Reflecting on the Long Road of Playing with Scout

To me, playing with my dog feels easy. We can go from half asleep to an all-out brawl over an oversized tennis ball and back to laying on our sides as seamlessly as changing a pair of socks.

I don’t say that it feels easy to brag. Just a year or two ago I barely knew what I was doing. It feels easy for the simple reason that I know how to do it now. And once I have known how to do it for long enough, I’ll probably forget that it was ever even tricky or unknown to me.

Learning to play can feel like climbing Mount Everest while naked if you don’t have much experience with it. But the same goes for learning other skills, too. The first time I sat behind the steering wheel in a car, I had no idea how hard to press the accelerator to make the car go. I had no idea what it felt like to turn the wheel or stop at a red light. Quite a few jolty rides later, and I can now suddenly find myself at work and not even remember the drive there.

A humble beginning

The first time I played with Scout, it was very short. I threw a tennis ball for her inside Haley’s small college apartment, and she fetched it and wouldn’t give it back. The second time we played it probably went about the same. Maybe I tried persuading her to give it to me, but if I remember correctly, chomping on a tennis ball was a superior activity to dropping it at my feet.

I didn’t really have any goals or ideas in my head about how great I wanted our relationship to become through play. If I had told Scout that in just a year or so, she would be play-bowing and play-barking at me, she probably would have made a face like “yeah right” and thought to herself, “I don’t even really like that guy.”

I knew it was very biologically fulfilling for both of us, and I thought it would be kinda fun to have a relationship with Scout where we could have fun together. If only I could figure out how to do it in a confined space, with a creature that was supposed to be roaming acres of land on another continent, herding animals all day.

Eventually I consulted the problem solving portion of my brain. The next time we played, Scout didn’t know what hit her. I had two balls to play with this time, and in her excitement to fetch, she would drop the first ball to be ready for the second. Perfect. Now we had a game on our paws.

Of course, it’s never that simple, and often neither ball would make its way back to me. Nevertheless, we had a brilliant game of fetch going for about thirty seconds, until chomping on one ball once again became the most interesting thing a furry, forty-five pound creature could spend their time on in that apartment.

Getting to know each other

Like any great friendship that isn’t in a movie or remembered through decades of nostalgic haze, it wasn’t platonic love at first sight. It takes a while to really get to know another creature and be completely comfortable around each other. We need to know almost their full range of behavior so we aren’t ever totally caught off guard by their actions or words (or barks).

Scout and I had so much to learn about each other. For her to be interested in playing with some random new human she had just met a few weeks before, she had to learn what to expect from me. And I had to get comfortable putting my hands so close to that mouthful of sharp teeth.

For every game we wanted to play, we both had to create a mutually understood set of rules. Neither one of us came pre-programmed to hold the end of the tug toy in a way that works nicely for the other creature. From fetch to tug to eventually personal play, there were patterns to learn, mistakes to make, and fun to be had.

Sometimes, one of us had to set some boundaries and say, “hey, you’re grabbing my hand, not the toy.” A lot of the time, Scout would ask me what the heck I was doing and why I was being so confusing, and I would have to sit her down and explain the game. (Okay, actually, it was more like just trying again with a slightly new approach to give her a better idea of what I wanted.)

And the whole time, I was becoming familiar with what her body language was telling me about how she wanted to play and whether or not she liked what was going on.

Learning a new language

Whenever a viral video of someone else playing with their dog pops up, it always looks so seamless. I think most people get the idea in their head that play should be natural and easy. There’s no rules, right? Aren’t social animals born as instinctive play superheroes in order to learn how to interact with each other and their environment?

We don’t think about all of the communication that is going on precisely because it looks so seamless. I especially never thought about how much would go into learning the patterns of play. It can be especially difficult to teach or learn because there isn’t a lot of cut and dry communication going on, especially not in the traditional sense of dog training as I understand it. In the most casual setting, there will be close to zero hand signals or verbal commands.

