For 15,000 years, humans and dogs have bonded together. And for many people, that bond has intensified over the past year, as we’ve spent more time in our homes, with the animals who share them. According to a recent article in the journal Nature, more than 63 million U.S. households include a dog — more than any other companion animal. Dog adoption only increased during the covid-19 pandemic, thanks in part to misleading media reports of dog abandonment, and in part to the fact that dog ownership confers benefits for one’s mental, physical, and emotional health.
photograph courtesy memphis and shelby county humane society
Last year, Memphis magazine let our annual Pet Guide go to the dogs — literally. And the cats. We invited a dog (Lily Bear, who lives with me) and a cat (Ampersand, who resides chez Jesse Davis) to author the articles for us. Each told the story of how they came to be rescued, and showed quite a bit of personality in the process.
Lily and Ampersand let us know that they were too busy this year, so we’re turning the focus instead on a topic that may be more immediately useful to readers: animal behavior. I sat down with Lee Phelan, CPDT-KA, PMCT, the in-house trainer at the Humane Society of Memphis and Shelby County, to talk about his work. I was chiefly curious to hear Phelan’s advice for pet owners as we transition back to something more like normal life. Of course, Lily Bear managed to play a role in this conversation, too.
The following discussion has been edited for clarity and concision.
Anna Traverse Fogle: My dog, Lily Bear, is actually in here with me, so hopefully no trucks will drive by. You would know better than I do, but my theory is that, to my dog, a very large diesel truck is basically an apex predator.
Lee Phelan: Dogs are socialized to things when they’re very young, up to about 16 weeks. If they don’t get that positive exposure, they can retain fear of novel things, like a noisy truck. If you ever want to figure that out, just ask what’s the function of all that barking? What does it look like? Is she scared? Is she tucking her tail or is she ferocious and charging at the walls? Mostly, it’s fear-based. Most aggressive behavior is, and so you can help her with that, with what we call basic counter-conditioning skills.
I often joke that you will never see counter-conditioning desensitization work on television. If it’s done well, it’s the most boring thing you will ever see. It is so slow, so methodical, that it doesn’t grab your attention, unless you’re a dog trainer like me.
ATF: I wanted to start out by asking just where you’re from and what led you to working with animals.
photograph courtesy adogslife / dreamstime
LP: I’m from here, from Memphis, and I’ve done a lot of different things here. I was a lawyer for 20 years. I had a bed-and-breakfast in Key West for about three-and-a-half years. I did a lot of construction, a lot of renovation in Memphis, especially in Midtown. And then, I got a real estate license, after I stopped doing those other things. This was in 2014 and the market was pretty bad. I decided to volunteer, and I went on a Tennessee volunteer opportunities website. The Humane Society popped up as an opportunity. I came here to volunteer and just fell in love with it.
The kind of training that I do, that Karen Pryor helped introduce back in the ’80s, with her famous book Don’t Shoot the Dog, was a mostly positive-based training philosophy and methodology. You teach behaviors by reinforcing the ones you want and ignoring the ones you don’t want.
This job had opened up, and I got called because they knew me here, because I’d been a volunteer. As I told them, this was the only job I would’ve taken.
We don’t ever move dogs on because of time or space. We will work with them until we can’t work with them or find them homes.
[Lily Bear barks in the background.]
AtF: There’s a truck. There’s a very large truck. Sorry.
LP: But there was a high state of arousal there, the tail went up. I couldn’t really see the ears, but —
AtF: Ears are up.
LP: Do they stay up like that?
ATF: Her ears are always up, but when she’s barking at a truck or something, they go more towards the center like this.
LP: Yeah. Okay, so that’s fear-based.
ATF: That’s what I thought.
photograph courtesy adogslife / dreamstime
LP: She never got socialized to that, so she’s fearful of it, and so she does what dogs do, she does aggressive behavior. That behavior’s about 98 percent fear-based anyway. But what happens is, the truck goes away. It works, right?
ATF: Yes! I’ve actually said that before. I’m like, “She thinks that she’s yelling at the trucks and then they leave.”
LP: Absolutely. And from her perspective, that behavior of barking at that thing she’s afraid of made it go away.
ATF: Totally.
LP: Now Pavlov’s on the left-shoulder and Skinner’s on the right, because there’s an association to that truck, but then there’s this operant principle happening, that this behavior — barking really loudly — makes it go away, which is what I wanted in the first place, so I’m going to keep barking, because that makes it go away. That’s a job for, I would say, counter-conditioning and desensitization. A lot of times, for that, we use sounds of trucks on your phone.
