Safety Lessons with Moxie

Learning to live with and train a very energetic rescue puppy has been a great refresher on a lot of safety topics that we all tend to talk about but don’t always put into practice.  I’ll be sharing some of the reminders that Moxie, our Australian cattle dog-beagle mix, has been teaching me over the next couple of weeks.  The first lesson that she has taught us is communication.

Communication

Weekly puppy training classes have been as much for us as they have been for Moxie.  The class instructor is very big on teaching both verbal commands as well as non-verbal commands. 

She spent a significant portion of the first class reminding us that the non-verbal commands are important because we may be in situations where verbal commands may either not be appropriate or effective.  In noisy areas, verbal commands may be lost to the ambient noise or just add to the confusion of the situation.  When I used to be part of a team performing Functional Capacity Evaluations as well as when I helped run a team doing motion analysis research, non-verbal communication via hand signals or facial expressions was a very important part of not adding distractions for the person being tested.  Sometimes, it would be to let a team member know to pay extra attention to a movement or a behavior.  In an industrial setting, the equipment may be too noisy to be heard above it.  Knowing what specific hand signals mean in that kind of setting can be the difference between working effectively and needing to call the emergency squad.

Moxie is working on learning to live with and listen to the four two-legged people in our house.  Working on Moxie’s training has also been a work in progress for the four of us in being consistent with the specific words that we use with her.  There are so many words that we as people can utilize to mean the same thing because we can interpret intent based on tone, volume, and setting.  That is not so easy for our four legged addition – two of the phrases that we are working on maintaining clarity of intent are “stay” and “wait”. 

“Wait” for dogs is a temporary command.  To a dog, it indicates that they need to temporarily hang out where they are until a command is given to them to be released.  It can be used to tell them to wait until you put a leash on/take the leash off or until you open their crate.

“Stay” is a more permanent command.  Stay is letting the dog know that it will be there, either sitting or laying down, until you come back to them.  It lets them know that it may be a while and not just the short period of time to click on a leash or put food in a dish.

A simple example, that often causes injuries in the workplace, it the confusion of the countdown when performing a task.  It always makes for a funny scene in a movie or sitcom when the count stops so that one person can ask the other if the lift is “on 1” or “after 1”.  Unfortunately, there are many fatal incidents every year that are due to communication errors.  One of the contributing factors to the crash of Avianca Flight 52 from Bogota to New York was a communication error regarding the fuel state of the passenger plane.  While most laypeople would take the phrase “we’re running low on fuel” to be a problem, that is not the common wording in aviation for declaring an inflight emergency. Because the flight crew didn’t accurately communicate their fuel state – which was dangerously low – to the tower, the tower did not know that Avianca Flight 52 was running on fumes. Avianca Flight 52 was unable to make their first landing attempt and had to go around for a second attempt. This second attempt ended when the plane ran out of fuel 20 miles short of the runway. Better communication of their dangerously low fuel state would have potentially allowed for a successful first landing attempt.

Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been getting better at interpreting Moxie’s verbal cues (barking) communication and her non-verbal (tapping, nipping at my elbow) to know when she is hungry, her toy has gotten stuck behind something, or that it is time for a trip outside for the bathroom.  I don’t have it all down yet, but I am getting there.