How Training Your Dog Is Like Practicing for Carnegie Hall
Looking back, it’s hard to believe I spent so much of my life devoted to furiously tapping my fingers on a sterling silver cylinder. All I seemed to think about for the better part of twenty years were things like vibrato, staccato, and legato. Yes it's true, I'm a recovering semi-professional flute player.
During college, my stomach knotted with shame and guilt when I didn't practice the flute for at least five hours a day. Up until about a month ago, I couldn’t remember the last time I picked up a flute, let alone felt remorse for not memorizing Mozart’s Flute Concerto in D Major. This summer my sister-in-law asked me to play at her wedding, and after a ten year hiatus, I dusted off my flute to serenade her guests. Preparing for that “comeback performance” was the context I needed to finally have the breakthrough I’d been seeking in a different activity: training my anxious and extremely high-energy dog, Stanley.
Why I Wish I Could Have a Training Do-Over With My Pandemic Puppy
Stanley is the first dog I’ve raised as an adult. He opens drawers in our house for fun, so he definitely keeps me on my toes! Photo Credit: Juliana DeWillems
I should start by saying that Stanley, who has a face like a black and white cookie, is a 35-pound mini-sheepadoodle (a cross between an Old English Sheepdog and a Miniature Poodle). From the beginning, he struggled with health issues and was incredibly nippy. He would corner my husband Alex and jump and bite him playfully, sometimes breaking the skin. He was also very reactive to noises and cars, dangerously lunging and barking at them when we were walking down the street. And then around the house, we felt like we couldn't trust him. He would routinely open drawers, paw at doors, or steal human things like socks to run around with. When we finally had to crate him because we weren’t able to watch him constantly, he would demand to leave by barking endlessly.
Alex and I spent months working with Stanley and some very wonderful and patient virtual and in-person dog trainers. Still, we were at a breaking point. We trained him for three meals a day, hiked with him on an extremely long leash (called a long line*, which is designed to give him freedom to explore and sniff) and gave him puzzle toys (to make eating his food a brain teaser). Yet, he still felt like such a hard dog.
How a Daily Training Method Helped Us Find a Breakthrough
Even though Stanley is extremely high-energy, he is incredibly affectionate. He wakes Alex and I up with kisses every morning and he cuddles next to us in bed all night. Photo Credit: Juliana DeWillems.
As the co-founder of an online dog-training community, I was embarrassed that I was failing miserably at training my own dog. At that point, my co-founder, Christie Catan, suggested that I reach out to Pet Harmony to work with one of their owners, Emily Strong. Emily is a Certified Dog Behavior Consultant (CDBC) and a Shelter Behavior Affiliate (SBA) and she co-authored the book Canine Enrichment for the Real World. So we threw a Hail Mary and signed up for 20 back-to-back, hour-long dog-training sessions (through something called the “Intensive Behavior Package”). Over a period of several weeks, we hoped Emily could help make our life with Stanley more manageable.
When we met Emily over Zoom, much to our surprise she explained that Stanley would not be part of our lessons. Instead she listened patiently to all of the daily problems we had with him, and gave us bite-sized exercises in a very organized spreadsheet to help us start to find solutions.
So we started training each day in very short sessions (a few minutes here and there) where we covered many different things. Each night Emily would review our progress, holding us accountable. Slowly and much to our surprise and delight, Stanley started to transform.
How Classical Music Helped Me Train My Dog
One day, halfway into our sessions, Emily told us about her former career as a music journalist and that she had studied piano in college. The coincidence of our similar backgrounds (I also studied classical music and worked in journalism) got me thinking about how a person’s experience as a musician could translate to the practice of training dogs.
It was around the same time that I was suddenly preparing to play in the wedding. During my practice sessions, I reflected a lot on practicing the flute growing up. I remembered starting every morning playing what seemed like endless scales (little pattern exercises to get your fingers moving in coordination with your mouth and tongue). Then I would move onto what’s called long tone exercises where I literally played a single note for what felt like forever. Next I would play these technical exercises called etudes that almost felt like mini pieces to perform, usually with something tricky for your fingers to figure out. And at the end, I would work on the repertoire I was actually planning to perform in the orchestra or for a solo recital or an audition. But that didn't typically mean I would play the entire solo or piece all the way through. Oftentimes I would focus on small sections or measures, working on a particularly difficult spot that was tripping me up.
