Last night Ty and I went to his first Beginning Obedience class, offered by the local AKC dog training club. It's been at least two decades since I last expected to learn how to train my dog at these classes. I take my newly-trained dogs there to help them learn to pay attention to me in a very distracting environment, and to help them learn to relax around strange dogs. This club hasn't changed its methods since 1975. They're still lecturing the dog-owning masses on fitting their choke chains correctly and getting the jerk just so. I ignore this, along with much of the rest of it; I go because their classes are cheap, not because they're good. My choke chains of yesteryear are rusting in the bottom of my dog supplies closet, since, like pretty much all the other dog trainers I know, I now teach all my obedience commands with clicker techniques, getting results ten times faster and ten times happier than with the old force-and-praise methods.

I was quite pleased with Ty. In this eight week course, dogs are supposed to learn to walk at heel, sit, lie down, and stay on command. Ty already does these all these things at home, he's six months old for heaven's sake. But he was just as focused on me and as quick to comply in a noisy senior center rec room full of restless dogs as at home. Nor did he show anything more than cheerful interest in the Schipperke on one side of him or the Viszla on the other. My corgi, whose dog-aggressiveness I suffered with for years before he mellowed out of it, had been particularly drawn to bullying smaller or more timid dogs; Ty tends to ignore dogs that are smaller than him; he paid only mild attention to the semi-hysterical dachshund across the room.

After awhile, I moved over to what I considered to be the most reactivity-generating pair in the room, a clueless-appearing young woman barely controlling the kind of happy doofus Labrador that has no apparent sense of other dogs' personal space. Sure enough, Ty snarled and made a bound toward him, which I blocked, adding some harsh words, then regained his attention with some happy talk and obedience work. The teacher came over and told me "Your Aussie isn't a bad dog, you know. That's just prey drive. But he has to learn that he can't herd everything he wants to."

I smiled agreement, mentally counting up the collection of different sorts of ignorance contained in such a few sentences. Firstly, of course, I never thought Ty was a bad dog, or even acting "bad". That's a meaningless category in canine behavior. Not that some dogs don't have unpleasant personalities, and most dogs who do anything at all, do things we don't approve of, but creatures without a moral sense can't be bad.

Second, Ty was not demonstrating prey drive. Dogs don't think of each other as prey (exception possibly being a very predatory breed like a husky pursuing a snack-sized dog —in this case if the tiny dog suddenly stopped acting like prey, the husky might well screech to a stop and start treating it like a dog again.) If you've ever watched a dog hunt anything, even large animals, there is no snarling involved, unless they are hunting something really dangerous. They are excited and fiercely joyful, not angry at all.

Thirdly, he wasn't demonstrating herding behavior either. Although I've seen herding dogs use pieces of their herding repertoire while playing with other dogs (something most dogs find intensely irritating, by the way), I've never seen it come out in an aggression situation. Very few people who have not worked stockdogs know what herding behavior is and is not, and this lady was hardly unusual in believing that just about anything an Australian Shepherd does is "herding". Ty will bite my ankles if he is really excited and loses his head. Is this herding? No, it's biting. He bites low because he has been bred to bite low, but he is not confusing me with a cow (luckily, because then he would certainly bite me a lot harder). Bonnie is an inveterate cat chaser. Is she herding? No, she's chasing. Any annoying dog can play-bite or chase cats, it takes a stockdog to herd.

Just a few minutes ago, it unexpectedly began to rain, and my goats were in a pasture without shelter, so I ran out with Bonnie to move them to the barn. I'm sure that obedience teacher would not have seen any "herding behavior", since most of what Bonnie did was to simply go stand in the right places so that the goats would walk through the gates. No biting, lunging, snarling, or dashing about was involved. It looked very uninteresting, but without her, it would have taken far, far longer.

What was Ty really doing? Well, the fact is, he was mostly just being afraid. In a really great beginning obedience class, this would have been identified and properly dealt with as an example to the whole class. As it was, I went up to the Labrador owner after class was over and we let our dogs get to know each other. Ty was at first apprehensive, but after the Lab proved to be friendly, he relaxed.

At this stage of his life, Ty is just learning how to relate to dogs outside his family. He felt threatened by the Labrador, a much bigger male dog acting in an unpredictable, incautious, uncivilized way (adolescent Labs are notorious for eliciting reactions like Ty's in other dogs). Ty's personality, coupled with the fact that he is an unneutered male with his hormones just beginning to kick in, makes him feel that the best defense is a good offense. That's why I put him next to the Lab to begin with, so that he could experience for himself that his first reaction was the wrong one, that big stupid-acting dogs are usually harmless. And that is indeed what he learned.

Innately confident, fairly territorial dogs like Ty, if they learn early that the world is generally safe, can be wonderful in later life, being able to roll with situations that more timid dogs would not be able to handle, and yet still be ready to step up to the plate if real danger presents itself. But that only can happen if they get enough experience of the world and an education in what is and is not appropriate behavior, and what is and is not really dangerous. That's what I'm hoping to give Ty.