Like Fate with her new tennis ball (courtesy of Bob at the town dump), the image of a dog playing is always endearing, it lifts the hearts of dog owners and brings wide smiles to their faces. Some of them know that dogs are predators, and that playing is the first step their mothers and fathers take in showing them how to run things down and kill them.
The dogs that play the most and chewing on each other are not really like toddlers squealing over stuffed bunnies, they are aroused creatures learning how to kill, bringing up their prey drive in ways their human masters do not like or really understand. The Lab or border collie who is obsessed with chasing balls is getting aroused, preparing to hunt bigger flesh-and-blood game.
One of the ways people who love to see dogs playing can make their crazy is to play too much, and to let their dogs play too much. Every time they play, their prey drive is bring raised and brought to the surface. Too much of that makes a dog crazy, one of those dogs who can never stop bothering people by dropping balls at their feet or bringing them toys. I see a lot of dogs that know how to chase balls, but have never learned to sit quietly in a house.
In his classic book “Domestic Dogs,” James Serpell of the University of Pennsylvania Veterinary School says that working and herding dogs especially often use the predatory motor patterns of their ancestor, the wolf. These include the orientation posture (seen when border collies crouch down low or when Labs get set to retrieve), followed by eye, stalk, chase, grab-bite and kill bite.
In Fate, I see the orientation posture clear, the eye, the stalk and the chase. The grab-bite and kill bite has clearly been bred out of her. But I only have to look closely in those eyes to understand that what looks playing to us — awwww, cute – is not. Is is the call of the wild, the prey drive of the wolf. We don’t project human emotions onto wolves generally, so we don’t think they are cute when they stalk, chase, grab and bite.
If you watch a dog chase a ball, you see all of the steps of the prey drive. They get set, they stalk with their eyes, they chase, brag and bite down. If you replace the ball in your mind with a rabbit, you get the idea.
But we love it when our dogs seem to us to be playing. We need them to be happy, we are projecting our own needs onto them. This is very often a misunderstanding. I believe to know a love a dog is to understand a dog as he or she is, not how we need it to be.
Dog parks are neat, but they cause just as much trouble for dogs as pleasure. Dogs can very easily get aroused and confused on dog parks, and dog owners can become overly fixated on their importance.
Breeders will tell you that during the early socialization period, herding dogs are encouraged to socialize with people and other dogs but are not given unlimited access to livestock. The emergence of predatory behavioral patterns, says Serpell, are variable, but the training of herding dogs does not, and really cannot, begin until after the onset of eye, stalk and chase. The dog is encouraged to show these motor patterns toward the sheep, and then is commanded off (“get off,” “get down”) before it can continue with grab-bite, crush-bite and dismember or dissect.
In Border collies the latter behavior patterns seem to be only mildly present – they were bred with that in mind a century ago – while in some of the more aggressive “run and catch” dogs to trainer has to quickly get on scene to command the dog off before it harms the livestock. Behaviorists believe that the release of the eye behavior in adult border collies is stimulated in part by their anticipation of movement of the “prey,” a/k/a, the sheep.
When chickens or sheep were sedated in tests at one college, and were inactive, border collies were unable to hold the eye pattern, and would re-focus their attention on birds or other animals that were moving.
Fate has enormous prey drive, but does not seem to posses the grab-bite and kill bite, the final stages of prey drive, the ones that make the sheep fear the dog and move. Essentially, the dogs look to sheep like wolves, they maintain the same kind of eye stalk, and the sheep think they are about to be devoured, so they move.
When border collies were bred in England, farmers were looking for a fast, smart dog with less kill instinct, a lot of animals were being maimed or killed by rough herding dogs.
While she has enormous working instincts, Fate doesn’t have the eye stalk, and the sheep pay no attention to her. If they ignored Red in the same way, he would bite them on the nose and nip at them until they moved. It never gets to that point.
It is critical for dog owners to understand that play in dogs is not like play in babies. Every time you throw a frisbee for a dog or a ball for a Lab, you are cranking the dog up, arousing him and raising his prey drive. This is great to do for five or ten minutes once in the yard. But if you do it in the house, or all day, or out of misplaced guilt, you and the dog may both regret it. Hyper-aroused dogs make difficult and obnoxious, sometimes even dangerous pets.
Dog play ought to be occasional, once in awhile for short periods. They don’t need more than that.
Dogs do not need hours of play a day, that is done for the gratification of people, not out of the dog’s need. In our home, there are no balls or toys to throw or chase, just a few bones and squeaky chipmunk. Dogs like Fate need to learn how to be calm, to do nothing. They know how to be crazy.
Fate gets two or three walks a day and a couple of rounds with sheep. She doesn’t need one more thing than that, and if there were a dog play group in my town, I wouldn’t go near it. She needs calming time, not arousal time.
I have spent a lot of time researching the difference between playing and hunting, and I realize that there really isn’t any. To the dog it’s all about hunting down things that move. Sometimes that includes dogs.
I tell myself to be cautious, and as hyper as she is, Fate is great dog inside the house. She curls up in her bed and goes to sleep. I can write for hours and not know she is there. Maria can work for hours and Fate will not budge in her studio.
No playing there, no throwing of balls, no activity at all while Maria and I are working.
I am always working to keep in mind the difference between what dogs need and what I need them to need. They are not the same thing, no matter how cute one or the other might be.
My cute little border collie is a killing machine, and when it comes to training her, I never forget it.