TRAFFIC SEMINAR by Peter Jackson The one thing that you all must leave this meeting with is a very simple understanding, and I’m going to explain to you during the meeting what the point of this meeting is - but the whole point of this meeting is to help you understand why you are asked continuously not to hurry the dog in the street. You replacement students who’ve been here more than once, if you’ve only been here once your hearing it already - don’t push on the harness handle. Don’t hurry in the streets. Most people like to walk in the street faster than they do on the sidewalk. With the cane, that worked. With the dog, you’re countering what the dog has been taught. So this is all that we’re talking about - we’ll come back to that simple point. So that’s all that you have to remember of this whole meeting - but you need to understand why. Dogs do not know the danger that cars represent. They don’t know that the cars can hurt or kill you. They cannot conceive of that concept. And the only way we could teach them that concept would be to hit them with the car. Then they would consider the cars dangerous, but then they would never go near a car. For that reason point number two should be obvious, that they don’t consider the street a dangerous place. You do, but they don’t. To them it’s just one more place that they have to take care of you. Sometimes there are things they have to avoid out there, and different than on the sidewalk, except for pedestrians, these things move. Parking meters don’t move, trees don’t move - cars move. So the way I avoid them is different than the other things. Otherwise, the avoidance is the same. And number three, and this is an important point, you cannot reinforce the way the dog works traffic situations for you like you can reinforce anything else that they do for you. So basically what you’re being taught here now is how to reinforce the dog’s training. Reinforcement means critiquing the dog’s performance. If the dog makes an error and bumps you into something, you correct him - and then you make him go back and do it again. That’s reinforcement. If they overrun a curb, you correct them and make them do it again. That’s reinforcement. You cannot critique their traffic work like that. If you think it’s been a good traffic check, you can praise them, but that’s all you can do. But really, a lot of the time you’re not going to know what they did for you. So the question, you can’t reinforce them, raises the next question. Can you untrain them if you can’t reinforce their training? And the answer is yes - you can untrain them. And the simple way you untrain them is by rushing them across the street. The dogs are taught traffic work in a very long gradual process starting right at the very beginning of their four month training process, and reinforced throughout the four month training period. There are limitations as to what we can expect them to do, but basically we use a lot of staff driving. Remember, we can’t hit the dog with the car, but we have to elicit and create a certain amount of respect from the dog with the car, and we want just a little bit of fear so we can perhaps convince them that there is a slight element of danger here that will help them remain serious about this task. And we do that by basically persecuting them. We first show them a car is something avoided just the way that we teach all other avoidance maneuvers. And then we begin to use the ability of the car to move to chase the dog, and come after the dog in every possible situation that could possibly be encountered by the dog working as a guide on the street or the sidewalk. So we teach it to run away from a car, we teach it to back away from a car, we teach it to stop at a variety of distances from a car, and we give the dog enough practice that the fear and concern turns into confidence and awareness, so that they are the dog that you receive today. However, the one thing that is quite simply very obvious from the start, is the severe limitation that the dog is saddled with because it’s a dog, and because they cannot consider the cars to be dangerous. And this limitation is the distance at which they would judge a car to change from a car that can be trusted, to a car that can’t be trusted. So as they are walking along the sidewalks, the cars that are traveling on the streets around them have to be trusted - right? If they don’t trust them then they are afraid of them, if they are afraid of them they won’t want to be on the sidewalks - so they have to trust them. The car that turns into a driveway a half a block ahead has to be trusted. So the distance at which the dog stops trusting and starts being wary is a distance we create in training - and that distance is less than twenty feet. So anything closer than twenty feet to you moving in a direction that could endanger you we ask the dog to try to be aware of. Anything further away from twenty feet we recognize that we can’t ask them to be aware of that, because there are a lot of vehicles out there that are further than twenty feet away that they have to trust, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to get to where you want to go. So it’s important - very important - to recognize that twenty feet is not very far at all. A car traveling at thirty miles an hour covers twenty feet in one half of one second. And so that’s where the limitation comes in. In a half a second a dog that is paying attention, and a human that is paying attention, can effect an avoidance move. If one or the other of you aren’t paying attention, then you won’t be able be able to make or complete the appropriate avoidance move. So things are