There is a number of books on dog psychology which are worth a dog musher reading. One of these is called, The Mind of the Dog and the other is Why Does Your Dog Do That? Both of these come from England, where it seems they are more interested in why dogs act certain ways than us Americans are.

Stimulus

Anyway, I said once that a dog would go on doing the same thing wrong, time after time, and I never understood why he did it - he just did it. The thing is, what a dog does this minute depends on what he did the last minute. If the same stimulus comes along that set him off some course the last time he did something, he will react to it just the same way he did before. Even if it is wrong. He doesn't have any imagination, so he can't think of something new to do. He just obeys the unspoken order to follow up one action with another.

This means that if you have a dog that comes back on you at a certain place along the trail, you have to break up this chain of action until the arrival at that spot means something else to the dog. The thing with dogs is, it may not be the same spot every time. It has to be only a spot that looks right, that looks like the other spots where he turned back or ran out. Just seeing that sort of a place will spark the dog's mind, "This is a spot we turn back at."

It is possible for you to take him out to spots like that and retrain him so that when he sees that sort of place, he will run much faster than usual because you have made that spot look like a place where he will have trouble if he does not run faster past it. Then, eventually, you will have trouble making him turn off at that spot, if you want him to. He has just set up a whole new series of responses to a certain stimulus.

Setting Patterns

The thing about a dog is, once he is off on a series of responses, just like when you stand up dominoes and knock down the first one that makes all the others fall, he can't quit unless he is stopped some way and his mind redirected, so the chain is broke. He does almost everything by habit and this is how the best lead dogs get to be the best.

When you get a really smart dog that can invent things to do, he hardly ever makes a real good leader because you can't depend on habit to carry him through the average race. So, this chain reaction works for you just as well as it works against you. But it can be a whale of a problem, which is why I am in favor of a person with a new lead dog never taking it out where he can't control it and set its habits the right way to begin with.

Every time a dog does something right or wrong, it gets more set in his mind. The thing that is different about the dog, compared to man, is that the dog will set up a pattern that leads right direct to a beating. And, if you watch him, you will see that he is more and more aware that a beating is coming as he goes through the stages that end up that way.

The trouble is, he is only sure he will get the beating when he goes into the last stage before it comes, every doggone time. He starts by looking off into that "turn-around spot." The driver says, "No!" and stomps on the brake. Last time this happened, the dog turned off and ran back. He is not thinking so far ahead as the pounding he got at the end. All that is in his mind is, last time the driver said "no" and jerked on the brake, I ran out into that spot. So, off he goes.

Then the driver says "Whoa!" and is down on the brake with all his might, and the inkling of what happened before is starting to get into the dog's mind. So, he has a little feeling of dread and he digs in more than ever and starts to cut for home.

About this time, the driver gets his brush hook set on something and is running up there, swarming all over the dog. He clobbers him and drags him back onto the right trail and says, "Get going," and the team takes off like a rocket. And, what is so hard to see is, the dog hasn't learned anything. He will accept this as part of the routine next time, even easier than he did this time. And, at the same time, he gets more and more worried because he doesn't like what he knows is coming up but nobody has ever really broke his habit so he can't help doing it again.

Breaking the Chain of Habit

The only way to break up the chain is to go out with him so he can't follow through the usual routine, with maybe fewer dogs and stop the first domino from falling. I mean, when you reach the spot, you are running alongside him before that spot sparks him into his general routine. You change the command, say, "Straight ahead," instead of "No!" (which is part of the old routine) and drag him past, or snap the whip down so he shies away from it-anything to break up the chain of ideas.

You have just done something like a short circuit. You have interrupted the pattern that this dog has to go through before he can go on down the proper trail. So, in real surprise, he goes on the right way. After you do this a few times, he changes his way of thinking about spots like that and he may, as I said, decide never to turn at that kind of place again, even when you want him to.

Dogs Are Creatures of Habit

Both of the books and me, myself, agree that dogs are creatures of habit in all things. They are at their healthiest and happiest when they are living according to a schedule they can count on. Dogs always expect to be hungry at a certain time, even if they aren't really hungry. It's just that at a certain time of day, they are used to being hungry. And if you feed them then, they will eat more than they would at any other time of day. If you try to feed a poor dog earlier, he won't eat a thing, but if he is fed at the regular time, he will eat half his dinner just because he is accustomed to eating at that time.

In obedience training, you can see how the habits take over. The dogs learn to sit down when the handler stops every time, whether he is paying attention or not. The sharpest ones might get sloppy and think of something else to do eventually, but once the right habit is there, it's easy to keep them doing it by just being on guard. Nobody could obedience train dogs any more than they can obedience train kids, if dogs didn't work from habit. That is the only reason we can use dogs in a team the way we do.

What the Dog Sees Something else people ask about a lot, is why dogs will run down the edge of a trail or on the edge of a cliff, or won't run right across the center of a big lake even though they will run willingly along the shore. This is not so much psychology as it is physical. Dogs don't have good eyes in daytime, compared to ours, and dogs' eyes are only a third as high from the ground as ours are.

Get down on the floor on your hands and knees and see how different everything looks from what you see when you stand up. You don't see a whole room. You just see landmarks close up that you never noticed before.

The dog that remembers a whole trail he once ran, even after it is all covered with deep snow, he isn't seeing the same thing you see. You see the whole lay of the land and how the hills come together or where a big clump of trees is. He sees where one tree trunk is after another, where a boulder sticks up or the land slopes off around a curve. He doesn't see any of the big picture at all.

