August 1, 2008 - Dog Pile

Because we are training working dogs, our dogs are not permitted to socialize together. There are a couple of reasons for this...

1) Dogs that play together generally take on either dominant or submissive behaviors during play. In working dogs we don't really want either behavior. Instead we want a dog that is confident yet compliant. Submissive dogs are hard to work with because they tend to not want to take treats during training and when you give them a correction, their attitude tends to plummet. With dominate dogs, you generally have a fight on your hands and the dog is sure to test you a lot. But a complaint dog likes to work for food, takes corrections and rebounds quickly.

2) Working dogs need to identify their handler as their "pack." When dogs interact together freely, the result is a dog that tends to gravitate to other dogs when he sees them. This doesn't make for a focused working dog.

With that said, we do not want our working dogs to be dog aggressive or fearful in any way. One of the ways we encourage this is an exercise called the Dog Pile.

As a class, we place our dogs on the floor, side-by-side, right up next to other dogs. We alternate with one dog's head facing north and the next dog's head facing south. It should look like this: face, butt, face, butt, face, butt, etc. The dogs are required to lay down touching a dog on both sides, all the while paying no mind to what the other dogs are doing; no eye contact, no wiggling, no sniffing butts, etc. At first the dogs are squirmy but eventually they settle in and focus on you, the handler.

Ultimately, with practice, this exercise will progress to having dogs literally piled on top of each other with the dogs making no fuss.