very fragile here, and this talks to the types of intersections we use, where we cross, and the nature of drivers. That this is a very, very strong limitation, and it’s important that you’re aware of it, because this is one of the main reasons why we ask you to cross at lighted intersections, and go with the beginning of the flow, so that the cars that the dog is dealing with are traveling more slowly and are therefore easier to judge. If we talk now about what happens when you hurry the dog across the street, or what happens when you push on the harness handle to influence the forward command - and this is something that we used to think just replacement students did when their old dog got older. We used to think, well, the old dog slowed down so they developed this habit. However, what we discovered within the past ten years, is that we found people who had been home just a month or two that were doing it - with a brand new dog! And so that really scared us, because if we thought my gosh, here is one person doing it here in Summit, New Jersey, and there is someone else doing it in New York City, what’s happening with the other seventeen hundred graduates? We’ve got to figure everybody’s doing it. The harness handle is stiff, you push on it, and doggone it they go. That is not what they were taught, but they learn to go when the harness handle is pushed. And it is just a matter of repetition. If you’re pushing every single time, pretty soon what happens is the dog doesn’t go when it hears forward, the dog goes when it’s pushed. Now usually push coincides with forward, but if you push and don’t say forward, they go. Alright, now here is something when that happens, the dog has not made a decision to enter the street. The dog has entered the street without making a decision. The dog has entered the street because the human pushed it. So this means the dog will go into the street whether it’s dangerous or not. Is that a clear distinction? This means a car could be going right in front the dog, and you push, and it goes because it trusts your judgment now. And it can happen very, very, very quickly - which is why all of your instructors are watching your hands - specifically at the corners. And their watching you in the street, making certain you stay behind the dog and you feel the pull. And that’s scary, because usually right now it’s a little slower than you want to go in the street, but remember, the dog’s job in the street is tremendously different than what your cane was. With the cane, hey, if I run I spend less time in the street - I’m safer. Canes don’t stop for cars, dogs can, so you have to give the dog a chance to evaluate. So when you say forward, you have to wait for the dog to make the decision. And you can communicate frustration, or anxiousness, or desire to do things more quickly, and you do this by pushing, or, by even more subtle things like just stepping. I didn’t push - well, you stepped. Or leaning, all sorts of body English can be picked up by your dog visually or through the harness, and as you become warm with your dog, which you will be as a team, they will be influenced by what you do with the harness handle. They follow us all the time. When we leave this meeting this evening most of you will stand up and just move - either with the leash in your hand or the harness in your hand - we’ll just be moving - it’s just a natural thing to do. And you’ll make it. But going into the street is a completely different story. If there’s one place where you want to have - where you really need to technically pay attention to the aspects of what’s happening, it’s there - because you and I know that is the single most dangerous thing you do every day is cross the streets. With the drivers driving the way they are now in this country, we are far in excess of anything The Seeing Eye ever thought it would be involved in back in 1929 when we started. And so we’re all just constantly scratching at the surface trying to figure out what more we can ask from the dogs, and I don’t think we can ask that much more without getting into the situation where the dog becomes too untrusting of cars. So we have to educate our students, and help them understand what it is that the dogs are doing. And so if you think how easy it is to untrain, you could untrain these dogs to the forward command, and you can train them to go on a push in probably - I don’t think anyone here at the school has ever attempted it - I’m confident you could do it in less than a week. You all have to take the responsibility to pay attention to what you are doing. So the only way you’re going to pay attention is to create a system of self-discipline. My suggestion is that you have a little checklist at each curb. Every time you hit a curb, remind yourself to standup straight, don’t push, say forward, and as you say forward remain immobile until the dog leads you into the street. And let the dog lead you, and match the dog’s speed. You can say hup hup in the street as long as it’s not in excess. You have to try to maintain the dog’s attention at the down curb and in the street, so that they can make an avoidance move if necessary - but don’t rush the dog across the street. If there is a snow bank, what you should do is climb up and over the snow bank and get down and stop - and then, restart. And then listen for traffic again, and then go. So you may have to make two decisions - one to enter the street, and then one to reaffirm that it is safe to go, so the dog can restart at the bottom of the snow bank. In a simplistic way, that is the meat of what we have to talk about tonight. I’ll give you one example of visiting someone