The Training of Tawny Part 5

 The collar

In keeping with tradition, when Tawny turned 8 weeks old she was given a collar – the softest, lightest one possible. It was, in fact, an old one rubbed soft with white wax floor-polish and worn by many puppies and several fawns.  It had been clipped short so that just a fraction protruded beyond the buckle. No matter if it wasn’t strong enough to hold her: its only purpose was to get her used to the feel of it.

            She jumped and rubbed and scratched and moaned as if she felt a string of grass-seeds strangling her. I took her immediately on an interesting ramble to take her mind off it.  By the next day she hardly noticed it, just as one stops noticing the feel of a wrist-watch.

            Several days later, when the collar no longer meant anything to her, I took it off again. Thereafter I put it on when we went out for a walk, and took it off as soon as she got home. In this way she soon connected it with an exciting walk and welcomed it.

            At least two weeks went by before the collar was used for any form of control, and then a very light lead was attached to it for her first lesson in walking to heel.

            Living in the bush one is faced with the dilemma of whether to leave collars on the dogs permanently or not. If they go off hunting on their own, will they get hitched up on a branch or on the horn of a buck they have bayed? Would the tusk of a wild pig get under it and break the dog’s neck? On the other hand, many dogs caught in wire snares around the neck have been saved from strangulation by their collars. Once one of my dogs, leaping between me and a cobra we’d disturbed, took the full force of the snake’s strike and was unharmed.

            My dogs, thank heavens, never leave the house without me and in the bush are always nearby. So a dog in training has her collar put on to go out and removed when she comes home. If one of the dogs is fierce or bouncy and I’m expecting fragile visitors sometime that day, I leave the collar on after the dawn walk and remove it after the evening exercise. I never leave a collar on any dog when I go out without them; I always feel that if there was any trouble between the dogs and the labourers or intruders I’d rather the dogs were not too easy to grab.  A young dog I once helped to treat had been caught by the collar and brutally beaten with grass-slashers over every part of his body, while his owner was away.

The lead

Once Tawny was used to wearing a collar she was shown the lead, a light leather one to start with. She was allowed to smell it and play with it for several minutes while lying down before it was attached to her collar. Gentle tugs were then made in a playful way; after which, with the lead on, I played with her in the house.

            In spite of these preliminaries, thrice repeated, she was like a fish on the end of a line the first time she went out on the lead. I let her pull long enough for her to realise that it wasn’t going to break but not long enough for her to panic, before sitting down and calling her into my lap for a hug. Each time she began to jump around on the lead I distracted  her attention in some way to bring her in closer to me and only then trying a few more steps forward.

            On the third time out I could see she wasn’t jerking on the lead in fear but in fury. I put a lead on well-trained TellMe and placed Tawny on her own lead between us.  On command TellMe walked soberly to heel and in no time at all Tawny saw what it was all about and more or less resigned herself to the task.

            Now I could change her light lead, which really wasn’t strong enough for control, to a nylon one with a length of chain at the clip end. I find with new puppies the noise and weight of this short length of chain, although very slight, tends to worry them too much to be the first to use.

            Like many pups, Tawny thought of picking up the lead about six inches from the clip and carrying it. In this way, although she still had to come when told, she felt she had some control over the exercise. It’s a pretty sight to see a little dog trotting alongside her owner with a loop of lead in her mouth, but it doesn’t allow for fine control over the dog. I aim to have my dogs as sensitive to a touch on the lead as a horse is to the rein.

            I use several types of lead – the light leather thong for beginners; the nylon cord with 10 inches of light chain attached to the clip end with a swivel clip; another fashioned in the same way but a quarter again as long; the slip-lead – a strong leather strap of standard lead length ending in a metal ring through which the hand-hold can be passed to make a choker less harsh than a choke-chain; a smart all-chain lead with a leather hand-hold loop for town wear; and a 15-foot training lead of light nylon rope.  Bay is so tall that her collar is at my waist, making a standard-length lead unnecessary when she is walking to heel. So for town wear, when she has to stay at heel all the time, she has a very short chain lead with a leather hand-hold. The chain-work on all these leads, as with choker-chains, is all of flat, smooth, flexible links. When I exercise or work the dogs in the bush I usually take only the all-leather slip-lead because of its versatility. It can be collar-cum-lead as it is supposed to be, a lasso to catch and hold a calf, a halter for a horse, a rope to help me climb a tree, a tourniquet, and heaven knows what else.

The choke-chain collar

Sensitive, light-boned Tawny proved easy enough to manage without resorting to the choke-chain, but I use them for the other dogs.  If used intelligently the choke-chain can be a useful aid in controlling a powerful animal, or in teaching a strong, stubborn puppy exactly where she should be when walking to heel – because when she is in that position you relax the pull on the lead and the collar becomes completely slack, not merely less tight as with an ordinary buckled-on collar. Most puppies soon learn which the most comfortable position is, and that deviating from it brings an immediate tightening of the collar.