When my sister-in-law asked me to play the flute at her wedding (pictured here), I was initially reluctant because I hadn’t really practiced, let alone performed, in ten years. I reached out to my college flute professor, Linda Chesis, for advice. She encouraged me to do it, writing, “It may not be perfect, but it will be heartfelt and that’s what counts!” Photo Credit: Zofia Crosby.
And after all that, when I finally strung all of the measures together in a performance, when I was so nervous my fingers were shaking and my knees were knocking, my muscle memory would kick in and it would all just work.
With only a week to prepare for the performance this summer, I didn’t have the same time to be as methodical. However, in the the famous flute solo that I selected - Concertino by Cecile Chaminade, I did break down the phrases that were tripping me up into small chunks. Rehearsing those small sections of a few notes at a time really helped me pull off the performance.
In the funny way your mind sometimes draws the perfect connections, thinking back on this experience made it clearer to me how I could be more successful in training Stanley -- by breaking things down each day just like I did as a classical musician. In high school and college, I accomplished big things (aka playing in front of hundreds of people, auditioning for and winning prestigious solos) and somehow I forgot that the way I got there was by taking baby steps towards my goal every single day.
Before we met Emily, Alex and I were convinced that we should see results with Stanley because we trained him every day, but we didn’t realize that we weren’t breaking things down into small enough pieces for him to be successful. So, when we started training Stanley to do a variety of things, and with Emily’s guidance, our daily training routine began to take shape.
We told Emily that a major goal of ours was to have Stanley relax on his own in the house when we were working during the day. As a result, she had us work on the tiny steps it would take to achieve what was actually a quite complex goal. For example, we began spending a few minutes each day training him to rest on his bed, using something called the Relaxation Protocol. When he got up and decided he was done with training, we'd move onto one minute of muzzle training, with the eventual goal that he could wear a muzzle in our yard and sniff and explore on his own to relax, but not eat everything in sight (he has a sensitive stomach and is a little goat!). After that we would practice crate training for a few minutes, so he’d eventually have another place to relax - especially when we’re not home.
Methodical Training in Music and With Dogs Requires Intense Dedication and Focus
The part of flute playing that really challenged me was when I had to dig into my right brain and think of the entire piece I was playing. When something was very hard to play, I was fixated on what my fingers and mouth technically had to do just to get by (left brain). But in the end, the most important thing was the story I told with each phrase and if that made sense in the context of the overall piece. Telling a cohesive story with a performance is what makes it memorable and special. In an orchestra that got even trickier, since I had to work with other musicians and the conductor and fit my artistic vision into theirs.
The thing is dog training is a lot like that. How can Stanley be expected to perform a recital (walk on a crowded city street or "behave" aka relax for hours when we have people over) without rehearsing in a methodical way? I got Stanley and thought that training him to settle or rest quietly at home would help him perform when visiting my in-laws’ house. Somehow in the process I forgot that practicing the flute in a basement dormitory practice room that smells like mold did not mean I would be able to perform just as well in Carnegie Hall. Not only did I need to practice settling with him in all sorts of environments, I also needed to break settling way down into tiny steps in those different locations to help him be successful. Dogs have emotions and need to learn and practice to perform in different settings just like we do.
At the same time, training a dog and practicing the flute at a very high level requires enormous patience and persistence. Alex admittedly has never done something this methodical and I find him still wanting results much faster. As a result, I still take on most of the daily training. Although at Emily’s urging I’ve started prompting Alex to remember what Emily’s taught us and to keep treats on him at all times (Emily had us buy some nifty treat aprons for the house on Amazon).*
Today I have a lot more empathy for Stanley and for myself as his primary handler. While we haven't quite worked our way up to performing Rachmaninoff, every day our baby steps add up into small signs of progress. I've learned to celebrate the imperfections too (like when he ignores me and plops down at a stranger's feet to demand belly rubs), because those are the little details that make his performance special.
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