who was here several years ago. He’d been home three months, and he called up and he felt that his dog was inattentive to traffic, because he felt as if he was getting close calls. So, I went down with anther instructor to serve as a staff driver, and observed him working with his dog, and indeed, the dog to my ability to see was not stopping for traffic. So we went back to the fellow’s home and I worked the dog, and the instructor drove traffic, and we quickly sensitized the dog to traffic to where she was giving us very good traffic checks. Then we gave the dog back to her master and went out for a trip, and I could see no difference in the way that this dog worked. Her traffic was agendaless again, she would not stop - but yet twenty minutes ago she had stopped for me. I could not see this gentleman doing anything that I had just talked about. He wasn’t pushing on the harness, he wasn’t doing anything - but we both knew something was wrong. So put my hand on his shoulder as he stepped forward, I would not let him go until I saw the dog move. And the dog wouldn’t move, so subtly, somehow, he was doing something that the dog could pickup on when he said forward, but it wasn’t visible. So he was probably moving a leg, or leaning, or just doing something very subtle that the dog took as her cue, and would go into the street. And this dog, when he did that, would walk right in front of a forty-five mile an hour moving car. She would walk - I mean a car could be in front of her - right here, and she would walk into it as he pushes. So there is absolutely no decision - yet I take this dog and work it myself and she won’t move. So she was totally influenced by the gentleman, she and this gentleman were operating in their own framework. When they were together, she responded to the push, or whatever it was - and I’m still not sure what it was. When she was with me she responded to forward. So then as a team we had to teach this dog again to respond to forward with the gentleman. And it took us the better part of an afternoon, but we did it. And then as an experiment, after doing a multitude of traffic checks to rebuild the gentleman’s confidence and the dog’s ability’s back up, on the way back home, he said, “I really didn’t exactly understand what happened here today, and I truly don’t believe that I was responsible for all that happened” - and I was still at times putting my hand on his shoulder. And this is again, at the end of an afternoon in which we had successfully given him quite a few traffic checks and proven his dog to be a responsible Seeing Eye dog. I set him up in a situation where there was a car coming down through the street and I told him to, “go and just do what you have been for the past four months,” - which is when he said “forward,” and somehow his whole body starts to move in a very subtle fashion. And she stepped right in front of this car again. So it’s a very fragile system. It requires tremendous responsibility to be taken by you as the human. If it is, you function as a team, but you have to understand the limitations that they encounter them on the street, and then also have to decide when not to trust them. And so in certain situations they can help you, and in certain situations they can’t. They can help you with cars that are traveling less than thirty miles an hour. The closer you get to thirty miles an hour the less help theythat the dog because it’s a dog, is beset by. They have to trust vehicles in the majority of situations can be. Over thirty miles an hour - no help at all. So don’t take thirty as carte blanche. Thirty means sometimes yes, sometimes no. Ten or fifteen miles an hour is much easier to deal with. Five miles an hour is very easy to deal with. The faster the car is going, the quicker it is approaching the dog. Beyond twenty feet the dog cannot tell how quickly the car is approaching him. Inside of twenty feet they are better able to detect how quickly the car is approaching and determine what to do. So beyond twenty feet, the average little Honda Civic traveling at thirty miles an hour, and the average little Honda Civic traveling at fifty miles an hour, they look the same to the dog. Okay, this is hard, this is a very visual thing, but this is what the dog is dealing with. As the car gets closer, and is as close as I am to the television set, now the dog says, “oh God, it’s really coming fast, and they can get out of the way.” But beyond that, they just may think, “it’s just a car - it’s moving - it’s alright.” And so they need the time to make the decisions. You need to be prepared to react to their decisions - and that’s the practice we’re giving you now, with the staff driving, and also setting you up with the cars that are all over Morristown. The more sudden and surprised the dog is, the more sudden the dog’s reaction is, the more surprised they were. And if the dog actually backs up in the street, they were completely surprised - meaning they in no way were anticipating what just happened with this car. So the more sudden things are, the more heroic you think your dog is. But actually, the more sudden it was, says how unaware the dog was of the situation as it developed. So that means the dog was trusting of this car because it had to be - at the last instant pull the car turned. And that is what you have to be most aware of - the situation the dog can predict as they start to cross the street. They see a car turning in the far lane, they can predict that, they can clock the dog’s speed, sometimes they don’t even have to slow down or they slow down ever so slightly, knowing that this adjustment will allow the car to get out of my way. All