We have a cue for that
Bunny knows a lot of words. Some of them are English, lots are German. Some are standard stuff for dogs, others are random choices. Many are adjacent to each other. He probably knows a lot more than I want to admit. “Knowing” is a strange word here. It is not like a dictionary knowledge. Context matters. Tone matters. Body language matters. Mood matters.
We want to make sure that cues mean the same to me and to him. Sit is a good example. I thought Sit is just Sit. He did it right away, on the first day at home. Only months later it turned out that Sit really means to him: Go to Aleks, sit in front of him, and get a treat. Or at least a Good Boy. It took a number of training sessions to work out that misunderstanding. Now Sit is really Sit, wherever he is. But how does the treat get there? Good question. We had an even more interesting conversation about Down. I trained it with a lure going down in front of his nose. As a result, he learned that Down means diving for something that is in front of him on the ground. That’s a lot of fun. From there to Down, only Down, nothing else, was a long way. He still lies down in a very enthusiastic manner, he throws himself to the ground, and I like that a lot. He is a Good Boy.
Good Boy, coincidentally, also does not mean Good Boy to him. He does not know what Good or Boy means to humans. Good Boy means the impending appearance of a treat. It is one of a few commonly used expressions of praise. I like using those, a lot. He understands the German Braver Hund or Guter Hund exactly like that, too. Hey, we feel good and I get food (perhaps)! The click of the clicker works pretty much in the same way, but it has the advantage that it is consistent, precise and without emotion. We use it a lot to communicate about new behaviours. He knows that Good, a simple, short Good, is an affirmation, that he is doing something I like which may result in rewards later. How much later, that’s up for debate. It’s not quite enough for an instant treat. Keep doing what you are doing! That’s what it means. The opposite is Nope or Hey or just a loud Ey, which at the minimum makes him hesitate in what he is doing, briefly. Hopefully. Sadly, we use those words quite a bit. Sadly, I have to be loud quite a bit.
Because Bunny is easily distracted, getting his attention is very important. There are a lot of cues for that. The simplest one is Bunny, which is the last island of communication before he goes offline, when his mind shrinks to the size of a redshank. Make sure to use that in an upbeat, sweet tone. Sometimes it has to be loud, and serious, but angry is no good. Bunny means Look At Me, which is, coincidentally, another word he understands. We rehearse those a lot, over and over again, initially every night, now occasionally, with increasing levels of distractions. He knows. Getting his attention is sometimes easier by making random noises, a whistle, a snort, a hiss, a smack. Something that he hasn’t heard before.
Calming him down is another important part of our lives. It’s the step after getting his attention. Focus on me, and do something for me. And forget about all that other stuff. I use all kinds of cues for that. Our feelgood exercise, I ask him to go through my legs: Durch! I throw a treat and he can pick it up immediately: Toss! A favourite — touch my hand with your nose: Touch! Walk next to me and do a 360 degree turn: Spin! That one is difficult, and if he does it, he is completely with me.
Some words are sacred for me, and as a consequence for Bunny. Those words have to result in one reaction only, no flexibility at all. These are words we need to keep him safe, and me, too. Recall is the best example. Come Here is our Royal Recall. It’s always the same: Run towards me, immediately, no hesitation, and with good speed. Don’t look around, don’t linger, don’t walk casually. With purpose. Come Here always gets good treats, the best I have with me, and several. It’s a jackpot cue, and he knows it. Stop means halt. Immediately. No questions asked, no further step. Stay is similarly inflexible. Stay where you are, right now. Initially he interpreted it kind of as ‘make yourself comfortable’. But over time we figured it out. Sit Stay means that. Stand Stay means that. Like a statue. Don’t move. No matter what. The last bit is more an aspiration then reality.
