Ebony's Pearls

Itzl with Keegan's Tail
Originally uploaded by nodigio

http://www.usatoday.com/life/columnist/pettalk/2009-03-10-dogs-behavior_N.htm

The best dog owners, Coile says, accept the dog-ness of dogs and keep them safe in our world. "That may be seen as coddling," she says, but she sees it as nothing more than using our brains to accept fundamental differences.
Caroline Coile, who knows a lot about human brains (she's a PhD in psychology and neuroscience) and about dog brains (she wrote a book called How Smart Is Your Dog?).


http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/personal/03/10/o.find.dependable.people/index.html

if someone in your life pulls in a dismal score on the Trust Test, perpetually failing to keep promises, tell the truth, quit drinking, or show compassion, this is exactly what you can depend on them to keep doing. Addicts can be trusted to lie. Narcissists can be trusted to backstab. And people who reliably do their best, whose stories check out against your own observations, can be trusted to stay relatively honest and stable.

Both of these articles relate to one another. Both talk about trust. You can trust a dog to be a dog. That includes service dogs. Service dogs are exceptionally well-trained, but they are still dogs. They have actions and reactions that are based upon being dogs. If they are trained using their basic dog nature, they are less likely to break that training, although sometimes, the handler may undo that training by expecting the dog to act and react like a human or a well-programmed robot.

I may dress my dog in snow boots, and furry warm coats, and funny T-shirts, and he attends Halloween parties and costume events in the appropriate costumes just as I do, and he gets to wear sunglasses to protect his eyes, but I treat him like a dog. I expect him to act like a dog, and I protect him from people who expect him to behave like a human. I am his pack leader, and all things flow from me – I keep him safe, fed, entertained, occupied, companioned. Everything he has, he has because of me, and he knows this. I am his pack leader. He works for me. Not for treats, not prizes or rewards, for me. He has a job to do and he knows I expect him to do it. It is well within his abilities and it fits his dogginess and his personality. It suits his place in my pack, and that makes him happy. As long as he is happy and safe, he does his job with confidence. He knows I trust him to do his job just as he trusts me to do mine. We are truly partners.

But he’s not human. I can’t expect him to understand human things as a human does and I can’t expect him to act too far outside his dog nature without stressing him and damaging our working relationship. People may think I’m coddling him – and were he human, I certainly would be! – but he’s not human and I’m not coddling him. I’m acting as his pack leader and I expect him to act like a dog and to fulfill his pack function. As a hearing dog, that function is to be an advance warning system, a scout, an alert or alarm. This is an acceptable duty in a pack so fulfilling it doesn’t stress him out. He expects me to feed him, protect him, keep him near me so he can do his job, and to take care of him – grooming him, paying attention to him, letting him play and greet friends. Because he is a small dog, he has different needs than a large dog. This is both easier and harder, especially since he has a whiny, clingy, Type-A workaholic, drama-queen personality. If he feels I am not letting him do his job right (and when he was doped up in the ICU after the car accident, he struggled to alert me to the beeps and sounds in the clinic) he gets whiny and clingy and – as we discovered – intolerant of those he saw as preventing him from doing his job. He didn’t snap or bite, but he “shunned” them and refused to listen to them and acted as if they were invisible. It was amazing how they struggled to lift a 4 pound dog who was shunning them.

I treat dogs as if they were aliens, with their own culture and mores and I respect that. I can “talk” with most dogs, and most dogs will listen to me because I don’t expect them to be human. The same holds true for cats, ferrets, foxes, prairie dogs, wolves, coyotes, some fish (betta and koi), some birds (conures, cardinals, blue jays, crows, eagles, hawks, sparrows, grackles, flamingoes, chickens, and geese), goats, and turtles. I haven’t learned the languages of other animals, so these are it for me.

What holds true for dogs and turtles holds true for people, too. You have to look beyond the words they speak to their interior language, to the culture and training and expectations they have and speak to that. As the second article says, you can trust a stable person to remain stable. While people do change (I know I’m not the same person I was 40 years ago), it’s usually not huge changes. Once you take the measure of a person, you can trust they won’t change much. Then, you can base your behavior and trust towards them on their own behavior. Your trust won’t be betrayed because you won’t mis-place it.

