Definitely Doggy Behaviour.

Recently, iv’e been thinking a lot about having a dog, especially now given that iv’e left sailing behind, spend lots of time on my own and have successfully adopted the practice of walking two or three times a day. One of my problems is that iv’e never owned a dog myself despite being brought up in a family that kept and owned dogs : my late father kept, raced and bread Greyhounds and it was part of my upbringing to take them for one of their walks each day. The second problem is that the dog I would really like, I think, is a GSD (German Shepherd Dog) yet I really don’t know if I could adequately manage one – GSD’s being large and powerful animals.

My several walks per day get me out of the house and give me lots of time to think about things, right now to observe doggy behaviour, the way that many dog owners around here don’t manage their own dogs and very strangely what I see as dog like behaviour from people – especially drivers !

Some days I think that my computer must be watching me because what it’s been giving me as recommendations has been endless video’s singing the praises of GSD’s as ‘family’ dogs : that or one of Cesar Millan’s video’s of him turning around aggressive and dominant or fearful and insecure GSD’s, Pitties and Dobies – for sheer nastiness though it’s often been the little uns that have become unbearably territorial and unpredictable. Having now watched about twenty hours worth of his dog magic I now start to read dog behaviour, and that of their owners, when I am out walking. The really strange thing,which I will try and explain later, is that I begin to see much of the appalling driving skills/car ownership as definitely doggy behaviour as well.

Cesar Millan spends about half of his video time correcting the behaviour of dogs, the other half of his time he is correcting or training the owners to be better humans : specifically to be calm and effective pack leaders that their dog or pack of dogs will accept as head of the pack and follow their lead instead of being boss dog themselves. Dogs being clearly in charge is something I see (and hear) nearly every day in this village. The most egregious example of appalling dog ownership and lack of both dog knowledge and control is a local couple whom I now think of as dumb and dumber. Their dog, a loud, dominant and sometimes aggressive Husky is clearly the one in charge during walks : it’s out front leading it’s so called owners along and if it meets any other dog it immediately lunges and starts barking loudly – even I sense that it’s an aggressive bark.

Perhaps iv’e watched too much Jordan Peterson and absorbed his lectures about the psychology of personality, After that I definitely know that I spent too much time bad driving and road rage videos such that I try and hazard a guess about the likely traits of the usual suspects – the bad drivers. I’m pretty sure that bad driving is slightly downstream of the competitive/aggressive behaviour of low agreeableness. Having now watched a similar amount of Cesar Millan dealing with difficult dogs and clueless owners I also start to equate the bad driving that I see with more feral, dog like, behaviour : for example which driver is being territorial about what they perceive as their road space, which ones are acting all frustrated and who must get in front at all costs with dangerous overtakes and the like. I would even go so far as to say that road rage is just like dog rage – lots of shouting/barking, lots of lunging and puffed out chests and so on.

If you don’t know Peterson’s work then you won’t know that he says that we share a bit of brain structure and function with the humble Lobster. It’s deep down for sure but it’s why our own brain responds so well to just two chemicals : Serotonin and Dopamine. One of the chemicals, I forget which, is different in the Lobster but has the same function. So, we’re all a tiny bit Lobster as the balance of the two is also at the basis of our Trait psychology and we can study that in a useful way by applying language. It might be a bit of a stretch but I wonder whether we share similar functions and innate behaviours with higher animals such as dogs.

I’m probably overthinking it, I usually am, but I think I see many parallels between human and dog behaviour : to explain myself even partially i’ll have to give you several examples. For the first example I have to let Cesar Millan impart some dog behaviour knowledge, Cesar has a kind of dictum in working with dogs which goes something like “no eye contact, no voice & no touch” – he says that maintaining eye contact with a dog or between dogs is read as a physical challenge. I think that in human psychology it’s also true that sustained direct eye contact is also a challenge. In his work as a driving instructor Ashley Neal shows in several of his videos that conflict between drivers often starts with a hard stare and that conflict can be avoided by not making eye contact : iv’e seen that in my own practice of driving and recently had an example in which by making eye contact with a territorial acting taxi driver was nearly the cause of a row and road rage although I was a pedestrian rather than a driver – what I got was the aggressive line “what’s your problem” and I hope I defused it slightly with the line “several strokes mate” although it was maybe a mistake to add “that’s my excuse- what’s yours ?”.

In his work with rehabilitating dogs Millan often uses his own pack to teach a new dog respectful behaviour towards the whole pack and often just uses one of his dogs to teach or reinforce lessons to a ‘therapy’ dog. Now, it’s fairly obvious that he is accepted as the leader of his own pack and that they all respect him : they also absolutely set the rules towards dogs outside the pack without any of the normal human rules of behaviour.

The obvious second example is that of respect and my best way of trying to explain that is seeing respect through the eyes of a feral south London gang or a 1% Biker club. I have no experience of gang culture but have spent plenty of time around bikers – even one percenters, Both demand respect and what that usually means is deference and in both cases there is something that feels like pack behaviour – there is for example a clear club boss or gang boss and it’s wise to treat either/or as alpha males. Not showing respect (deference) is usually a surefire way of getting a smackdown (beating).

I am almost certainly over thinking it – normal for me being me then – but it’s been a whole lot of fun this last few weeks to read bad driving behaviour and car ownership in the same way as reading dog behaviour. One of the funny things in Cesar Millan’s practice is that he often has to have male dogs neutered because, as he says, testosterone is a big part of the problem : how often do we hear that said about aggressive young blokes getting into road rage incidents ?

Now, i’m not heading towards suggesting that the worst (male) road ragers should either lose their licence or be offered neutering (castration) as an alternative : give most of them enough time and some of them will grow up a little or meet karma in the shape of an even younger and more aggressively applied fist. I do think that we, as a society, make serious mistakes when we allow many young men to own and drive cars that they treat as weapons in the making. Again, what i;m not suggesting is an intensifying in the apparent war on motorists and beyond that I have few viable thoughts about how society should proceed : around here for example, if you’re a young bloke that has a job then it’s most likely that you have to drive to work as public transport is so unreliable around here.

I’m quite a long way off track here – I started this post to talk about maybe becoming a dog owner and i’m pretty sure that P had the wrong breed in mind : it’s not so much that a GSD could knock me down and walk over me but rather that, having watched a lot of Cesar Millan, I don’t know whether i’m the right person to own a dog. That’s a fairly strange and bleak conclusion to a post !