Stand by the way is an interesting case. In principle, it should be on the same level as Sit and Down, but in reality it is much harder to agree on. Every dog can learn Sit and Down, but Stand needs some patience. For a while, Bunny thought that what I mean is just ‘stand up and get the treat that is right in front of you and then do whatever you want’. That was a consistent pattern. I could not do any better. He stood sometimes for a long time, but not on cue. Then something happened. While we were training for Pivot, an elaborated exercise where his front paws stay on an elevated platform while his rear legs move around in a circle, he suddenly stayed where he was, standing. I just had to add the cue again. And there it was. A rock solid, permanent Stand. He has a beautiful stand, majestic, strong, and yet relaxed. Pivoting, by the way, works very well in one direction, anti-clockwise, but we struggle with the other direction. Maybe we need a different cue for that. It’s a different direction, after all.
As for getting attention, recall is so important that we have an entire range of options for that. Come Here is only used when I’m fairly certain he will come. It’s the sacred word. Two short bursts with the whistle in my pocket mean the same thing. A simple German Komm (which sounds suspiciously like Come pronounced in Scottish) is used more commonly, mostly in the sense of Come With Me. He has learned that he can ignore it for a while. You need those words, soft cues, cues that don’t require instant and inevitable obedience. Words that can be muddled. Komm is one of those. There are lots of other things that mean Come to him, noises, gestures, his name, waving a treat, the noise of the plastic bag that contains the treats. Anything for a recall.
The other words that should be rock solid, but aren’t, sadly, are Leave It and Drop It. Leave It means leave the thing you are looking at or sniffing at, just leave it and do something else instead. We practice it every day. He knows what it means, but has this idea that there are exceptions, like, for example, a sausage roll. Drop It is even harder. Drop what you have in our mouth. For a dog who does not like to drop things there are limited opportunities to rehearse that. But I think we knows what it means. It works with toys. It works with props. But with food? Good luck. This will be with us forever. The implied additional message here is to get something better from my pocket. But sometimes I don’t have anything better. Trading treats turns into an arm’s race.
A few more that we need every day, outside, especially when he is walking in front of me. Left and Right mean the obvious, and he really knows that. It’s surprising. He knows it better than I do. Wait is kind of a relaxed version of Stop, come to a halt, but you can sniff around, and a few more steps are fine. Just wait a little, another soft cue. Lots of these cues we have never rehearsed at home, they happened sort of organically in the flow of moving around. Slow, or in German Langsam, means slow down. How much, and for how long, that’s the big debate, and it’s one of these discussions we are going to have for years. It’s the fulcrum of our relationship. Every fibre of his being is against slowing down.
We use the German word Vorsichtig to alert him of possible danger. Steep drops, slippery rocks, surprises, animals with teeth. Auto, pronounced in German, warns of incoming cars. Strangely, we also use it when we want to go to our own car, but then it’s more like this: Autofahren? If he is running away and the long line is running out, he gets an Enough to indicate that this is far enough. In essence means he needs to slow down to avoid the jerk. Again, a hard sell. I say it with a melody going downhill, kind of like a ring tone. In principle, all of this should work off leash as well, and it does, if nothing else is going on. So, it doesn’t. This Way is a really cool cue to indicate where we want to go. I can point in a direction, if he looks at me. Go This Way! Good Boy. He also understands it in German. Hier Lang! To just keep going we say Keep Going. Don’t go left or right, just keep walking or running, ignore everything else. That one is much easier, because in lots of situations it’s all he wants. It corresponds to the ‘on by’ that mushers use. I didn’t want to train him the typical musher cues, because that seemed silly when walking through a Scottish village. I think he understands the German Vorwärts in the same way. I phased it out because Kathrin thought a German man with a huge dog shouting Vorwärts while walking through Britain is not a good thing.
He can Heel, that means, walking strictly on my left, close to me, but we only use it in training sessions. In practice it’s pretty useless, and since it has to be precise, I don’t want to spoil it through real life experience. Instead, if I want him to walk close to me, not necessarily next to me, it’s With Me. That’s a tough one, because often enough ‘with me’ is not the most interesting place outside. But he knows it, and after a bit of back and forth, he usually follows along. Recently we started to introduce words for different gaits: Walk is the walk, Trot is the trot. We are getting there. We don’t have a word for pacing, because I don’t want him to pace that much.