of these things you have to be aware of. And the only way you’ll be aware of them is by creating a pull in the harness that you can read. If there is slackness in the harness because you are trying to hurry, you won’t feel the subtleties that the dog will affect or create or do in the street. Question asked by student in group - Peter’s answer - Correct, because the dog cannot see that car until it cuts in front of you, and so that is probably the situation that surprises the dog the most, and also that car that’s coming from behind you on your right and turning in front of you is also going to have an angle to it. And so as it starts to turn it will be further away, but as it finishes the turn it’s closer, and so the dog then may slow, then stop and back up quickly, depending upon when it saw the car. And so if you are following appropriately and can feel the dog’s pull, and have the dog out in front of you, you have a better chance of being able to react to the dog. Some of you right now are still working on this concept, and it is not uncommon now to all of a sudden be standing in the street and your dog is behind you. And we’re saying, “what the heck just happened here?” Well, the dog reacted in a way that you are unable to duplicate. And that is just a lack of coordination that will improve throughout this meet. But, the lack of coordination will improve if you make yourself ready. So, when you go in the street you have to be really on your tiptoes. This is not a place to be relaxed, even if it is the quietest street you have ever crossed. Dog guide users get hit in the United States regularly, and some of them don’t live. The interesting thing is, in the majority of accidents involving dog guide users, the dog is not hit. So the dog managed to get out of the way. The human was not able to get out of the way. If the person remembers what happened, the majority of people will say, “Yah, I felt the dog do something, but I was unable to do it. I was unable to run forward, I was unable to back up,” - meaning, we have to figure they weren’t ready. What this then leads us to is, you need to understand all of the intersections that you use, meaning every street that you cross, you should have a clear understanding of the appropriate and legal traffic patterns, of how the light functions, and you should also try, even with assistance, to get an understanding of the nature of the drivers going through this intersection. How aggressively are they driving? Some intersections demand and require a driver to be aggressive in competing with other cars. And if that’s their frame of mind, they’re not going to be very courteous to pedestrians. And so you can plan your routes as best as you can, but keeping in mind the limitations of the dog and the nature of the drivers, you try to set yourself to crossing streets where you are not going to get a lot of traffic checks. And by taking apart an intersection and examining it, sometimes you find if you crossed west first and then north, as apposed to north first and then west, you can lower the chances of getting a traffic check. Does everybody understand? If two, two way streets intersect in a plus type intersection and it has a traffic light, sometimes you can almost eliminate the chance of getting a traffic check by crossing in a specific direction away - even going out of your way sometimes - to do it, but if it makes your crossing safer, do it. Don’t just say, “Hey, I’ve got a dog, she’ll stop.” She or he will stop in ideal situations or to the best of their ability, but we’re dealing now with a very unpredictable element - and that is the driver. And a perfect example that has changed dramatically in the past fifteen years is the nature of drivers in New York City. It used to be you saw a certain amount of courtesy from some drivers in New York City towards dog guide users. And now it’s been reversed to where it’s actual - it seems like persecution. It seems like somebody has said, “These dogs know traffic. Go after them.” Because they cut them off just as they do regular pedestrians. There is no courtesy, and so they truly challenge the dog to the limits of the dog’s abilities. So if I lived in the city, I would carefully examine the streets I’m going to cross and where I’m going to cross them, so I can minimize the chances of cars turning in, because I know there just going to cut me off with an extremely aggressive type of behavior, and I don’t want to subject my dog to more of that than I have to, because I know that they are not flawless. Question from student - Pete’s answer - No, I don’t know, I would have to assume that it’s been compiled probably with a collaboration with all of the schools, but I don’t know that that’s been done. We all know that graduates from every single school have been hit, and sometimes it’s as simple and benign as a bump in a driveway, usually it’s a little bit worse. One statistic that’s interesting to note, is the majority of street accidents, accidents which happened in the street, happened in the second half of the street crossing. The second half of the street crossing is where human and dog alike tend to be most relaxed. The majority of street accidents that have happened have happened on extremely familiar street crossings. Again, which would suggest that dog and human are very relaxed because they feel as if they can predict. What I am used to seeing with an experienced dog guide user is that street entry is typically rather cautious. Human and dog together kind of ready for that car turning, understanding that we’re going to enter slow, and at the midpoint of the street crossing you typically see the team pick