[NAGDU] {Spam?} Handle signs, and more on how to get my dog disengaged from people

[Peter Wolf]

Lisie, and hi everyone-

I have the same thing, people going right in for the pet or engaging my dog by eye and voice.   Handiworks looks like what I’ve seen in person at Lighthouse in San Francisco.  Fluorescent bicyclist lime green with bold black print.  My favorite is “Ignore me I am a working guide dog”, or better, “Ignore me I am working”.  

That will be my next verbiage.   We have spent a ton of money on patches over time.  First it was “do not pet”.  Then, Do Not Touch.  Then we fine tuned it to “Working Do Not Distract” and  “Do Not Distract”.   I think that first words encountered, “Ignore Me”, might be even better.  

I’ve been thinking as I have started writing on this, that it might be fun to talk about perception.  It’s my great irony that one of my careers has been teaching perception and particularly at that, use of vision and expansion of peripheral vision.   Now I have lost the peripheral, and some significant aspects of vision…It has been a real trip to - no longer from interest or even passion - to return to my earlier indigenous training background as a tracker and scout, to go through O&M blindfolded, and remember the years of having to move through the woods blindfolded in different seasons with nothing more than a pair of speedos.  I had to find my way through swamps and thickets, find people, or camp, or somewhere unfamiliar.  So now, what has it been to return to so many of the things that I trained in, and even taught others, but by necessity learn, has gotten pretty amazing…like to echolocate by necessity because I just must close my eyes for some time and not use them at all.   Of course once the shock wore off, and my personal pity party was exhausted, then it started becoming interesting, fascinating, even enthralling to bring up feeling and hearing to displace vision.  Anyone else have this experience?  Whether you have worked with your hearing and other felt senses for a very long time, or had to make the shift because of rapid or sudden vision loss (my situation), I would love to talk to you about it if you have developed this.  Publicly or privately, I would appreciate having conversation about this a lot.  Now that I’ve learned to accomodate and be “centered” in the new normal that my vision is and relax about it, it’s as if I can sense I’ve gotten new “vocabulary”, in my senses, from which to begin really learning.  If you might have any guidance from your experience in how to work to expand my senses, it would be fantastic.  I’d say email or phone me.  That would be awesome.  

OK, let’s go back to why I was going to write in the first place.  The point where I went off was perception.  It was a big part of my Psych degrees, was at the center of what I eventually taught, and is probably part of what drives people to stick their hands out and go for our dogs!!  Hey I’ve been writing a lot lately, and hopefully I’ll chill…Eek, I have a desk full of stuff piling up!  But one more, because I hope you find this exploration fun.  It’s about the Psychology of signs (on dogs).  It may be that the way many signs (I mean patches) on our dogs can actually attract rather than repel well intentioned people.  It’s about how the subconscious works when we read signs.  I want to talk about that, and then depart, sort of take a risk and go way out there with it.  

The subconscious is literal.  It does not understand “do not”, as quickly as “do” something.  In fact, “do not” goes invisible to the subconscious, and only the “do” part registers. I’ll explain that in a moment.  But a case in point first:  This is why punishment makes dogs paranoid, or if punished more, even neurotic; but love makes them want to do anything to be closer to us and “get it right".  We know this from hypnosis.  In hypnosis, you’d never point to the table lamp, and casually say to client, “kill the light” when they leave.   They might do far more than simply turn off the light switch.   Seriously, classically in an example like a patch reading, “Do Not Pet”, the “do not” is glossed over, and the thing that is the action, like “pet”, is what the preverbal reaction in a person is, before they even know it.  This is actually what we are writing about, when we say to each other, “they just seem to reflexively reach for my dog”.   It’s strange, and I hope it bears out better than in a bunch of well funded Psychology studies.  

Julie was this you - someone wrote that they tried a “hand” image for their “don't pet” patch in the beginning.  And if I recall correctly, that it was even less effective than a patch with just words was.  Guess what, that’s exactly the subconscious reaction I’m talking about.  What the passerby saw, was a hand.  What they didn’t see, although it was there, and probably in bold line at that, was the “No” circle and line across the hand.  They got “hand” - and reached out their hand!   So I’m sitting here writing to you guys, now thinking to myself,  Hey cool, I’m sold!  If this is so true, I’m going to buy the “Ignore Me” patch!  I like that…few words, obscenely bright color, with a positive, not negative Command in bold print.  I’ll let you know if it works.  

..So the other week, I wrote a piece for the group on how I’ve developed this little martial artsy movement to break off or avoid people messing with Metukah.  I’m realizing in writing to you guys today, what it must be that is operating in it, that has been making it effective to prevent a “lock on” or if I’m too late…to get people off my dog.  As I’ve said, being a snow white silken windhound, she is drop dead supermodel gorgeous, which doesn’t help us at all!  