It is the same to him as it is to you when you go swimming in a lake and get out a ways. You can't guess how far from shore you are-you can only see the figures on the beach where you came from and they look a long ways off. People drown all the time because they don't realize how far out from the shore they are. If they could stand up on top of the water and get a picture of the whole lake, they wouldn't get so far out without knowing it. Well, the dog never sees the whole lake or a whole wide road. At his height, he just sees the edge of the road or the edge of a drop off, or the line of trees or rushes along the edge of a lake. So, he always tries to get next to something that will help him know where he is.

This is why most dogs follow a trail so good and the reason for trail leaders who don't know a gee from a haw. If they were as tall as a horse, they could see across a field or a lake and they would never follow the trail. They would cut straight across the way a horse will do. Horse trails always take the short way, you know. But a trail dog, if he is loose and not too sure where he is going, will wander back and forth with lots of "check points" all along the way. The dog will set a path across a big meadow that goes from one rock to another or from a big bush to a small tree or along a creek bank, because the world he lives in is very small compared to a big animal with good, sharp eyes. He covers a lot of ground but it is all from one place to another nearby place and then another, unless his instinct tells him exactly where he is going and he is in a big hurry to get there. Then, he just trusts his scent power, or his instincts to guide him right to where he is going even though he cannot see it.

You can see from that, why your dog fights you so bad about going right out and breaking trail across a big, open field where no trail has been made. He will be willing to go someplace, but if he has the choice, it will be along the fence line or along the edges of bare patches or something. That way, he is setting up landmarks all the way and that is how he likes to move around. He doesn't like to run on a big wide lake because to him, it has no edges or landmarks.

Reverting to Old Habits

You wonder how come, when dogs are so much creatures of habit, a good lead dog will try you out so bad. It is still habit with him. He has learned all the ways of holding up the action and maybe his last owner got them all straightened out so he wouldn't do them, but with the new person who gives the signals without knowing, they will all pop up again, one by one. This new person puts him in a position where once before, he had built up a chain of reactions, so he goes right into the old routine until the new driver either busts him for it, or lets him follow through.

With a real well trained dog, anything he starts doing is by accident. Everything else he does is something that he did before, that got printed on his mind and maybe forgotten until the right situation came up again. If he got away with it often, he has to be trained all over again. If he does something new, by accident, he will only do it again if he is not stopped the first time.

You can even see a smart old dog look around to check the opposition, when a "habit" domino has just fallen. His instinct tells him to do the next logical thing but his training tells him not to do it. The way you react will make all the difference. Most anything you do will stop the chain. If you don't do anything, the dominoes will go on falling right to the end.

Timing of Discipline

About all I can say about all of this is that you will get better results by disciplining when the first domino falls than if the whole routine runs through to its natural end and then you discipline. There is no use punishing the dog for the last action in a long series. He is apt to think he was beaten for stopping, if that was the last thing he did and you were really getting after him for running out. That was so far back in his mind he doesn't even associate it with what's going on right now. The closer you get to the very first impulse, when you are disciplining, the better chance you got to break up the chain of impulses and actions. Disciplining after the whole chain has run out is no good. It only makes the dog hate to go out because he figures in his dim way, that being beat on is a natural result of his doing what is automatic to him. He just can't figure that you are mad at him for what he did 500 yards back. He thinks you are mad at him for what he is doing right now, which is maybe bucking and straining and diving around, trying to break loose the brush hook.

Driver's "Tone of Voice"

That is about all I know about dog psychology, except the thing that everybody must know, that a dog will change how he behaves if he sees you change or hears a change in your tone of voice. The one that is always good in training but goes funny at a race, has probably lost confidence because he relies on his driver to act a certain way. When he sees this person rushing around and talking loud, he thinks he is in trouble, and there goes all his good spirits and assurance.

You know, you can be all tensed up but controlling how you act and forcing yourself to be easy and casual, and as long as you don't change your tone of voice, you can fool your dogs completely. You just about have to. It is lucky they are no smarter. Your "faking" wouldn't fool a human being for a minute but it fools the dogs.

Try saying, "You stupid, miserably filthy SOB," to your lead dog in a sing-song, happy tone, fake or not, and watch him wag his tail. Say it in a mad, loud way, and watch him tuck his tail under and roll his eyes over, looking for a place to duck to. Half of dog driving is using your brains to outsmart the dogs. We have got a much better chance of conning them than they have of conning us, though some of them are pretty damn good at it.

Just remember this. I have borrowed this from another book. The idea is to go out and walk around the block. A person just sets off and says, "I am going to walk around the block," and he does. But a dog thinks, "I am going to take that pleasurable walk 1 had last time," and trots out of the yard, over to the neighbors There he sniffs around a minute and the dog two houses down starts to bark at him. That makes him hurry two houses down where the woman comes out and says, "Shoo!" He runs blind past a few more houses to get away from her and sees some kids he likes, and walks with them for a ways.

When they go in a house, he smells something cooking and follows that smell to where it is coming out a window, and while he is sniffing, a man comes and says, "What are you doing here? Get home! " And, he takes off and trots a ways more. Then he smells a tree where the neighbor's dog has marked and that makes him think he better check out where that dog is, so he ticks off the last quarter mile, hears his owner calling and turns into the yard.

Where the human being walked around the block, the dog did about ten different activities, each one caused by the last, and although he has been around the block, he doesn't know or care. Next time, the dog two doors down might not be home to make him continue in that direction, so he might cross the street instead and start himself off on some other kind of adventure. Each little part of it resulting from the part that went on before. And, always reacting the same way to the same thing if it happened before. Always getting lost or confused if things don't happen in a sequence he is used to or if something breaks up the routine too bad.

That is what is natural to the dog. You have to take advantage of it to train him your way.