the pace up. And very often what we think happens is, as the dog may suddenly stop for a traffic check etc., the human might think that’s the slower to stop for the up curb - and steps ahead to step up on to the curb and thereby into the path of the car. Sometimes that’s why the dog doesn’t get hit and the human does. But we know that the dogs are exceptionally quick, it’s just a matter of you guys learning to match their speed and understanding the limitations with which they operate - and the aggressiveness of the drivers. That’s the key. The drivers are so aggressive now that they just don’t have time to yield to you. Morristown over the last two years is trying to enforce the law, that when pedestrians are in the crosswalk, they have the right of way. And there are signs all over town, and little by little Morristown is becoming a bit more courteous. You know, a driver sees another driver stop, and they stop, and so, but that’s not typical of towns in this country. Maybe it will be, but it’s going to take a lot of work. And what is happening too, is intersections, as their being designed or redesigned, are being designed and redesigned to facilitate the movement of vehicles, and not the movement of pedestrians. So one of the newest things that is common now are computer controlled intersections. They are called volume controlled at the vain of intersections that are volume actuated intersections. They are either controlled by video cameras, which is happening with large artery manipulation of redirecting traffic as it is entering a city, or typically, like in a town like Morristown, there are sensor wires in the streets at the intersections. These sensor wires can tell the computer how many cars are waiting on the red light. And the computer can then change the amount of time. The more cars that are waiting, the less time the red light will run. The more cars that are waiting, the longer the green light that they will get will be. The less cars that are waiting, the shorter the green light will be. So if you’re waiting to cross the street that these cars are waiting to cross, and lets say there is one car, if there is one car, the green light will be seven seconds long, if there are four or more cars, the green light will be twenty seconds long. This is a real scenario - this is a light in Morristown. You can’t cross a street in seven seconds. By the time you identify the car going, the green light has already been green for over three seconds. You say forward, the dog goes, that’s four seconds. You have three seconds to get across the street now. That’s one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, and the light changes. So if you didn’t know this, you’d have a problem. I mean you would know it because sometimes you can cross the street okay, and sometimes you can’t. Now every volume activated intersection is supposed to have a button. The button should allow you to get the maximum green light time. So this gets complicated. At every light that is volume activated - each will function differently, but you will know it if you have inconsistent difficulties in dealing with this intersection. If sometimes the green light is longer, and sometimes it’s not, that’s a volume activated intersection, and you need to find out how it works. If you can’t figure it out yourself, you need to call the traffic engineer. Somebody in the Department of Public Works, somebody in the township has to know to know how this works. If we can’t make it to function to your benefit, then you have to become the squeaky wheel and try to get something put in there that gives you a longer green light, or, you have to find a better place to cross. Question from student - Peter’s answer - Yes, and I think that is a very good thing to do, because if you ask the dog to go when a car is blocking it’s path, the dog may choose to go, and the dog will probably choose - in a split second - the path of least resistance. So, if we go to the right, that means you are going out in front of the car towards parallel traffic, if you go to the rear, you’re going behind the car and in front of the next car. Either way is less than desirable. The dog typically will have to go way out of the crosswalk to effect this crossing. And remember, the dog not knowing as much about danger in these situations as we do, will often, and depending on which way it’s looking, if you say forward and the dog happens to be looking to the right towards parallel traffic, it’s probably going to head in that direction, without giving a second thought that, “Whoa, we’re going out into parallel traffic.” The dog has confidence that it can figure anything out, anytime, anywhere. So it’s just saying, “I’ll deal with it when I get up there.” You’re the one who knows it’s wrong. Your approach there is exactly right. You may take a little extra time to cross that street, but you’re guaranteeing yourself a safer time period. We’ve talked about the trust the dog has for cars - it has to have a trust up to a certain point. We know what that point is. Cars closer than twenty feet and their ability to judge the car increases as speed from thirty miles an hour goes down. Thirty mile an hour being the maximum. So if you’re crossing intersections where the cars are cutting you off are going faster than thirty miles an hour, that goes beyond the dog’s limits to help you, and then the dog is not a help to you at all. So you need to know the speed of the vehicles that are cutting you off in traffic checks with the intersections that you use. So you may need assistance in examining the intersections that you use. If you have an intersection you don’t understand