            I am totally against the practice of leaving a choke-chain on a dog in place of a buckle-on collar unless the ends are tied to de-activate the running-noose action.

            There is often some initial confusion as to the correct and safe way the choke-chain should be worn.  Here it is, step by step:

           1. Attach the lead to one ring of the choke-chain, thus ‘identifying’ one ring.

            2. Feed the entire chain through the other ring to form a circle.

            3. With the dog at your left side, facing the same way as yourself, put the circle over her head.   The chain of the collar should travel straight from the lead across the back of the dog’s neck and round her throat. (If it goes from the lead under the throat, it can tighten with a vicious turning motion which can be very damaging to the dog’s throat.  If you try to put it on when facing the dog, it’s easier to get it on wrong.)

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The Training of Tawny - Part 4

Tawny and the bantams

At dawn bushbuck and duiker browse through the garden.  Bushpigs dig over the compost; mongooses fossick in the flower beds after mole-crickets, beetle grubs and other delicacies. The fruits of the great wild fig, mimusops and quinine trees shading the lawns, as well as those in the orchard below, are gleefully gorged upon by somango monkeys, sun squirrels and every bird from hornbill to bulbul, and at night by bushbabies, tree civets and genets. Buck, bushpigs, civets, mongooses and the dark glossy chongololo millipedes, some of them nine inches long, gratefully pick up the fallen fruit dropped by the wasteful tree dwellers. ‘Tornado’, the great snail, antenna’s his way across the lawn. Clearly the use of any insecticide is out of the question.  Hence I keep a small flock bantams to help control the insects.

            Predators abound.  I lose quite a few bantams to them, and would surely lose them all but for the dogs.  At the first squawk of alarm from the bantams they rage out to chase off the attacker. When all is calm we go on to reunite the scattered chicks with their anxious mothers, sniff out any that are missing and, perhaps, if we haven’t been able to get there fast enough, find a pathetic bundle of bloodied feathers.  Shout ‘Hawk!’ or even say it in the softest whisper, Tawny races out to search the sky.  If she sees one she runs below it, preventing it from coming down, until it gives up and goes elsewhere.

            Some of the smaller hawks, however, come through the dense tree-tops, hop by cautious hop, drop and snatch a chick before anyone has seen them.  If it is raining, civets, normally nocturnal, sometimes venture out and under cover of the noise of the rain creep up on the flock unawares. Others are bolder. Crowned eagles tumble in the sky, yelping musically and giving their presence away. In a parasol tree on the edge of the garden where the thick branches grow out from a crown like a giant umbrella blown inside out, an eagle began to build a nest, in good view of the bantams’ range – a flat above the restaurant. Furious that she couldn’t reach it, or prevent it building there, Tawny nevertheless fumed at it so constantly that it lost its nerve and moved its nest site further into the forest.

            Hens will sing about a new-laid egg, take to the air shrieking ‘Freedom!’ when they leave the broody nest for a meal or a dustbath, scream ‘Rape! Rape!’ hysterically as the cock chases them, trying desperately to keep his upright stance, wings stiffly at his side, which is so impressive when he’s standing but ridiculously awkward to maintain when running; and sometimes a hen will take to crowing herself.  Tawny will barely flick an ear at all this nonsense. She pays more attention to the cock.

            Among his extensive vocabulary is a special sound that means he sees a danger high, high in the sky, and everyone must keep dead still.  It even sounds a bit like ‘Freeze!’ Another sound means a bird is flying low – a sudden flash of wings.  Yet another means something is walking on the ground. Tawny understands these warnings and takes careful note, although, as they are quite small sounds, she is not always within earshot. The cock’s full alarm cry, of course, is unmistakable and Tawny can rush to his aid, hurtling over the stonewall contours of the steep garden faster than any of us could without breaking a leg.

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The pretty legend about tiny chicks scuttling under the mamma hen when alarmed certainly doesn’t apply to my bantams. Instead the hen leaps up flapping and squawking, making a fine target and distraction of herself, while the chicks dive under the nearest cover and crouch motionless, sometimes for hours, until she clucks them out again. Sometimes she doesn’t know where they are and is so distressed that, instead of giving reassuring clucks to bring them out of hiding, she goes on shouting as if she thinks the predator must have got them all, and the chicks stay hidden.  Then Tawny is called to nose them out one by one and reunite them with their anxious mother.

            I give her a fairly free hand in this. The chicks are so tiny and well camouflaged, hiding under a dry leaf or a bend of grass, that I could easily step on them.