All these words have a history, and all have a negotiation. They all morph and change. Some are fragile and fluent, others are rock solid. Some are broken and should be retired. Bunny has a way with words. He picks them up very quickly, but also interprets them in his own way, and sometimes it takes a while to agree on something. Some cues are more like a suggestion, some are an information, and some are commands. Again we need to agree on which is which. For some I suspect he knows the hand signal better than the verbal cue. He backs up when I say Back, but can he do it without my typical hand sign, waving him backwards? Unsure. Most don’t have a hand sign. But if it’s there, I’m sure he prefers that.
He obviously knows Paw and the German Pfote, although most of the time I use it as High Five, which means the same as Paw, except I want to touch his paw while raising my hand. It’s a particularly high Paw, I guess. It’s also a common feel good moment for us. And I have not mentioned yet maybe the most common word in our communication, which is Okay. Okay is the release, the sign that whatever we have done before, is finished now, and we start something new. The melody is important, it goes downhill, never uphill. The uptalk Okay could be an entirely different cue. Okay is a reset button, a sign that he can ignore what I said before. We go back to our normal baseline. All Right works in the same way. At least I hope that’s what it means to him. Sometimes when I say Okay, he looks at me and asks what to do. I love these moments. Okay does not mean Do Whatever You Like.
He does not know my name. But the second and third most important people in his life have names. Kathrin makes him perk up. Sarah makes his ears flicker. The most important snacks in his life have names as well. Banane makes him run home, to the kitchen or to the back of the car. As a result, we can not use that word anymore, we have to say something like curved yellow fruit. Ei does the same. Bis gleich means I’m leaving and you will have to cope alone for a bit. How long that bit is, I don’t tell him. But he knows I’m coming back, too. Bis Gleich contains the promise of the Wiedersehen.
I’m sure he understands Küche, German for kitchen, as well. I’m confident he knows Spazieren oder Rausgehen. On the other hand, Raus da, in German, means to get out of something, a bush, a garden, something. I’m certain he knows Tür, the door, which is a very important part of our days. He can find things, smelly things, if they are reasonbly easy to find, and the cue for that is Such, the German for Find. And so, Bunny’s vocabulary becomes this weird mix of languages, a kind of broken English or broken German, an entirely new system, but very easy to follow along, and anyone who speaks those two languages a little bit can immediately understand what we are saying.
For his Good Canine Citizen courses we had to teach him to go to bed, or, in his case: Geh in dein Bett! A rather useless term. It’s not really his bed that he is going to, it’s just one of his mats that we are using around the house. He throws himself down, and occasionally even hits the mat while doing so. Speaking of throwing down, he knows Bauzi, which is a weird term for lying on his side or back, or, as it is known more commonly, Drop Dead. This one is incredibly useful, if you want to have a look at his belly or his paws. He can Speak on cue, although this will result in a variety of noises, depending on the situation. Often a short bark, sometimes a grunt, sometimes a full-blown woohooo. To separate those out into different cues, that’s a long-term project.
Okay, one more: Leine, German for leash, means that the leash is somewhere between his legs, and he needs to sort it out. I started saying that mostly because it is annoying, and I had to go and pull the leash underneath his belly. But within a few months he learned to do it on his own, by strategically lifting one or two legs over the leash. He can’t quite see what’s going on, but I’m sure he can sense where the line is. Leine! It’s also a great way to stop him and to focus on something. Leine! And off he goes again.
That’s easily more than fifty, fifty words Bunny definitely knows, and I keep remembering more. And those are only the ones that we use in a more or less deliberate, systematic way. And we have not even talked about his words — those are just the ones I have introduced. Of course he has taught me cues as well. And I have not even mentioned Pfannkuchen, the most important of all words.