or that scares you, our suggestion here is - don’t use it. If you’re scared, there’s reason. And the reason is that it’s dangerous. You need to find out how dangerous, what’s your ability, what’s the dog’s ability to deal with this intersection, and as we go on in this century we have to say look, you know, lets be helpful, lets get assistance. If you have to cross this intersection but you believe it’s too dangerous, go sighted guide with someone who is crossing. If you can’t do that, at least know what the dog’s limitations are and know that you’re flipping a coin. If you’re going to roll the dice, don’t cross the street where the cars are traveling faster than thirty miles an hour and thinking your dog can help you - because it can’t. Question from student - Pete’s answer - We have no left on reds here, we defiantly have right on reds, and so we can’t do anything specifically in training to address that. The dogs are taught to handle any car that comes in front of it the same way. The only thing we can address is through the teaching prospective of the student - meaning my typical suggestion would be, don’t send the dog on a turning car. Send the dog on a car that you’ve identified as going straight. So maybe you don’t go with the first car or the second car, what you have to do is, you have to convince yourself, and be sure that the cars that you’re using as your guiding cars, your cue cars, are not turning right on red - but in fact have a green light. With the dog with the left turn on red, so that car would be then on your right - right? Right. Certainly, what I would do is, if it were an intersection, I’d try to find out if where left turn on red was legal, and either avoid those intersections, or just never go on a turning car - and only go on a car that went straight across the intersection, because that car would say to me that I have the green light, the other car I wouldn’t be able to determine unless I heard - even if you heard two or three cars in a row, were the two or three cars in a row going left or right on red? Do we know? That would be the issue I would try to - and if I couldn’t make good decisions and was frustrated, I don’t know what I’d do truly, but as a professional I would say I would have to try to find a different way to cross the street - at the other end, or avoid it completely, or if I have to cross this street, what if I cross the parallel street first, and then cross the street, and then come back to the other side after recrossing the parallel street - I avoid the intersection, I’ve made two extra crossings to do so, but if it increases my safety dramatically, I guess the extra work is worth it. There is a quick way to go to work, and there is a safer way to go to work. It is amazing when I talk to people who can sit here and nod their heads, and then I’ll go visit them and see them doing something that is clearly, clearly exceeding the dog’s ability to judge, and they say - or clearly a dangerous thing - but to them they’ve never had a dangerous occurrence. And so they’re doing it because they’ve never been struck by lightning here. But yet you know what you know - but you have to believe in this theory folks, these are just dogs. They do lots and lots of neat things for you, but there’re a dog first. And when you say forward, they could be looking at that bread crumb in the street - meaning their attention is not on you. Meaning if they go at that time, you have a dangerous situation. So you have to try to create as safe a situation as possible, you have to try maintain as much attention as possible, and like Joe said, you have to manipulate and try and control your environment as much as possible. Question from student - Pete’s answer - You would have to teach the dog how to cross the street, so this is a situation in a street crossing where as the dog stands at one corner, because the sidewalk on the other side is offset, one direction or the other, it may not be clear to the dog which direction it’s supposed to cross. You would need a sighted person, and you would have to do what we call a patterning exercise. Meaning you would have to walk your dog at heel, going sighted guide through the appropriate path until he or she had enough repetitions. Typically we would go two or three repetitions across the street, getting the dog up on the sidewalk in the desired spot at the finish, so the dog begins to understand that this is where we want to go. Then, the sighted assistant would watch you work the dog to determine whether the dog has understood that this is the correct path. Some townships or cities - not on every corner but on some corners in a kind of a way to save money, or in a hasty way to meet motor requirements, are out of forward ramps. Instead of putting two ramps at one corner - one across each street - they put one in the middle of the corner, which faces diagonally into the intersection, and some ramps, even if there are two ramps, they don’t face straight. If they don’t face straight and your dog has brought you into the ramp, if you’re the least bit uncertain of your body direction, sidestep away from the parallel street as far as you can. If you need sighted assistance to determine how far is safe, get it and find out. Typically sidestep at least until you are on the uphill side of the ramp and can find a curb. This does two things. One, just by sidestepping off of the diagonal and further up the perpendicular street, you will help redirect your body direction so it’s facing more perpendicularly across the street you choose to cross, and two, you will change the direction of your dog’s visual perspective. So as it comes into the ramp