Calm or Learned Helplessness? Ep209

This is a very lightly edited transcript.

Episode 209. Is the dog calm or is it “Learned Helplessness?” Today, we're gonna get a little bit geeky. This was a great question that a listener sent to me, so let's delve into that this week.

You are listening to the Creating Great Grooming Dog Show. I'm Chrissy Neumyer Smith. I'm a Master Groomer Behavior Specialist, a Master Canine Stylist, a Certified Behavior Consultant for Canines, a Certified Professional Dog Trainer, and a bunch of other things along with being an educator and the Dean of Academics at The Whole Pet Grooming Academy, and this, my friends and colleagues, is the show where we talk about teaching pets to be good for grooming and other types of care.

If you're new to the show, welcome! Each episode, I try to present it in a way that you are going to enjoy the episode even if you have no background and you've never listened to an episode before. So, a listener asked this question: How do we know if a dog is calm or if we're seeing learned helplessness?

So first, let's talk a little bit about what learned helplessness is. Learned Helplessness is when an animal knows that there's no way to escape, or their past experiences have all been, there's no way to escape, and they no longer try. They're shut down, and they often look still, in a way that, as groomers, we might be thinking, “Oh, finally, he's holding still. This is gonna be great.” This is a dog who might not be struggling against you, who might not be trying to escape, who might not be trying to bat at tools, or growl or anything like that. But they aren't loose and relaxed.

So if we talk about calmness, what we're looking for when we talk about the three Cs, and if you're new here, you haven't heard it before, but everyone else singing along, the three Cs are Calm, Comfortable, and Cooperative. And calmness can be measured. Calmness. Calmness is interesting. Calmness is a dog with relaxed muscles.

Usually, we can see it in their face. I want you to think about like the dog that's kind of got a slack jaw and they're kind of smiling and their tail isn't tucked, but it's just kind of relaxed and wagging. Not necessarily way up high in the air and super excited. 'cause even excited. Even if that's not aggressive, it's still gonna be a problem for dog grooming.

So the dog that we are looking at for in terms of calmness is loose. Now dog trainers are usually looking at a dog's face, and here's the thing, if you're a dog trainer. Or maybe somebody who hasn't been working on a back foot where you can't really see the face. A lot of groomers, we can't see the face.

So the way that you would know if a dog is loose, if their body is loose is in your hand. You can feel if they're tense. They're kind of, one of my customers refers to it as getting round. When her dog is nervous, he just kind of cowers, his back arches, his head lowers, his shoulders kind of crunch his tail tucks under. 

Think about like getting round. I think it's such a great example, but if you think about the dog that is calm. They might not be like wagging their tail and bright eyed and the ears are up. They're just relaxed. You can feel it in your hands if you press into their shoulder or their hip, you feel 'em kind of move.

oose bodies don't lie. If you are really tense or afraid or worried, it is really, really hard to loosen your body. So think about that dogs are literally trying to tell us what they think at all times. They're trying to let us know, there's no secret here. They're like, yes, that makes me nervous. Please stop the thing. 

But a dog who is displaying learned helplessness may be standing really still and not necessarily showing any signs of fear. Just also not showing any signs of being relaxed. 

We do want relaxed, so if we stop and think, is this pet having a pleasant experience? I want you to think about the pleasant experience, not the positive experience, because while that goes down a weird and crazy route, sometimes, sometimes we have, um, very subjective views of what a positive experience is.

But is this pet having a pleasant experience? And that's a yes or no question, and maybe we have to say, uh, it's more pleasant than last time. Maybe we've made progress since the last one, but if it's an unpleasant experience, then we need to step back and think about how can I try to make this more of a pleasant experience.

How can I implement that if this dog is really scared and just kind of looking like, I mean, I know I'm on a grooming loop. I know I can't jump off the table. I know I'm what I'm is expected of me, but also, um, I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. And I know that's very anthropomorphic when we start saying a dog hates something or likes something.

But I think. We can look at a dog and see the dog who's just filled with dread, and that can be learned helplessness. And we want to avoid that even though we could still get a beautiful trim on that dog because they're gonna let us do whatever we want to do on them. The modern groomer needs to say, I don't want this dog to feel this way about this process.

We're offering hair cutting and bathing services and toenails. This is a spa day. And while they may never be like, yay, a spa day, we don't want them to be afraid. We don't want them to be tense. We don't want them to be filled with dread, and we can work on that. We can work on that a lot by helping them have a more pleasant experience by not continuing to push when we see these signs that they're nervous.

