book of this type on the market. Unlike many other dog trainers - Turid Rugaas, for example - McConnell discusses the body language of aggression and fear as well the language of submission and "calming". This information is essential for anyone dealing with a potential aggressive dog.
The only complaint I have with this book is that McConnell appears to deal mainly with herding breeds, and although she briefly mentions a few other dogs in the book (mostly retrievers and a few smaller terriers), her anecdotes are mostly about border collies. This bias is relevant as border collies are a breed that was developed to work closely with humans, and specifically selected to be alert and sensitive to the nuances of human and animal body language. I know from experience that some of McConnell's conclusions aren't necessarily going to be quite so accurate with other types of dog - for example, dogs that are bred to guard, dogs that are bred to fight, and dogs that are bred to work independently of humans.
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Lara Stielow (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
This is an excellent book that will give you more insight into your dog's behavior.It explains the natural behavior of dogs vs. humans, and why sometimes our most instinctive reactions to our dogs can be ineffective or even harmful to our relationship with them. Patricia McConnell is a wonderful writer who weaves excellent stories, sure to make any dog lover laugh and cry, into this information laden book. This book does not tell you specifically how to train your dog or deal with behavior problems. It explains the psychology of humans vs canines and how we can work together to enjoy each other fully. I originally got it from the library and could not put it down. By the time I was done I had to get a copy for myself. Although, I have a line of friends waiting to borrow it. Happy reading!
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