Transcript
All right, guys, so we’re going to go over animal handling and behavior because, of course, that is a huge part of what we do right now. A couple of things before we begin. One is there is so much more animal behavior material available for you online or if you ever have questions or you’re looking for resources, feel free to contact me. My master’s thesis was on livestock behavior, but it applies to rescuer’s. It applies to owners.
It applies to the small animals. (Oh, it’s so hard. It’s so hard.) So if you have questions about animal behavior or good resources for that, please do let me know. Now, we have two demo dogs today. The reason that we have limited ourselves mostly to dog and horse handling is because those are the calls we get now. You might encounter other animals, chickens, particularly goats, sheep, donkeys, sometimes rarely something else, but mostly if you’re deploying, you’ll be handling dogs or horses.
How many of you have dog or horse experience? Everybody. Awesome dogs, horses and other livestock. OK, cool. Hi. Yeah, I had a treat there. I’m gonna go. So I have two demo dogs with me today.
You’ll see they are built very differently. Now those of you who’ve been through the online training, you will know that we’re going to be looking at the body condition score as we approach the animal not to make any kind of judgment about the owner or what they’re doing, but so that we have a sense of what we might be dealing with. Now, if I if I were approaching Jets’ right now, I would know that he is a very engaged, interested animal.
Hey, I also notice he has a broad skull.
He has broad bones. He has a shorter, wider nose. He’s got stockier build. Right. So some of the rescue methods that might work on an animal like this may not be appropriate here. Right. We’re going to see a lot more delicate, not only physically, but often also high, high, often the temperament of an animal that has a very narrow face, very long, lean body. The temperaments do tend to be different. Now, of course, everyone’s an individual and you can’t necessarily make any blanket comments about breed, but it’s important to have a sense of what kinds of breeds you have out there, what kinds of temperaments you have out there, so that when you’re approaching the animal, you know, oh, good job, very nice stretch.
So that when you’re approaching the animal, you know sort of what to expect. Right. Can anybody tell me what they see right now? Mm hmm. What do you guys see in his ears and, uh huh, and his mouth open, relaxed or open stressed lives? No. So yawning is the displacement behavior, it’s a social signal that they give when they don’t really know what’s expected of them. I see there’s a lot of foam on the tongue.
That means he’s a little bit dehydrated. He’s been panting. It’s not a hot day. He hasn’t been exercising. Therefore, he stressed there’s tension at the corners of his mouth, tension at the corners of his eyes. Further displacement behaviors were stretching. This is good. Stretching is good. Shaking also is good. If any of you have dogs at home teaching them to do the like full body shake as a stress relief thing is an awesome tool.
So if it does work for people, too, you can also see there’s a little bit of waili. You see the whites of the eyes start to show a little bit. So if I were going to approach, can I give them to you for a moment? If I were approaching this animal for the very first time, there are a couple of things that I would want to keep in mind. One is my body language. That’s not something that we tend to be aware of.
We don’t train ourselves usually for body language.
I also want to be aware that I’m in this weird getup, and especially right now, they can’t see my face and you’re doing a great job.
But I also want to be aware of my clothing. Now, people have this tendency to think animals are colorblind, so it doesn’t matter what you’re wearing, it’s fine. When we say colorblind, we actually mean they don’t see red. They see blue and yellow, they don’t see red. If they’re birds, they see way more than that. But humans see blue, yellow and red dogs and horses see blue and yellow. So if you show up in your bumblebee jacket and your high contrast gear or a reflective safety vest, they’re going to notice that.
Right. That’s visually interesting to them. You’ve changed the shape of your face, your head and your body. If you’ve got your backpack on or your gear, you know, you’ve got those rope bags. You’re changing the way you’re moving as well. So think about a stressed animal, think about how you’re going to appear to that stressed animal and then think about how you’re going to approach them before you approach. The first thing I do is take a step back.
You see how my body just shifted. I’m centered. I’m square. And I take a deep breath because it changes the lines of my body, they pay attention not only to the body and the way it’s moving, they pay attention to your breathing. It was a phenomenal study done where they tracked dog eye movements, watching people, dogs, eyes tend to go to our eyes, to the corners of her mouth and to our tails. But we don’t have any tails.
But they do. That’s where they keep looking. They do this back and forth to try to read what we’re doing. So if I’m going to approach an animal, I say, OK, I can see the stress. There’s a little bit of lip licking. There’s an open mouth, there’s some tension there. The body is squared up and right now he’s distracted and not paying attention to me. I do not want to go marching straight up to this animal who I don’t know, by the way.
I don’t know. But if I needed to approach them, I could still approach my finger to bribery. Not everyone will appreciate you braving the elements, so probably are going to be. I only had the first one I was I. If I were to approach. I do not to. That’s really. It’s really quite right if I have the opportunity. My body first and to move sort of sideways with very slow, measured steps, I would prefer to do that if he’s distracted.
I don’t want to come up behind him and try to. I to. I’m not going to let you know that this is a very sensitive time to come right up to and very gently get. There’s no padding grabbing so that he knows exactly what to expect from me.
Good job. Yeah, I’m impressed. Notice how he’s not looking at me and I’m mostly not looking at him either, but I don’t need to. It’s much easier to work with an animal side by side than it is trying to maintain that eye contact with them. I’m not putting social pressure on him by coming over his head or trying to engage with him face to face. I’m letting him choose to be here with me. And in fact, after four treats and a couple of ribs, he’s leaning on me ever so slightly, which is a trust expression, not what I would have expected.
I’m actually really impressed. Good job, buddy. Now, notice, I know I’m not touching him. If I needed to restrain him, hi, I’d let him see me and I would prefer to come sideways for the camera. I’ll come up here. I’ll come sideways up along the face so he knows where I’m going. He can see what I’m doing and then I could get his collar. Now you notice he’s got this gorgeous color very thick because he’s got quite a delicate neck.