So. Learned helplessness is an interesting one. I will put some links in the show notes because, , I really don't wanna get into too much detail about what they did for the tests in the sixties , to determine what learned helplessness is. 'cause yeah, they're, they're kind of heartbreaking. It involves shocking dogs and, giving them no way to escape and seeing how they behave later when they have an escape route.

And yeah, we, we don't really need to get into details, they're. There'll be some links in there if you'd wanna follow through. But learned helplessness can look like a dog who's being great. And a lot of our owners might not realize that their dog is just kind of shut down. They might think, oh yeah, but he doesn't like it.

There's a difference between a dog who's like, ah. All right. Yeah, do the things I'll, I'll play along you groomers in your crazy groomer games. You know, my weird friend Chrisy, who does all the touching and the stuff with the clippers, but that's different than the dog who's shut down. All right, so what we're looking for is we want this pet to be relaxed.

We want calm, we want comfortable, and we want cooperative. Now, calmness. Let's talk a little bit about calmness some more, because calmness is also, if a dog is panting. They are not calm. Interesting. Right? Let's think about that one. 'cause we often see dogs who are panting. They're not calm. What we want for calm is a dog who is actually, their whole body is just relaxed and we need to work toward it.

I'm not saying to wait until a dog is calm. Often we're working incrementally toward calmness. We're watching for signs of more calmness. But a dog who's panting. He's not calm. A dog who's jumping around and being playful is not calm. And actually that's an interesting point for the dog trainers out there.

As a dog trainer myself, I, I get it usually in dog training we're like, Hey, you know, I want 'em to like it. Let's teach 'em to like something and. That is okay. Here's the thing. If we're working on cooperative care stuff where we're a millimeter away from an eye, or we're in a really like tight, sensitive area with sharp tools or applying ointments or, or eye drops, you know, things like that, we, we need to, if we're going to teach them to like it, then we also need to teach them now that you're not afraid and you think it's fun, we need to teach you to be calm and still because these things are dangerous. So I like it when a dog starts to switch over into like, oh, this isn't the, this isn't the drag.

I thought it was gonna be, this might be fun. And we switch into like, okay, we changed the mood and now let's, let's also teach you about, I need you to be still. And this isn't happy, silly time for a little while. I don't mind if we turn it into happy, silly time, but we're not done there. And that's really my message for the trainers.

The work is not done happy, silly time is still dangerous. So we need to also, now that we've changed the mood, maybe we took it from a dog who was kind of worried to a dog who's like, oh. Hey, wait a minute, this is my grooming party. Things are gonna be fun. This person's kind of nice, and she pets me and she talks to me and maybe she gives me cookies, you know?

Um, and then tone it down. Once we change the, the motivation, once we change how they feel about it, their feelings, um, their emotional wellbeing, and then we, start teaching them. And now that you're not afraid, also. We do need you to be still, and we need you to be calm and playtime will happen, but it doesn't happen all the time.

I will tell you when playtime happens. If you're enjoying the show, please remember to tell a friend. Please just tell another groomer, tell a trainer, tell your vet. Tell your owners. You can send your owners to any of these episodes.

If you think a dog is displaying learned helplessness, there are some things that we can do. One of the things that keeps coming up in, in grooming circles is that I think a lot of groomers think about behavior in terms of holistic grooming, but dog training, we refer to it as cooperative care. You might hear terms like consent based.

Consent based is going to be really important for these dogs with learned helplessness, because if we can help them understand. Oh wait, there's a way for me to opt out and maybe opt, opt out of all of it, but it really depends on where you're at with this pet. Not every pet needs you to, , provide a situation where they can totally just walk out of the building.

Okay. It could be, can I lift your foot? Oh, you're not ready. Okay, we'll give you a minute. Can I lift your foot? And that could be their choice. Giving them choices like, oh, I wasn't ready. I think that as dog groomers, we often think that the moment we see some sort of resistance, it means that, , it's a refusal, but so often it's a not ready if you give them the chance, if you let them get their balance or, or maybe pick the foot up a different way, or maybe turn the tool off and make that that challenge easier, then some of these dogs go, oh. Oh, that's not what I thought it was gonna be, but you may have a dog that was not ready to even walk into your facility.

And I see this over and over and over again. , we feel pressured by owners that that's what they're coming to us for. So we have to get. This dog in the tub or this dog on the table, and we try to push, push, push. And at the end we're hoping the dog realizes that we're friendly and we never got mad at them and that everything's gonna be fine.

And we completed the grooming. The owner is happy. And that's where I hear a lot of groomers say The dog had a. Positive experience. I'm doing air quotes. You can probably hear it in my voice, but in my opinion, sometimes that is we're pushing them too hard and we're actually causing learned helplessness, like there's no escape.