and is standing lined up with the ramp, it’s not looking across the street you wish to cross. It’s looking at the diagonal corner. So if you’re on the southwest corner, it’s looking at the northeast corner. And remember, this is a dog who has no clue what the right way to cross all these intersections are. “Hey, I just go out there and I do my best to stay away form these things, and we get across.” And so it really depends upon what they’re seeing as to which way they’re going to go. If you wait a minute, lets move over here - then the dog will go, “Oh, you want to go here - okay, let’s do that.” And so if the parallel street is on your right as you walk down the block and you want to cross and keep going in the same direction, sidestep out of the ramp, and there will be enough instances in the routes and the intersections that you encounter in Morristown that you’ll have to do this as practice, because we have ramps that face every which way. We also have corners which have no ramps, so there is nothing with which you can direct yourself on except traffic sounds. Again, this is going to be more and more common, and so you’ll have to create little things at each intersection that will help you learn to evaluate your young dog’s body direction. A young dog does not function like the experienced dog - they don’t always come up to the down curb and face straight across the street. As they gain experience, you can begin to rely upon their body direction more to help you, but with this level of experience you have to take more responsibility to be sure your body direction is correct. In a finished summary, the most important thing was, don’t hurry into the street, don’t push into the street, and the only way you can continue to teach yourself is critique yourself. At every curb, remind yourself what you should be doing. This is going to be harder and harder the longer you are with your dog. This is a fact, and as you leave here and go to your home, your dog’s confidence level is going to continue to rise and rise. So the types of traffic checks you’re getting here, you will no longer see when you get home because your dog is too smart to let itself get tricked. It’s getting tricked by the staff driver now. What I’m doing is, I’m waiting until the dog has said, “Okay, nobody is going to cut me off,” and then I cut them off. So you get the practice of the suddenness of the response. We can’t get citizens to do that, so they are the source of your other types of checks. But as these types checks get less and less, you’ll see that the dog’s confidence and it’s ability to trust cars grows. And so one final topic, it is possible, even though you’re doing your best to not contribute to untraining, that your dog could rise into a level of confidence that they’re so trusting of cars that they are too close - and you will be the first person to know it. There is nobody who knows your dog better than you. And so if you go, “Wow, that was scary,” - the first thing you do is you go home and you call us. So, you have people tell you that they do not think the dog has stopped for a car because they are untrained and don’t know what to do. You are the judge of what is safe. If you begin to have any questions about what your dog is doing, you call us, and we will give you a plan to help you evaluate the true safety of the dog, and if we are not satisfied upon re-evaluating after this plan has been implemented, we will come right out to see you regardless of where you live - because this is a safety issue that needs to be evaluated right away. So again, it can happen, there is nobody who can say that it will or it won’t if you’re playing the game like you’re supposed to - we hope it won’t happen, but it’s anybody’s guess. If you go six months and don’t have a traffic check, and you live in the country, and you go to downtown in the city all of a sudden, and are challenged with a hundred checks in a week’s time, how is your dog going to respond, I can’t honestly can’t answer. You will have to find out. We would like to think they would respond, but remember, you’re good at what you do. If you walk along country roads and cross fields and hike woods, then maybe a little forgetfulness might take place and a cause for concern could be valid, and if there is a cause for concern, we’re here to help you evaluate that. We’re here to come visit you and validate, or we’re here to meet you in a city, we’re here to talk you through, so we are your resource. Okay. Oh, and one more thing I forgot. Audible signals. Okay, these are the crickets and the coo coos and everything else. If you use these things, don’t go the instant the sound starts - because you will condition the dog to go on the sound. They start the instant the light changes. And after the light changes it’s a few seconds before cars start to go anyway. So if you rush into the street you’re one, contributing to a conditioned response, meaning just like pushing, no decision. And two, if you rush into the street, you run the risk of encountering a driver who is trying to beat the light. Who’s accelerated on the orange and is just sneaking through on the beginning of the red. And just as red changes and green changes and you hear the coo coo and you step out in front of him. So, they really don’t make an intersection safer. A lot of people think they make an intersection safer. No, they just confirm when the light is green or when the light is red and which direction traffic is moving in. So, if you’re using them, you’re better off just using them to confirm what the traffic flow has already told you. Okay, that’s all I had to say. Thank you all for coming. 12/2004