See, people who have their trust betrayed often give trust based upon their personal trustworthiness. Their reasoning is “I would never do such-and-such, therefore my True Love/Best Friend/Co-Worker would never do such-and-such.” The truth is that the other person isn’t you and if you are trusting them to behave as you would, your trust will be betrayed – and they won’t necessarily have done anything wrong. When you trust someone else, you need to be able to predict their actions and understand their patterns of behavior, and base your trust on them, not you.

When you misplace your trust and feel betrayed, most of the time, it’s because you didn’t accurately predict what would happen. Sometimes, you can’t predict what will happen. Perhaps the person changed, perhaps you didn’t know them as well as you thought, perhaps the circumstances were such that they felt they had no choice, or perhaps it was an honest mistake that led to the betrayal. It’s possible you can trust that person in the same way in the future, or perhaps you can trust them for other things, just not that one.

Trust is a flexible thing. It varies from person to person and sometimes from one situation to another. As we age, some people gain in trustworthiness and others don’t. It’s an issue we have to constantly re-evaluate.

If we continue to trust someone to do or be something that is not in their power to do or be; we are setting ourselves up to constantly feel betrayed and hurt. To that extent, we are in control of who we trust, to what extent we trust them, and how we feel about that trust and what happens with it. We adapt our behavior to how others behave around us. If we misread their behavior, we get hurt.

Although we do carry our trust and distrust over to other people, it’s an unfair thing we do. Just because one person betrayed our trust doesn’t mean every other person will also betray our trust. You have to, as Ms. Beck says, use the scientific method in evaluating who you trust and how: predict how the other person might behave in a given situation, look for evidence to support or refute it, then adapt your trust of that person based on your data.

We can’t go through life at the extremes – distrusting everyone or trusting everyone. The one isolates us and leaves us unhappy and the other opens us to a lot of hurt.

I must be honest here and say I prefer to follow the route of being too trusting and take my chances with being hurt. I’ve learned that if I extend trust to others and let them know I trust them, most of the time, they will be trustworthy. The times when they aren’t, it’s almost always because I miscalculated how much they could be trusted. If I’m honest with myself, I will acknowledge that there were clues to tell me I shouldn’t trust that person and I did it anyway. That really does lesson the hurt – and sharpens my observational skills.

Online is harder. It’s easy to build a persona and hide behind it. Some people see the internet as one huge game and they set out to “play games” with others. They may not do this on a conscious level, but it can still happen. There is no “face time” and that makes it harder for some people to consider the rest of us to be real. Therefore it doesn’t matter if they pile on to someone and say things they know are hurtful and cruel. There are any number of recent examples I could point to – when a person on my Reading List’s kitty was desperately ill, a large number of people who would never have behaved that way face-to-face chose to attack him, call him all sorts of hurtful things, and even attempt to report him to authorities without any solid facts to support them. The recent writer’s contretemps is full of many examples of people “gaming” others and of hurt feelings from this gaming and many, many, many feelings of betrayal. A person on my Reading List recently experienced this personally when she suddenly had a lot of people add her to their Reading Lists. She felt attacked and at least one of the new subscribers felt betrayed. I could go on, but really, if three examples aren’t enough, a thousand wouldn’t be enough.

Truly, the only way to build online trust is to observe a person for a long time in many venues, reading their blogs, reading their comments in other people’s blogs, reading their responses to comments in their blogs, interacting with them on mailing lists and via emails, reading their websites (if they have any), reading articles and works by them (if they have any), reading reviews they’ve written (if any), and so on. Even then, it’s possibly to miscalculate how much and what kind of trust to extend.

I find that if the other person posts things like “you have to earn my respect”, chances are, I can’t trust them online because they are the kind of person who doesn’t see others as real. They treat other people as players in a game and they will only respect those they see as better players and attack those they see as weaker players because that’s how you game things.

Me, I feel we need to first extend respect so we can interact with one another. We each then have to work to earn the other person’s disrespect. This is because I start from the premise that the other person is real, has feelings, and deserves to be treated on line the same way I would treat them in person.

I treat people on line the same way I treat people off line, by extending respect, courtesy, and simple trust, and then they have to work to earn my disrespect, my rudeness, and my distrust. That’s a lot more trouble than most people are willing to go through, so they manage, almost effortlessly, to retain respect, courtesy, and trust. Amazingly, they often offer the same back to me. It makes life pleasant.

Doesn’t matter if it’s a dog or a person, if you respect their innate nature and observe them well enough to perceive their patterns of behavior, you will be less likely to get bitten, get hurt, or have your trust betrayed. That’s the lesson both of these articles have to offer.