How We Train An Abused Pit Bull

Welcome back to Bluegrass in this beautiful October afternoon. I'm out with three Labrador Retrievers, a German Shorthair Pointer over there somewhere, a Jack Russell Terrier roaming around, and the subject of today's video, a Pit Bull Terrier named Lucky. Now Lucky is aptly named because he showed up at a lady's doorstep with a scalded back. So I'll try to hold him in position so the cameraman can kind of show you the scarring on Lucky's back and I'll add some photos from an Now, for those of you who are not familiar with what I'm talking about, in the South, we have a saying, faster than a scalded dog. And the reason that saying came to kind of be in the vernacular is because it used to be common practice if you had an aggravating stray dog coming up, you'd boil a pan of water and you'd throw it on them. So if you were coming out of the house and you had a dog getting into stuff, you'd just come out, throw a pan of hot water on them, and they'd run off and generally wouldn't come back. I'm not telling you that's a nice thing to do, of course, I'm just saying that that's where the saying comes from. I guess some people still do it because this dog, when he showed up, he just was burned from the back of his head all the way to the base of his tail, and it just looked horrible. And so his owner, she emailed me, and she said, Hey, Stoney, I have a scalded pit bull that's showing up. And I think I'm going to keep him and I'm going to keep him intact because I don't want to have any health concerns related to neutering him. And I said, okay, well, let me make sure I've got this straight. And a really smart professional lady lives in a nice neighborhood, right? She already has a Malinois and she is now going to adopt an intact pit bull terrier that has suffered a major life trauma. I'm like, well, I'll just be honest with you. I don't know that that's the best course of action. But if that's just what you're going to do, then, of course, I'll help you as much as I can to ensure that he realizes as much of his full potential as possible. Lucky, come on. And you will see. You will see that we're out here and I have a drag line on Lucky the Pit Bull and Lucky the Pit Bull only, right? And I have that drag line on him because minus this drag line, he takes whatever kind of stuff I tell him as a suggestion and he might or might not. Like, follow that suggestion, right? Okay. So, here we are. This is going to be an interesting month with Lucky because, come on, dude, he is, like most pit bulls, real happy, real gregarious, real outgoing, okay? But he's still a pit bull. And so when you say, Stoney, what does that mean? Do you not like pit bulls? Listen, I like pit bulls fine. I grew up with men who worked on the river, and they had dogs. And I'm not going to say what they did with those dogs, but they did it all up and down the river, you know. So I've been around the dogs all my life. And, you know, do I think everybody needs a pit bull? Well, of course not. But dog men, dog men have pit bulls, and they seem to be able to manage them just fine. But they don't live in real nice neighborhoods, okay? So now when somebody contacts me with a pit bull and they say, hey, Stoney, I live in a nice neighborhood. I say, well, how dedicated an owner are you? Because my general answer is I ain't fooling with it. But this lady's super dedicated, so I'm sure she's going to do a great job. But this whole thing is compounded by the fact that he had a tremendously traumatic experience as a young dog, and he had no early formative developmental stage socialization and training. So not only are we dealing with early life trauma, we are also dealing with the fact that He kind of missed out on some learning and socialization opportunities that would have really helped him, like, you know, fit into our particular system specifically or to fit into, you know, polite society in general, okay? Now, you might say, well, Stoney, what's your go-to thing? When you're trying to rehabilitate a dog or when you're trying to, you know, deal with a breed of dog, that's not the typical type of dog that comes to your kennel. Well, look guys, I run the same system on every kind of dog, right? I'm going to get out and I'm going to take this dog and we're going to do the same things with this dog that we do with every other dog. It's just going to take a lot more labor and a lot more patience, a lot more persistence, and most importantly, with a dog like Lucky, who if he does mess up, the messing up will be catastrophic. Really careful management, okay? But like today... I'm really trying to work on Lucky, like getting in the habit of being able to go into a high distraction off leash environment and not run away too far. And this is kind of what I'm dealing with right here. And so I lose him periodically and you notice that I didn't holler for him right there because if I hollered for him he would have just kept going to the creek and I would have looked weak and I never want to look weak to a dog like Lucky right so I ran over there and I got this leash and now I'm going to be like hey you can't go into creek come on Lucky come on and now so here's the thing Lucky is going to think that it's not fair okay because these other dogs So these other dogs are going to the creek and these other dogs are getting to do some of the things that he doesn't get to do. And so that's kind of, you know, it's kind of the point of today's lesson. Okay. Here's what happens with dogs like Lucky. They're awesome. I mean, he's really fun to be