They're just gonna keep going. No matter what I do, if I cry out, if I twist, if I try to pull away, no matter what I do, they're just gonna keep going and we can create this situation where we're actually. Teaching learned helplessness quite accidentally. Okay. Groomers love dogs. These are groomers who are often, um, patiently and lovingly traumatizing dogs by accident.

So if we think that this dog is having a bad experience, is not having a pleasant experience, and we're not trying to, to address that, that's where some of this learned helplessness is happening. And I raise my hand because I have done this to dogs. Right. I, I was not always the groomer and trainer that I am today, and I know how easy it is to think, well, he is being so good, so he'll, he'll get the right message from this.

I'm just gonna keep going even though he seems nervous. And the message here that I want you to know is that you could be creating the situation of learned helplessness with a dog who is simply shut down now. I have heard groomers say, do I care? Why do I care? Oh my God, at least he's not trying to bite me.

I've got a job to do. But here's the thing, learned helplessness is really traumatic. We don't want that situation for them. We don't want them to be under that kind of stress, and there are better ways to teach them to be good. What if we teach this dog that grooming is just not a big deal? It's not a big deal.

Maybe they never love it. Like I said, that's a hard one for dog trainers. But you know, maybe for this dog it's like, um, you know, waiting in line at the DMV to get your driver's license picture done, and you're like, oh my God. Oh, this is taking forever. This is not what I planned for my day. Are we ever gonna end?

Right? I mean, if I'm in the DMV. If anybody here works at the DMV, I'm sorry, it's just an example, but I remember the last time I even had an appointment for a particular time and it still took an hour and a half listening to half of the people just complaining the whole time. Right. Parallel that,

it's not particularly unpleasant. It's certainly not scary, but it's not something I crave doing. Um, not sure what would make me crave doing it. I mean, maybe if you throw in some coffee and some chocolate. Hmm. New idea for the DMV, but think about some of these pets are just never gonna enjoy it. , but we can teach them to be safe and we can teach them that everything is fine.

Learned helplessness , is a dog who is just, has given up so much that they're just like, oh, it's not even worth trying to escape anymore. Oh my God, what a terrible message. Doesn't it kind of break your heart? It kind of does. So calm, calmness, a dog who's loose, that body is loose. Think about like dogs who smile, like, you know, the, the big goofy grin, the dogs who are relaxed and are just like, duh. Hey everybody. I'm having a good day. Both of my guys have like great smiles. They're just so funny when they just look at you and they just got the slack jaw totally relaxed, just high.

, that's , a sign of calmness. The loose body, the dog who can still stand for you. They're willing to be moved around wherever their tail might be wagging. It might just be relaxed and, and just draped over their, over their backend, you know, whatever their natural position is, but it's not tucked underneath, nor is it wagging furiously that would not describe that as calm and comfortable.

We want them to be comfortable with all of the things that we need to do. We want to watch for signs of discomfort. Watch for it. Think about like, okay, well you were pretty comfortable until this point, which might be when the dryer that's turned on reaches a particular area on your body, but maybe they're okay with like the dryer being turned on and the dryer on their back end and the dryer on the rib cage and their dryer on their on their shoulder.

But when you get start getting up toward their neck, they're like, Ooh. That's the part where I get nervous. And that's our decision point.

We don't wanna just keep continuing. And then cooperative is us meeting them partway. It's not calm, comfortable, and obedient. It's calm, comfortable, and cooperative. We want to work together with this pet. I'm gonna watch for their signs and, and I'm gonna try to help them be good. I want them to think that this was safe, that I'm somebody they can trust and to not be nervous because.

These pets will have grooming needs their entire life. And if we kind of, I usually use the, the 15 year mark, some dogs are gonna live a lot longer than 15 years. Some won't reach 15 years, but kind of on average 15 years. So I want you to think about this and, and I'll end it on this part, if their lifespan is 15 years.

Why, why, why, why? Why on earth would you fight with that dog every time? It just doesn't even make sense. Common sense animal handling. Like, let's just teach 'em to be calm for it. Let's teach 'em to relax for it. We don't want them to be frozen in fear. We don't want them to have learned helplessness. We don't want them to be stressed.

Common sense animal handling. Let's just get them to relax for it.

If you want more information, I teach at The Whole Pet Grooming Academy. That's wholepetnh.com. I teach the Master Groomer Behavior Specialist Diploma Program, which is a really intensive, long, long course. It takes about nine months to finish. I also teach a couple of shorter courses that are about four hours. You have a month to have those, so visit wholepetnh.com for more information on the classes that I teach. Have a great week. Bye.