The Dog Listener

by Jan Fennell

  There are, I’m sure, many more discoveries to be made, many more eye-opening insights to be gained. Yet even with the knowledge we now have, we should not be surprised that the empathy between the two species was so powerful. Quite the opposite in fact, the immense similarities between the two animals made them natural partners.

  The wealth of study that has been done in this area tells us that both the ancient wolf and the Stone-Age man shared the same driving instincts and the same social organization. In simple terms, both were predators and lived in groups or packs with a clear structure. One of the strongest similarities the two shared was their inherent selfishness. A dog’s response to any situation – like man’s – is ‘what’s in it for me?’ In this instance, it is easy to see that the relationship they developed was of immense mutual benefit to both species.

  As the less suspicious, more trusting wolf settled into its new environment alongside man, it found it had access to more sophisticated hunting techniques and tools such as snares and stone arrows, for instance. At night it could find warmth at the side of man’s fire and food in the form of discarded scraps. It was little wonder it took so easily to the domestication that was about to begin. By introducing the wolf to his domestic life, man reaped the benefits of a superior set of instincts. Earlier in his history, the Neanderthal man’s exaggerated proboscis had provided him with a powerful sense of smell; his descendant saw that by integrating the newly domesticated wolf into the hunt, he could once more tap into this lost sense. The dog became a vital cog in the hunting machine, helping to flush out, isolate and, if necessary, kill the prey. In addition to all this, of course, man enjoyed the companionship and protection the dog provided within the camp.

  The two species understood each other instinctively and completely. In their separate packs, both man and wolf knew their survival depended on the survival of their community. Everyone within that community had a role to perform and got on with it. It was only natural that the same rules should be applied in the extended pack. So while humans concentrated on jobs like fuel gathering, berry picking, house repairs and cooking, the dogs’ main role was to go out with the hunters as their eyes and ears. They would perform a similar role back within the camp, acting as the first line of defence, warding off attackers and warning the humans of their approach. The degree of understanding between man and dog was at its peak. In the centuries that have passed since then, however, the bond has been broken.

  It is not hard to see how the two species have gone their separate ways. In the centuries since man has become the dominant force on earth, he has moulded the dog – and many other animals – according to the rules of his society alone. It did not take man long to spot he could adjust, improve and specialise the skills of dogs by putting them together selectively for breeding purposes. As early as 7000 BC, in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia, for instance, someone noticed the impressive hunting skills of the Arabian desert wolf, a lighter, faster variety of its northern relative. Slowly the wolf evolved into a dog able to chase and catch prey in this harsh climate and, more importantly, to do so according to man’s commands. The dog – variously known as the Saluki, Persian greyhound or gazelle hound – remains unchanged today and may well be the first example of a purebred dog. It was certainly not the last. In ancient Egypt, the Pharaoh hound was bred for hunting. In Russia, the borzoi was bred to chase bears. In Polynesia and Central America, communities even developed dog breeds specifically for food.

  The process has continued through the ages, aided by the dog’s willingness to be ‘imprinted’ by our species. Here in England, for instance, the hunting culture of the landowning aristocracy produced a collection of dogs customised to fulfil specific roles. On a 19th-century estate, a typical pack would include a springer spaniel, to literally spring or flush the game from cover, a pointer or setter to locate birds, and a retriever to return the dead or wounded game to the handler.

  Elsewhere, other breeds maintained the historic bond between man and dog even more closely. Nowhere was this exemplified better than in the development of guide dogs for the blind. It was at the end of the Great War, at a large country convalescent home in Potsdam, Germany, that a doctor working with injured veterans noticed just by chance that when patients who had lost their sight started moving towards a flight of steps his German shepherd would cut them off. The doctor sensed the dog was turning them away from danger. He began training his dogs specifically to use this natural shepherding ability to help humans who could no longer see. The guide dog for the blind developed from there. It may be our most direct throwback to that earliest community. Here was a dog providing a sense that man has lost. Unfortunately it is a rare example of co-operation in the modern world.

