We love our furry companions, for better or worse. But when it comes to changing your dog’s behavior, training tends to focus on making them respond to human commands in order to make them act more human. But a local non-profit has made it their mission to move people to a new way of thinking about pet training and behavior.
Down a long gravel road in Maysville far from Highway 17 stands Safe Harbor Farm K9 Rescue and Rehabilitation Center. An old church on the 61 acre property has since been refurbished as a clinic. There’s outbuildings and log cabins surrounding a one acre pond. This is not your normal animal shelter. Cats, ducks and chickens are roaming and, it’s quiet. No dogs barking- unusual for a pet shelter.
“Is that a deer or dogs back there? Probably deer. As a matter of fact, when you drove up, I had that little fox, we have lots of wildlife back here.
Lynne Swanson started Safe Harbor Farm back in 2005 as a pet rescue. And it’s not just domesticated animals that are drawn to this place.
“We have heron, blue heron, green heron, egrets, lots of turtles, I’m always picking up turtles on the side of the road and bringing them here.”
In the early days of Safe Harbor Farm, the center cared for 20 to 40 dogs at a time, but now they’re down to about a dozen. And that’s just fine with Swanson. It frees her up for a new endeavor called the SMILE! Project. She says the lightbulb went off as people took notice of how polite and quiet the dogs up for adoption were.
“People started asking us how the heck we did what we did. And that wasn’t a question we could answer in ten words or less.”
In 2013, Safe Harbor Farm brought together pet professionals, veterinarians, trainers and shelter personnel to provide training in canine communication. There also was also a demand to make the information at the conferences available to the average dog owner. This was the beginning of the SMILE! Project, which Swanson says aims to keep savable dogs out of animal shelters.
“A lot of times people give up on dogs because they just don’t have the knowledge that it takes to turn things around. My message to them is most of the time, it’s pretty darn easy.”
Swanson believes getting inside the dog’s head, understanding their body language and behaviors, will help you train your dog better and result in a happier pet. She demonstrates with Jennie, a white German Shepard mix.
“She’s the one that lets us know that someone’s at the door waiting for any of us now. She’s going to come over and say hey”
"So we’re walking up to the cage now."
“Up to her nice, big pen. (bark, bark) That’s an alert bark. She’s saying hey, somebody’s new.”
Swanson opens the gate, and Jennie runs up to greet us. She’s been at the shelter for about five years. She’s here because she was likely hit by a car at some point in her life and now is incontinent.
“And once she does a walk around, she’ll probably just walk away and then come back just letting her know she’s comfortable with you. That’s something that people get wrong a lot of times. They think a dog who walks away is a lot like a person who walks away and doesn’t approve. If a dog walks away, they’re signaling comfort with you or approval of what you’re doing.”
“I’m standing in the pen right now and the dog is circling around my feet sniffing me, but I’m not reaching down and touching her.”
“Yeah, exactly, when we meet each other for the first time, we look each other in the eyes, we reach out a hand and we’re verbal. Hi, how are you, I’m Lynne. But if you have two dogs who haven’t met each other yet and they’re verbal and reaching out, none of that is good.
“So, she’s walked away now.”
“Yes! So she’s signaling total acceptance of you. At this point, there’s going to be no more alert barking. You can walk back and forth, make yourself at home and you’re one of the family.”
Understanding how a dog thinks and acts Swanson believes is the key in helping people address problems with their dogs. She says it goes beyond training a dog basic commands like sit, stay, and roll over.
“Dogs are by their nature a non-verbal species. And so we go so much further when we communicate with them in a way they communicate with each other. And how is that? It’s through motion and movement.”
And it’s also through energy.
“If we’re talking softly, most dogs understand oh, okay I don’t have to respond to that. But if you get more excited and your voice turns like this and you have a lot of inflection in your voice… look at this, see how he picks up his head? And he’s looking at me? He’s purely responding not to the words I say but to the energy behind those words.”
In the past, Safe Harbor Farm provided thousands of spay, neuter and vaccinations to pets and helped find homes for animals in eastern North Carolina. But Swanson hopes a new focus on the SMILE! Project will broaden their scope, helping prevent dogs from ending up at animal shelters across the United States and around the world.
Last month, her book “Smile! And other practical life lessons your dogs can teach you while you are training them” was released.
“We can’t bring everybody to our shelter, we can’t train every person, we can’t train every dog, so we’re putting this out and hoping it helps a lot of folks.”
The book is available at public libraries in North Carolina, Virginia and New York. 100 percent of the proceeds from book sales benefit the SMILE! Project.
“Nobody makes a cent but the SMILE! Project, not even the author. And that’s me. We just kind of did this because we just wanted to get this information out and we’re just here to help and this is the way we’re helping.”