Right. Jet, on the other hand, is not delicate. But for most dogs, I would want to approach the side closest to me.
I’d want to get a hand on their color and then I would want to gently lead them wherever I’m going. Now he’s really leaning on me, which is very helpful. And I could swap to a leash if I had a leash, if I had a rope, if I had a bandanna. Right. And when I take the animal. Yeah, good job. I want to know that I have an attachment point. I don’t want to put my hand inside a rope.
You’re never ever going to do this. Please promise me you’re not going to do this. You always want to hold on, but you never want yourself to get tangled in your rope. And if I have to move him, I want to make sure that he has a little bit of choice, a little bit of freedom of movement, one possible, which means I’m not going to grab this and yank and go really tight and tense. Well, look what happened to my body just now.
Can you tell? It’s harder to tell because of the mask.
And we are designed to look at faces, but I can walk like this nice and evenly or I can try to tense up.
But not always, right? If I want to move. I actually want a. And in front of his shoulder and I want to move this way. It’s a lot easier to turn an animal, to move an animal if you’re putting your body between them and where you don’t want them to go. If you open a space, they’ll tend to want to move into that space. If you close off the space with your body, they’ll tend to move away from you.
Away from that pressure shoulder is your turning point. If you’re in front of the shoulder, they’ll go whichever direction you’re going. If you’re behind the shoulder, they’ll tend to veer off. This works on cattle. It works on sheep, works on horses. It works on dogs. Yes. Handsome boy, would you like to go see Dad? You’ve been just fabulous. Thank you, so that, in a nutshell, is how I would approach an animal who does look like they might tend to be a little bit more nervous, a little bit more anxious, a little bit more high strung.
Now, in opposition to that, we have jet, jet, jet. Now, Jet, I don’t really have to do anything with. Right. Thank you. Good job. Yeah, good job. He’s outgoing. He’s gregarious. He wants to interact with everybody. But I would still yet I would still tend to approach him if possible from the side. I would still. Yeah, I would still want to have two hands, right, if I open a space for him, he’ll come with me.
But if I wanted to turn him, I’d move in a little bit tighter so I could get ahead of him and I would turn his body with my body. Good job. Good job. Yeah, that. Well, you said you will. I always try using hand signals to you never know what the animals have been trained for. And they almost universally understand the come here or the woe is that it touch do targets. Yeah, good job.
Often, even if you pretend you have a tree in your hand and you do like this thing, they go, oh yeah, yeah, like that. Like that. And it’s always worth trying. Right. It’s always worth trying to see if they’ll work with you now. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Do you notice what I have said to either of these dogs, have I been given commands? Have I been loud? Have I grabbed them?
Now, these guys are easy right there, demo dogs for a reason, but one of the things that I want to point out to you is that in addition to making sure that my body is relaxed while I’m approaching them, that I’m actually interacting with the animal as little as possible. Triggers. Stack, and what I mean by a trigger is any sensory perception, so if I were wearing the yellow bumblebee coat, if Jack was noticing the flickering lights because fluorescents do flicker at a rate that they can see if all of you were making little noises and all the things outside were making little noises, if mom and dad are sitting right here and I can’t reach them and that’s really frustrating if they’re a little stuffed dogs and we don’t know what to do with those, if there’s another live dog and we don’t know what to do with that, all of these things stack up and any one of them is not necessarily a bad thing.
We often think of triggers as being negative. They’re not negative, they’re just sensory perceptions. But the more of them stack, the harder it is to process all of those and make good decisions. And what I want when I’m interacting with an animal is to give the animal the chance to make a good decision. The way to do that is to limit my interaction with them, take away as much pressure as I possibly can from them, and give them, maybe most importantly, both the space physically and the time to process what’s going on and to make that decision.
That makes sense. So if I wanted to move and for the sake of the camera guys, I’m going to move around a little bit. I’m going to show you a difficult I suspect it’ll be slightly difficult thing. So just wants to be with his people. That’s his preferred place to be. I’m going to take him away from his people and see how this goes, Jack. Good job. Now, I’m not going to wrap up my hands.
Oh, maybe the treats are more magical than I thought. So I’m going to move him around the room and as he pulls away from me a little bit to go explore, I’m going to give him that little bit of leash so he can do it, right?
Yeah, good job. Because if well, he’s got a next stop on him. But if I pull up, if I put that extra pressure on, a lot of dogs are going to immediately go you. No. And start fighting. Oh, good job. Good job. Yes, that was nice. I don’t have any treats in my hand, whereas if I give him the space to move around a little bit, if I give him a little more flexibility, he’s going to move with me better.
It’s not important that I have him right here. What’s important is that I can move with him and that he’ll move with me. Good job.
But now, of course, that’s a very experienced demo dog, so he’s doing beautifully. And we will return you with a treat. Thank you. All right, so time space, low impact, low amounts of interaction. That’s how I would prefer to approach my animals. In some cases, that’s not going to work so well. In some cases, you may not have physical space to work with. Right. If you’re on a ledge here on a ledge, that’s how much space you have.
Not delicate, you may also be in a position where you need to work quite quickly, right? Sometimes you’re going to need to get something done. And the way to do that is to slow yourself down, to be calm, to be aware of your body language, to be aware of your positioning, and then step back and let somebody like Rebecca come in and use the tools that she uses in her daily life. I’m extremely experienced in animal behavior.
But if I needed to use one of our tools to catch a dog. That’s that’s not me, right, I might approach that animal and I might keep them calm, but I’m not going to be the one actually using those tools because I am not the most experienced person in the room with those tools.