around. He's fun. I'll be in my office. He tries to get in my chair with me. He likes everybody. He likes all the other dogs until he doesn't. Okay. And that's where we run into trouble. Okay. Because he'll be out and he'll be doing stuff. And the farther he gets away from people, kind of the more his true personality comes out. And if he doesn't really start trouble, but if another dog. Kind of comes up and bullies him in any way or has a transgression somehow or another he takes personally. Then like he starts to bow up and he starts to get a little bit on the tough side. And I don't know if you guys know from personal experience, but at least you've seen it on YouTube, right? When pit bulls bow up and start acting tough, they're not acting. They are really tough. Okay. And so I've got to get him in the habit of going out into the world and dealing Dealing with a certain amount of frustration. Where he doesn't get to do what he wants to do. But I can't do it by bossing him. Because he really doesn't take to bossing very well. So what I have to do is I just have to manage him in a certain way. Is that he starts to accept that there are limitations on his autonomy. Limitations on his movement. That are part and parcel of going on an off-leash walk. And that's where the long line comes in. I'm not trying to... I'm not trying to come out here and use this long line to drag Lucky around and to boss him and stuff, but you will notice that I consistently, when he goes to get too far away from me, I use the long line or what I call a drag line to stomp him. And when I first started doing it, he would take it a little bit personal. And he'd be like, hey, Stoney, this isn't fair. And he would complain a little bit, or he'd grab the leash with his mouth. And I understand. I understand. He just wants to go over there in the creek, right? Okay, but the problem is if he goes over there in the creek, he's liable to get himself in trouble. If he goes over in the creek, let's just say all these dogs. Go up this way, cameraman. If he goes over in the creek with these other dogs and they run into, say, a groundhog, and that happens fairly often, right? The other dogs kind of bark at it and carry on, whatever. Well, Lucky is very likely to take that barking and carrying on to a different level, right? He's liable to go ahead and engage that groundhog and try to kill it, and then he's going to not only have a back injury, but he's going to get bit on his face and stuff like that. Or they might find something over there that, like, Lucky really considers to be, like, important. and they get into a little bit of conflict and since I'm not really close to them Let's go to them. you know a dog like Lucky can hurt another dog very quickly. If this German Shorthair and one of these labs have a disagreement well there's going to be some some gruff growling and posturing and maybe even a little snapping because that German Shorthair his name's Oreo and like a little bit aggravating like when it comes like if he has a if he has a chew or if he has something like that You know he can be a little bit not nice to the other dogs, but the consequences of him being not nice are really just not that high. So I kind of don't have to manage him so much. If he's over there 20 or 30 yards away from me and giving me a hard time, I can kind of fuss at him and he'll stop. Lucky when he gets 20 yards, 30 yards away from me, I might as well not exist, right? And since I might as well not exist, now I'm not going to put him in a situation to, like, fail because not only would he fail, but he would get, like, successful repetitions that are related to distance from me, right? And then I would get stuck with what we call proximity obedience when, you know, he would mind when he's, like, real close to me or when certain environmental factors are in play, right? So a lot of what I do when I start implementing my system with these type of dogs, I just established some basic lifestyle boundaries. I don't tie them directly to what I would refer to as micromanagement. I'm just letting Lucky get in the habit of being out with a bunch of other dogs and not getting his way. You see what I'm saying? And think about what a blessing it is to learn when you're young that you're not always gonna get your way. Because as you get older as a person or as a dog gets older, if you're always in the habit of getting your way, then every little thing that happens that doesn't suit you, well, you have to go to pieces. Well, what happens when pit bulls have to go to pieces? Google it, right? They do really bad stuff. And so I want this dog to get in the habit. Of dealing with small amounts of adversity, small, you know, small little bits of things not going his way, oh my gosh, well before he gets out into a real situation with a very competent but still amateur dog trainer, right, who hasn't been in a lot of, you know, hasn't been in a lot of dog fights and things like that. I want him to have a lot of experience with not getting his way. Come on. Now, we'll see right here. Now, I got to talking to you guys and I made a mistake with my drag line and Lucky went that way. So, I'm going to see if I can't call him, but I'm not going to boss him. I'm going to go this way and see if I can bring into play what we call the rubber band effect. And if I've been really good to Lucky and he sees me as an awesome person to be with, he will come find me. Come on, Lucky. Let's go. Come on. Come on. And there he is. Perfect. Very good. Very nice. So if you're out and you're working with a dog like