talking to strangers

Maya can sometimes eat cookies that strangers toss her way.  I should be more specific -- Maya almost never has an issue eating the food, it's just that this particular game runs into some problems, so we only play it sometimes.

The first problem has to do with distance.  Right now, Maya feels comfortable around a stationary human at conversational distances, but not closer than about 8-10 feet while she is sitting or lying down (this is huge progress for Maya, of course).  If the person has treats and accidentally drops one inside that zone, Maya will still want to eat it, but going to get it would push her beyond her comfort zone.

That's not a huge problem, because I can simply walk her away while the decoy recovers the treat.  The real problem is that Maya chooses to squirm too close when she knows the person has treats.  Maya knows that when I have treats, she can lie at my feet and gaze at me and expect to get her share (I reward this shamelessly).  Being a clever dog, Maya has decided to see if this works on scary strangers.  This means she zips ahead of me, lies down, and then crawls in a wiggly fashion toward them until she is far too close for her own comfort.  This conflict between desire and discomfort produces inner turmoil.

I have more trouble managing this problem because if I physically stop her, Maya will still crawl forward until her leash is at maximum tightness.  Which means that the closer she gets to a scary stranger, the tighter her leash is, which is all kinds of counterproductive. We can avoid that issue by using barriers (strangers feeding Maya through fences or car windows), or by using a mat (giving Maya a target spot at a safe distance), but I think the best solution is to continue to do other things that increase Maya's comfort level at close proximity to people, so that as she wiggles closer she simply feels safer.  We're working on it.

The other problem with the cookies-from-strangers game is the one that actually fascinates me, because it tells me something about my dog that I didn't already know.  This problem has to do with barking.

Maya barks when getting cookies from strangers for three basic reasons: fear, habit, and internal conflict.  Fear is what happens when she gets way too close or the decoy does something unexpected, and the barking looks/sounds very aggressive (for lack of a better term).  Habitual barking tends to happen when Maya temporarily can't think of something better to do, or when she is walking away from something and has gotten in the habit of tossing one last insult over her shoulder.  It tends to be brief and lack emotional investment.

Internal conflict, such as the situation I describe above where Maya voluntarily crawls too close to the source of her fascination/fear, produces a different kind of barking.  It looks and sounds exactly like demand barking (AKA attention barking), which is what dogs do when they are being pushy and trying to get a treat by yelling.  Higher in pitch than other barks, but not as high as a panicked scream (such as those Maya emits when she thinks I am going hiking without her), and with a very insistent tone.
Seeing this, a light bulb went off over my head.  OH!

One of the things that has always puzzled me about Maya is that her fear of other people seems to be very profound -- it is incredibly difficult for her to interact with them at all.  But she managed to interact with me and Brian pretty much from the beginning, and I saw very few signs of anything like that level of discomfort.

But Maya spent 3-4 months after coming home barking at us, usually when we were sitting still.  At the time, I thought it was attention barking.  I had good reasons for doing so!  Attention reinforced it, for one thing, and it clearly looked & sounded like attention barking -- it was never, ever threatening.  Maya had no impulse control or frustration tolerance, so I thought she was just endlessly screaming for attention (or any reaction, really) from me.

Now I get it.  Maya was conflicted.  She desired my presence and my absence (and could cope with neither).  She wanted attention but found it difficult to handle.  It was almost exactly the same emotional dynamic that underlies the fear/fascination dilemma produced by a stranger with cookies. No wonder it took so long to extinguish, and no wonder none of the recommended means of halting attention barking helped.  Everything I did just made Maya more conflicted!

I love sudden insights.  As weird as it may sound, it makes me feel a lot better to see clear signs that Maya was afraid of us.  I've always assumed she must have been, but the scarcity of evidence puzzled me.  Realizing that the barking had mixed motivations is reassuring, because if Maya can find a way to balance her attraction and fear when it comes to us, then there's even more reason to think that she'll continue to find that balance with other people too, even if the process looks a little different. 

One of these days, getting some treats from a stranger isn't going to be such a big deal.  That would be good if my goal were for Maya to make more friends, of course, but what it is really good for is the ultimate ambition that my dog and I both share: more cookies for Maya!