Just like any other learning, play takes time and repetition. And it is uniquely difficult because it is practically a totally new language. It’s been important for me not to just latch on to the first thing that I think Scout is catching on to. I try to keep us from getting boxed in to a narrow idea of play so that we can continue to explore new territory.

One tricky part is that if your dog is anything like Scout, the toy is going to get them so excited that it becomes a lot harder to teach new games. Luring only works so well when they move 10X faster than you can, and the selective hearing usually kicks in as well. I either have to try to bring the energy level down a notch or two before I try to teach something more formally, or I just give up and let the crazy come out.

What that tail do

In the world of play, almost all of the words are spoken through body language. Like she’s in some weird 2000s pop song (exhibit A), Scout has learned from my body when she should chase the toy to try to steal it from me and when she should sit and wait for me to throw it for her. A lot of the time I won’t even realize that I’m standing up straighter or putting the toy behind my back to get her to do what I want.

It used to be easy for me to think that I could plan how a play session would go. I thought that I would direct what was going on with a series of movements or commands, and we would go from one on to the next.

In reality, that’s never happened. During high energy play, things happen on a much faster time scale than during most training I’ve done. There’s no time to be the commander of the battlefield and give instructions for every action. Scout is already guessing what to do next and quite possibly already flying through the air before I can even start forming my first word.

Teambuilding and trust-falls

Scout is a very socially sensitive dog, and like many of us, has crippling fears that she might be doing something wrong. A large part of learning to play has been building her confidence and making sure not to send any signals that could look unnatural to her. In order to have the best play session, I need her to be sure that she is doing it right and not worried that I might be scolding her if the smallest thing goes wrong. Play is much more rough and tumble, quite unlike the more precision training that is required to create behaviors like down stays.

The biggest thing to build her trust and confidence in our games has been to always act like everything is totally normal, no matter what happens. A nice dose of, “nope, nothing to see here” keeps Scout engaged even when I mess the game up somehow. 

It’s a big advantage for me that Scout is a tough little cattle dog when she gets into a more drivey state. She voluntarily runs into walls after a toy, and often ends up splayed out on the ground after jumping or turning directions too quickly. Something goes “wrong” but it’s never been a big deal, so she comes right back and keeps playing full force.

The journey to getting Scout to go all out during play involved a lot of incremental steps. Instead of throwing something completely new at her, I try to bump the intensity up one notch at a time to reach the end goal. This is especially true with physical interactions during play. The more repetitions of me pushing her around while below her discomfort threshold, the better.

At this point, we are both so comfortable that we can play tug with a tennis ball all the way in her mouth, and neither of us flinches too much.

A brave new world

Comfortableness and confidence during play has really opened up new parts of the world to us. Bringing the fun of play to new environments helps create more positive energy wherever we go with Scout.

It has also helped us steadily increase the possibilities of play. We can create new games from combining two old games together. Or, we can take an existing game that we know well and shape the game to create new behavior.

For example, we taught Scout to play frisbee and to jump up and grab it from our hand. Dozens of games later, I was able to take the energy and jumpiness of frisbee to get her to jump onto and over my back for the disc.

Over time, Scout has become much less sensitive to me or the environment throwing her something out of left field during and after play. We have even been using play to help work through her dog reactivity because she has confidence and stable energy while playing with us around other dogs.

Playing is truly a heck of a lot of fun

It feels amazing where Scout and I are at now. Of course I’m not always in the mood to play, but when I am, we can have a great game together that brings a big smile to my (otherwise all-too-often serious, just ask Haley) face.

She’s not some trick dog on Youtube or running obstacle courses, but that doesn’t matter to me. I’m more than happy with how Scout and I can just throw down together in a game and have a blast.

And the work has visibly paid off, too. It’s easier than ever to try new games and figure things out together. We know better than ever what to expect from the other, which I can tell has strengthened our bond by a lot.

For me, play isn’t supposed to be clean or polished or even at all structured. Most of the time, Scout and I can be found just having freeform fun that will turn into whatever it wants on a given day.