            One evening when we were looking for a day-old chick, with the dark almost upon us, I noticed her lying down with her chin between her paws, her eyes swivelling as she watched me searching carefully through the grass. This was quite unlike her. Usually she works with such enthusiasm I have to sometimes tell her, ‘Gently, slow down!’

            ‘Come on, Tawny,’ I called, ‘what’s wrong with you?’

            Minutes later, when she hadn’t moved, I went over to her. ‘On your feet, woman! Work!’ I urged, gentling back my impatience. ‘Find kip-kip!’

            Without lifting her head from her pawns, her eyes turned up to my face, she slowly opened her mouth and out tripped the missing chick like a gently bowled marble, quite unharmed. The tip of Tawny’s tail flipped apologetically: she isn’t allowed to take so much as a fallen feather in her mouth, let alone a live chick. She must have fished this little mite out of its hiding place and then not known quite what to do about it.

            More than once I have scolded her for apparently abandoning the search and going way off on her own. Then she shames me by coming back with a missing chicken, patiently nosing it through the grass and bushes to rejoin the others.

            Jack built the bantams a super house – stronger than the cracked and ancient house we ourselves live in – that even a honey badger, who could dig you out of a maximum security prison if he had a mind to, cannot break into. Bantams mostly like to roost in trees, out in God’s own fresh typhoon, where they fall easy prey to predators.  But get the cock to go in the house and the hens usually follow.

            Tawny makes sure they do. She rounds up the loiterers and hustles them in, then follows, looking around the roosts and the nesting boxes, for all the world as if she is counting them.

            The hens don’t care to sleep long in the nesting boxes, for reasons of heat and hygiene, and often before their chicks are really big enough to hop up the ladders to roost, flap upstairs, clucking encouragingly for the babies to follow. I let them try for a while and if they can’t make it, either lift the hen down and tell her to go to sleep in a box for a few more nights, or lift the chicks up to her.

            They are difficult to catch, being worried and feeling very small and abandoned down on the floor. So I crouch down and cup my palms low to the floor, and very gently Tawny noses and nudges the cheeping little chicks into my hands.  Before long they learn to hop in by themselves, as taking-for-granted as office workers stepping into a lift.

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The Training of Tawny Part 3

Praise

I would be expecting some enthusiastic work from Tawny when she was older; therefore praise for work well done or a command swiftly executed would necessarily be enthusiastic. If I were to give her nothing but low-key or minimal praise, she would eventually give me only low-keyed work.

This principle would not apply to matters of discipline, or any other situation where Tawny, having come under control, would be required to remain controlled. In such situations praise would always be genuine, but not so wild and lavish that the sense of control would be lost.

Take, for instance, the incident of the sitting-room chair.  Tawny so wanted to be in that chair but, with a big prick from her conscience and little guidance from me, she controlled her desire and lay down on the floor.  She wanted to curl up and sleep and now she was in the correct place to do so. Had my praise been other than subdued she would have got up and come to me, pleased and playful, and would have to start all over again with deciding where to sleep.

She certainly deserved some praise. She was a very young puppy among people still strange to her, yet she had stopped to think about what she was going to do in relation to my wishes, had correctly interpreted and obeyed my response to her questioning gaze. A loving expression and a soft ‘Clever baby!’ quite sufficed.

For some reason my dogs seem to think that the exclamation ‘Good girl!’ means the end of the lesson or the end of the job and they start fooling around again. ‘Clever girl’ hasn’t the same effect.  I don’t know why this should be; perhaps because ‘Good girl’ or ‘Good dog’ is used by everyone, including visitors, and means to them only that the humans are pleased with them, in a general way, which of course makes them feel free and bouncy.  So ‘Clever’ is their praise word for use within working or training situations.

Table manners

In the evening the cats and dogs are fed at the same time in individual dishes on the floor of the small kitchen.  While I’m preparing the food they all hang around, hintfully licking their lips and dribbling. The dogs who can fit under the kitchen table sit there on sack-covered boards. Bay, who can’t fit, waits in the doorway. The cats are allowed anywhere but on the table.  There must not be a hint of a whimper nor a mutter of miaow, or a damp cloth descends from nowhere, splat. If a bit of food falls on the floor no one may snatch it. I put the dishes down 2 by 2. They all know their own names and places and wait their turn. When the last animal is served Bay walks in untold to her plate, which I hold for her sitting on the stool, keeping a watchful eye on the rest.

            Some eat slowly, some fast.  No one is allowed to snitch from another’s plate. One cat might feel there’s a need, just today, to be fed with the fingers, and sits and waits patiently until I can come to the rescue. The big eaters stare hard at the leftovers until, if I can spare it, I tell them they can clean up. The dogs then get a bone each and take them off to favourite spots to avoid any fighting. Afterwards they may come back to ask for soup or milk. They ask only with their eyes.  The cats sometimes ask for milk, too – they are permitted a pip of a miaow if their eloquent looks don’t get my attention.

