Marking Territory

I recently spent 5 weeks on the East Coast of the United States in the suburbs of New Jersey, taking care of my sick mother. I had left my dogs at home but to de-stress I spent an hour or more a day walking around my old home town. I noticed a regular group of friendly dog walkers, and I also noticed a small handful of signs posted on the edge of nicely landscaped properties, many of which were maintained by lawn service workers and not homeowners. While I am a strong believer in property rights, I got the feeling that many of the signs were put up not necessarily in order to fix some out of control problem, but instead as an assertion of human territory. I have lived in congested areas before and now live in the country where I get my fair share of motorists throwing their empty beer cans and candy wrappers out on the edge of my property but instead of putting up ugly signs that I'm guessing would be ignored anyway, I just pick up the garbage every once in awhile, and don't think too much about it. It's my contention that in crowded congested areas, New jersey being the most crowded state in the Nation with 1195.5 residents per square mile (Washington D.C. has 9856.5 but is not a state) Idaho having 19 residents per square mile, people get more defensive of their territory. So I was surprised to see what I thought were unattractive signs at the edges of lovely landscaped properties. To me the signage seemed more distasteful than the occasional overlooked dog dropping. I am a responsible dog walker and pick up after the dogs I walk, but this battle of land owners verses a few irresponsible dog walkers seemed to go deeper than the obvious. The one that made me laugh was the pretty sign with silk bows that asked for the dogs not to "Pee " on the shrubs. I'm wondering how they would even know? There were 4 of these signs spread out over the perimeter of this property and the ironic aspect was that this person's shrubs, attractive as they might have been, were also spreading out a good way onto the public sidewalk( note photos above). Do they really believe that ownership extends out to the public sidewalk despite the fact that they had made the initial plantings? I'm curious as to how the public/private boundary was not clearly understood. Was someone perhaps claiming more territory in an overcrowded area? The yard and shrubs were quite lovely, but once again the signage, complete with silky ribbons, did really draw the eye away and detract from the lovely plantings more so than any dog's pee, as far as I'm concerned. Oh well, more thoughts to ponder on a crowded planet where there are so many people and so many dog owners. I guess we creatures all try and claim territory, the trick is to figure out how to all get along.

Healing people training dogs

(The dog in the photo is a dog available for adoption and not the dog referred to in the following story)

There is a woman I walk with from time to time. We take our dogs and go on long nature walks discussing life and business and the state of the world and our families. I noticed that she was having trouble getting her dog to come when she called her. I offered up advice. I said you should use three separate tones of voice with the dog. 1) a friendly, happy talk tone, praising good behavior, 2) a matter of fact,direct, command tone, such as "come"3) a growly tone when you have to say "No" and stop the dog in it's tracks if it's about to run off and get into trouble. It's the growly tone that sort of mimics a mother dog to her pup. Well I told her this advice on three separate occasions and my friend is a very bright woman with advanced degrees and yet she wouldn't try out the advice. Hm, I thought, this is interesting. I'm not one to push advice once I've offered it. My feeling is I offered what I thought might help her and explained the reasoning and need to be consistent with the commands to her. I thought to myself, this is interesting, she heard the advice but for some reason isn't interested in seeing if it would work.I just let the issue go and continued to view the problem silently to myself. Her dog would come to me but I was consistent with it and used the three different tones, so she could see that the advice actually had some effect. One day we were talking about our childhood memories and she explained that there was a lot of anger and yelling in her house, and it was very scary and uncomfortable for her growing up. Bingo, I made the connection. This was the reason why she could not use the growly tone with the dog because it brought up so many bad memories for her and made her feel uncomfortable.We discussed the insight and it registered with her. I asked if it would be okay for me to discuss this in a blog post and she said fine, as I thought it might give insight into the training issues of others. So it's not just dogs we are training but at times we are helping people to remain in the present state and perhaps help heal some past issues. I can't say that the problem is completely resolved but at least there is light shed on the issue, and some understanding . Healing takes time and dog training, depending on the dog and owner can take time as well