Ok.  So let’s break down what is making the martial artsy movement work.  It contains subconscious communication to others through body language, on an instant and pre-verbal level!  To recap, when someone is coming in at my dog physically or verbally, usually they are on my “dog” side, out across the dog from me.  That’s either ahead of us, incoming, or diagonally ahead of us in space, or next to her.   They are rarely on the other side, because that’s just me.  The dog is on my other side.  And if they are behind, it doesn’t matter, they are just a voice.  Ok, you got the spatial?   

In my case, Metukah is usually on my right side.  As they reach in, or have already reached in (because I didn’t see them coming), or start engaging her verbally, I shorten the leash (soon to be handle), toward me, and I turn her slightly forward and slightly crossing in front of me toward my other side (my left side).  Not really though, not so much as that.  I don’t cross her in front of me.  I pivot *me*, and her with me.  My arm holding her leash actually doesn’t move much.  It is me moving, and she comes along as the bent arm moves with me.  I don’t mean big movement that interrupts our standing there or walking.  What this movement is, might appear to a good watcher, as if she accelerates forward a little, and slightly turns inward toward our line of travel. But again, actually, It’s not a big movement, but it is a slight “arc”.  Remember, I am not really putting her into a turn so much, she is simply pivoting in direction slightly around me as *I* do.  Do you get it?  So for keeping a line of travel while I am doing this, it’s only really a little bit of an S turn.  And we continue forward.  If I’m standing still when it comes in, I just pull or pivot.  The person then doesn’t get my chest facing them as would be normal, now it is actually a little bit of side chest and half a shoulder.  No longer facing, but not so far as to be turned away.  There.  I hope that paints it.  

 Two things happen in this.  One, Metukah’s head, and therefore eye contact, are instantly disengaged from the person.  And it’s good because in doing this, I have just engaged, or “tasked” her in movement.  She instantly is attending to me.  The product of this is, that the person just kind of breaks off, without seeming to realize what is happening.  This is because, in a nanosecond, their subconscious has - quite  literally -  just been given “the cold shoulder” by the dog, and also by me.  In an instant, the person who expected the front of a dog, with all it’s deliciousness like head and neck, face, eye contact and attention, suddenly only has ribs turning into a butt, which give nothing.  And the guy on the end of the leash is suddenly occupied seemingly elsewhere.

Think about this. Here’s where I said I was going to go “way out”.   I’m going to get almost esoteric here.  This is fun!  What I am realizing is happening is this:  It’s like an experience of whiplash to the neural expectation of someone who has just targeted your dog for attention.  Think martial arts.  Let’s use this example.  Say, a punch comes in.  Anyone know this one?  If you’ve spent enough time training, you don’t have to throw a big block anymore.  You only have to move yourself in space a little from the feet if at all, and your face,  just a little to the left or right.  You let the punch come in, so that it is not impacting but now only brushing by on the skin of your cheek.  When you do this, here’s what happens in the perception of the puncher:  The puncher neurologically *does* perceive that they got what they were trying for.  They may have called it “Punch”.  But what their subconscious went for was simply “contact”.  This is where the subconscious comes into play.  Now, If you don’t move, and they do hit you, they’d have the same satisfaction neurologically, because they’d naturally register the “hit”, which is…contact.   So here’s the thing:  With this if you allow contact, but you aren’t where they thought you were when they started throwing the punch, you don’t even have to hit back...   Just leave.  Because in that moment, for a nanosecond, actually, they will become neurologically confused.  What they reached out for in their expectations didn’t happen.  Yet they did start contact, which was something different - and they remain stuck in their brain map about it…  In that moment you already just turned and went home.  What I have come to realize is, when I pivot and turn Metukah slightly away from someone’s reach or speech, that is exactcly what happened.  That’s what we are actually doing!

 Here’s the difference:  In the above scenario, if you “blocked" it, that’s a different message - you’d then have a “fight”.  That’s no fun. (In dog handling, to me that’s the equivalent of “stop / don’t pet”, which rhymes with “get off my dog”, which can get a response from others directly or spoken to someone else like “What a jerk”.

I never actually dissected the mechanics of this.  Cool, huh?  This also works by the way, when it is too late, and someone has already engaged the dog, locked on.  Then it is harder for (me), because I feel like I’m being rude.  But still, I have learned to instantly gently pull and redirect her first, thus tasking her with a direction change, to break off the contact.  And then of course it is my option to say hi, or nothing, or “So sorry, she’s a working dog”.   I wrote this earlier, saying that until I got the hang of it, I felt that I was being callous, antisocial, or rude.  But in these moments, there isn’t time to discuss it and educate people, unless I want to hang out and talk about it.   How to remain in good neutral regard while working…not impatient, or resentful, or irritated, that’s my challenge sometimes.  I do a lot of educating, because I find most people do mean well.  But perhaps because I do, it has been occurring to me lately that there seem to be a whole lot more people who do know a respectful boundary about working dogs than there used to be.  I think that our society is changing in this, with dog awareness increasing.