            The routine is unvarying, predictable and trusted. That’s discipline.

            It’s easy to enforce. The proprietory right over food is a very strong law amongst carnivores. I am their pack leader and my rulings on ‘the kill’ are respected. New puppies, transgressing, get a growled ‘No!’ and are pushed firmly into their places. Cats get hissed at: ‘S-s-s Fable!’  (for this reason, I don’t name cats with names beginning with S). Sometimes in the early stages they have to be pushed off their line of robbery with a palm against their noses, or plopped with a damp dishcloth, which is perfectly harmless but hateful.  If they are too young to understand, less than six weeks, say, they are fed in another room.

            At six weeks old Tawny couldn’t understand. At seven-and-a-half weeks she was allowed in the kitchen with the others. Two days later I could turn my back on her without a worry.  Each new generation copies the behaviour of the established incumbents with the minimum of guidance from me.  I just had to invoke existing hierarchies.  When Tawny was still small her attention would sometimes wander from her evening bone, and Bay or TellMe, liking to think it was entirely abandoned, would pick it up. ‘No,’ I’d remind them, ‘That’s Tawny’s bone.’ And they’d spit it out regretfully and amble off.  Quite marvellous.

Discipline

I am sure that you will agree that if a child or an animal is to be comfortable in, and totally accepted by the society into which Destiny has dumped them, they must know the rules and stick to them most of the time.  In our home, there are probably more strictly enforced rules than in most households.  The fact that this place is a wildlife sanctuary, and wild animals can’t really be disciplined, lays a further burden of good behaviour on the domestic animals -  and the humans.  To offset this a great deal of time is lavished on play, praise and loving.

            So of paramount importance is no chasing or barking at cats or any other animal.  In this respect there are some lessons that are more quickly and soundly learnt by a puppy if she thinks the subsequent happenings are purely the result of her own action and not that somehow she has displeased someone.

            When crippled Fleur and Tawny first came face to face I stood guard, a flyswat secretly at the ready.  My small hope that they would kiss and make friends was still-born. At the first quick movement forward by Tawny the flyswat stung her ears.  The next time it was harder.  Puzzled, she looked up at me, but I was looking up at the ceiling.  A few experiences of this convinced her that Fleur was equipped with a secret weapon and was better left alone.  This translated to the other cats and the lesson was learned before the second day with us had passed.

            Barking at the other cats, a problem not needing such an instant solution, brought a sharp, ‘No!’ from me with a loud clap of my hands, backed up if necessary with a quick grip and shake of her scruff, as a wild mother dog would do to discipline her puppy.  As she grew, Tawny  would have to learn that she was allowed to really bark, as opposed to wuffing or growling, only as a warning of the presence of strange dogs and humans.

            Very soon, when the cats no longer ran away, the fun went out of baiting them – and anyway, why worry about that when there were bantams to chase.

            On this score I said nothing at all for there was a far more efficient teacher than myself.  This was old When (White-hen) who had two small chicks that I knew she would defend with the ferocity of a hawk – and so she did.  She leaped on Tawny’s back and rode her, shrieking, down the terraced garden, the yelping puppy bucking like a bronco.  Tawny’s conclusion: bantams are all right for looking at but not for chasing, really.

            Had When not been available I would have had to take Tawny on a lead, small as she was, and walk her among the hens, sit down among them with her in my lap, and every time she showed an active interest, tell her firmly, ‘No!’ grasp her muzzle and give it a small, single shake inwards towards her chest. I might have had to do this so often it would have become thoroughly boring.

            As it happened, a few days later she walked, by accident or design, close to another bantam with newly hatched chicks. There were fearful shrieks and Tawny fled for the house screaming blue murder.  Dan and I were in the kitchen and quickly turned our backs and chatted loudly as if we hadn’t noticed. Tawny pressed against our legs, crying, but we ignored her. After a while she went to the door and watched the bantams from a position of safety.

            Now it happened that a little earlier Bay had snapped at Tawny for tampering with her bone; I had rushed to snatch up the yelping puppy and comfort her – though I didn’t chastise Bay for asserting ‘pack discipline’.  Bay, Tawny and I now belonged to the same ‘pack’ and at this early stage Tawny could expect a measure of protection and sympathy from her ‘mother’ or ‘pack leader’.  In the case of the bantams, this was not forthcoming; the lesson was learned.

            To reinforce this I took Tawny with me for a while to the hen-house early every morning to let them out to free-range for the day.  They flew from their perches, squawking and clucking through the door, the cock trying to chase all the hens at once, while I held Tawny firmly in my arms.  Eventually she lost interest.  In time she would learn to correctly interpret all the sounds the bantams make and react accordingly.

More on bantams in the next post.

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