ATF: We did that with a corgi that I had growing up. She was petrified of thunder, so we played cassette tapes (this was the early ‘90s) of thunderstorms, and it helped some.
LP: Well, so it’s more structured than that. So what you would do is play that low at first, at a level where she notices the sound of the truck, but she’s not terrified of it. Meanwhile, start feeding her. I use baby food, like Gerber’s baby food that comes in the little jar. And then, you turn it off and the food goes away. You turn it back on, pause one second, here comes the food, noise goes off, food goes away.
What’s happening is that noise of trucks is starting to predict something good is going to happen, so instead of having a fear-based response to that, she starts to anticipate it, look for it, want it. You’ve changed an emotional response to a stimulus, and that’s the coolest thing you can do. Because by working like that, you can take her fear away, and I don’t think you can do anything better than that, for a person or a dog, than to take their fear away.
ATF: One thing that I wonder about is, as people begin to return more to their offices, to in-person school, to all of these things, what should people do to help make sure that their animals don’t freak out, have separation anxiety, that sort of thing?
LP: That’s a great question, and a lot of us that work with animal behavior started thinking about this early on. Oddly enough, the first thing I started thinking of was what are dogs going to do seeing all those humans with this on, right? [Phelan gestures at his face mask.] That hasn’t really affected them; we don’t have any dogs here that are fearful of anyone in masks. They’re really good at reading our gestures, but they seem to get what they need from the eyes.
photograph courtesy adogslife / dreamstime
But your question is even more important. Yes, you’re going to have a problem. If you’re with your dog 24/7 and then, all of a sudden, you expect to be away eight to 10 hours and have them hang by themselves.
I wouldn’t think separation anxiety would be a probable outcome of that. You can have what’s called isolation distress. They’re really just points on a spectrum, and at the worst end of it is the separation anxiety.
What I’m recommending to people is to start a systematic desensitization program to being left alone. That is, leave your house, leave your dog for five minutes, go walk around the block or whatever you do for five minutes, but get out of there, because your dog is oftentimes aware if you’re in the vicinity. Just go away for a while and gradually, over time, start to increase that duration where you’re away from your dog. Start, also, getting them used to some types of enrichment, sometimes called puzzle toys, the kind of things that can engage a dog for a while. Those include things like Kongs. Most dog owners know what Kongs are. You could stuff them with food and you can put them in the freezer. I like to use their kibble, parts of their meal, a peanut butter plug to hold it in, or bits of cheese, something like that, and put the Kong in the freezer.
Sometimes they get frustrated, because it’s frozen solid. But once they get used to it, that will give them up to an hour where they’re having to work, which can engage their mind, make them more tired, and help them get through that period of time when you’re gone. I love the YouTube channel, Relax My Dog. Some of the recordings are 15 hours long, and it’s just this music that is so boring that I can’t listen to it.
ATF: Mine likes public radio.
LP: Yeah, the sound of people talking.
ATF: Just people talking, at a relatively low volume.
LP: There’s tons of stuff, including CBD oil and things like that. You might try some of those, but the most important thing is to get them used to being alone and that might mean you have to leave for half the day by the time you get through this, so you start out with five minutes to 10, maybe then go back. We like to use what’s called a variable rate, so it’s not like they start predicting when you’re going to be back.
A lot of people recommend that you confuse your departure cues. Every time you leave your house, you do a bunch of things the same. Your dog picks up on that: “Mom’s leaving.” Sometimes the anxiety can start then. What we recommend is that you do those things, but then go sit down and watch television, so that it’s not predictive.
ATF: Yeah. So maybe instead of cross the street, step off the curb. I live in a relatively quiet neighborhood, so I could step off the curb and into the street. Going back into your work with the Humane Society, but still carrying the threat of COVID-19, how has the pandemic affected your work on a daily basis?
photograph courtesy adogslife / dreamstime
LP: When I first came here, we were still pretty much on lockdown. We had limited staff, limited dogs, and most of our dogs were in foster. When it happened we sort of shut down, right? Now, I wasn’t here then — I started in July. But in March and April, they put a lot of dogs in foster and the facility had pretty limited access. Volunteers were not allowed because of covid. We started them back in August, and the change was remarkable. It’s one of the really interesting things about shelters, and I don’t think people really understand it unless they actually work in it. When I volunteered, and I volunteered in several shelters, I never understood it. Volunteers are not an adjunct to what we do; they’re a necessity.
ATF: This has been fascinating. Thank you so much for sharing your time with me.
LP: Well, because I’m a huge dog nerd and I love this whole area of conversation, I could talk about it forever.
ATF: I clearly could, too. Thanks again.