this, and you're trying to use a strategy where you're kind of gradually putting limits on their behavior, when things go wrong, it's super important that you don't have a go to pieces yourself, right? You know, things are going to go wrong. When you're using a drag line, listen, a drag line is very aggravating. You know what I mean? It's always getting tangled up into stuff. Sometimes you will... You know, you'll try to step on it, and if you're a little older or a little younger, if you've got a knee injury or something, it'll jerk your foot out from under you and it'll hurt you. So I'm in no way advocating for you guys to use drag lines. I just grew up doing it, so that's what I do, right? But sometimes you're going to mess up, okay? The very worst thing to happen is for you to mess up and panic, okay? Whenever you mess up, Just present confidence and show the dog what you want him to be, right? Okay, so if I'm out here and I have a lot of self-control and I'm willing to deal with a little bit of adversity for myself, I think it makes it a lot easier for dogs to deal with a little bit of adversity. Come on, dogs. Come on, come on. It's very good dogs. Oh, you're a good dog. Okay, cameraman, go that way. We'll go up by the world-famous brush pile challenge. Come on. Now, here's the neat thing about the drag line. When you're doing off-leash work with a dog, especially one that gets kind of frustrated easily and is not the kind of the type of breed that has a natural tendency to stay with you, your drag line usage will be primarily front loaded to the initial parts of your walk. And so like once you start to get that initial outburst of energy, like put where you want it, then you'll notice that they stop pushing the boundaries and you stop having to use the I use the drag line a lot. One of the key things we used to do when I was young, we were doing off-leash training instead of, you know, like depending on like technology, we would take a series of drag lines. So we would come out to a place like this, put the dogs on a 30-foot drag line. Then as they got tired, put them on a 20-foot drag line. They got more tired, put them on a 10-foot, then a 5-foot. And on the way home, we put them on a tab leash that was just kind of bouncing around to remind them that they're still under a little bit of control. And it really works good, for the most part, with your dog training. It's really about how you set situations up, much more so than it's about the specifics of a given technique. I always try to stress this, come on dogs, I always try to stress this with the people that come see me, is that the dogs will learn if you will give them the opportunity to learn. And especially if you have a breed of dog that is not bred specifically to do a complex job in conjunction with a handler, being a good leader and getting out and doing interesting things is much more important than knowing a bunch of dog training techniques. If you think about the evolution of dogs, throughout history, people didn't have much in the way of scientific knowledge related to raising dogs. they just got out and did stuff and the dogs kind of tagged along and when the dogs tagged along they learned by doing and you can go back through years and years of my videos and you'll realize that i always think and demonstrate that learning by doing is the best kind of learning right and so i get to a point in my walk where i feel like i put that excess energy where i want it okay and i feel like lucky is starting to self-regulate And that makes me able to take the leash off. Now, if you're doing drag line work and you want to do it the old-fashioned way, you wouldn't do what I just did where you take a long line and you go to no leash. What you would do is you would go 30, 20, 15, 10, 5, tab. And that's a great way for teaching off-leash obedience. As long as you're out and you're doing interesting things and the dogs look at you as someone that if they follow, They're always going to find something better to do than if they were just following their own urges, right? Okay, so That's kind of my video for today And you can kind of see that this works sometimes people ask me because I you know, I have a couple of videos about pit bulls and Sometimes people ask me if I don't like pit bulls. It's not that I don't like pit bulls It's just pit bulls don't really fit into what I do I can't have a kennel full of pit bulls, right, because they'd be fighting and carrying on. I can have one or two, you know what I'm saying? I can have a couple stay here because if I have one or two dogs like Lucky and a group of really friendly and outgoing dogs, Yeah. the friendly and outgoing dogs, they mitigate Lucky's kind of natural confrontational personality But if I have two of Lucky or three of Lucky, then they just end up beating up or killing other dogs. Obviously, I can't have them. All right. Well, that was kind of a rambling video. Now, that's kind of a rambling video, but listen, put your thoughts in the comment section below and tell me what you think about my basic idea related to doing remedial training with a pit bull terrier or a similar type dog, or doing remedial training with a dog that has suffered early life trauma. And tell me what you think about my approach. Tell me if you think that getting out and doing things and putting them in a positive peer group is as important as what I think it is. Because I think getting out. And doing interesting things, okay, is the best kind of dog training you can do. All right, I'll see you guys next week. Come on, dogs.