  In more recent times our relationship has changed, as far as I am concerned, often to the detriment of the dog. Our former partners in survival have become companions cum accessories. The evolution of the so-called lapdog illustrates this perfectly. The breeds were probably begun in the Buddhist temples of the high Himalayas. There, holy men bred the hardy Tibetan spaniels so that they became smaller and smaller. They then used the dogs as body warmers, teaching them to jump up on to their laps and remain under their robes to fend off the cold.

  By the time of Charles II, the idea had travelled to England, where the English toy spaniel evolved from breedings of tinier and tinier examples of the setter. Over time, these little gundogs were pampered by their wealthy owners and crossed with toy-dog breeds from the East. The breed’s history is still visible today in the distinctive flat-faced features of the King Charles spaniel. This was, to my mind, a pivotal moment in the history of man’s relationship with the dog. To the dog nothing had changed but to his former partner, the relationship was entirely new. The dog had ceased to have a function beyond mere decoration. It was a foretaste of what was to come.

  Today, examples of the old relationship that man and dog enjoyed are few and far between. Working dogs such as gun dogs, police dogs and farm dogs, as well as the guide dogs I have already mentioned, spring to mind. However they are the tiny exceptions. In general today we have a culture and society in which no consideration has been given to the dog’s place. The old allegiance has been forgotten. Our familiarity has bred contempt, and along the way the instinctive understanding the two species shared has been lost.

  Again, it is easy to see why there has been a communications breakdown: the small communities in which we began our history have been replaced by one huge, homogeneous society, a global village. Our lives in the big cities have made us anonymous, and we don’t know or acknowledge the people we are around. If we have become divorced from the needs of our fellow humans we have lost touch completely with dogs. As we have learned to cope with all the things we have to face in our society, we have simply assumed that our dogs have done the same thing. The truth is they haven’t. Today, man’s concept of the dog’s role and the dog’s idea of its place are completely at odds with each other. We expect this one species to abide by our norms of behaviour, to live by rules we would never impose on another animal, say a sheep or a cow. Even cats are allowed to scratch themselves. Only dogs are told they cannot do what they like.

  It is ironic – and to my mind, tragic – that of all the 1.5 million species on this planet, the one species blessed with the intelligence to appreciate the beauty in others fails to respect dogs for what they are. As a result, the exceptional understanding that existed between us and our former best friends has all but disappeared. It is little wonder there are more problems with dogs today than there have ever been.

  Of course there are many people who are living perfectly happily with their dogs. The ancient bond clearly lives on inside us somewhere. No other animal evokes the same set of emotions or forms the basis for such loving relationships. The fact remains that people today who are living in harmony with their dogs are getting there by a happy accident rather than through knowledge. Our awareness of the instinctive, unspoken language that we share with o
ur dogs has been lost.

  In the last decade, I have attempted to bridge that divide, to attempt to re-establish that link between man and dog. My search for this missing means of communication has been a long and at times frustrating one. Ultimately, however, it has been the most rewarding and exciting journey I have ever made.

  Chapter 2

  A Life with Dogs

  It is hard for me to imagine this now, but there was a time when I could not face the prospect of forming a friendship with another dog. In the awful aftermath of Purdey’s death, I had become deeply disillusioned. At one point I even think I came out with the classic line ‘I will never have another dog in this house’. The reality was, however, that my affection for dogs ran too deep. And, within a year or so of Purdey’s death, a little gun dog was healing the scars left by my tragic loss.

  Despite our early setback, my family and I had settled well into country life. It was my husband’s interest in hunting that brought dogs back into our home. One day, in the autumn of 1973, he came back from a rough shoot bemoaning his lack of a good gun dog. He had seen a wounded rabbit slinking its way into the woods to die. ‘If I had a dog that couldn’t have happened,’ he complained with a look that left little room for doubt about what he was thinking.

  So it was that on his birthday that September, his first gun dog, a springer spaniel bitch we called Kelpie arrived in the house. He loved the dog as I did. It was the beginning of my lifelong love affair with that beautiful breed.

  We were, predictably I suppose, terrified of repeating the experience of Purdey and immediately bought one of the standard text books on gundog training. I have to confess that our first efforts at shaping Kelpie up were far from a roaring success. We wanted to train Kelpie to retrieve, an unnatural act for a springer. Sticking rigidly to the book, we started her off by throwing objects for her to recover and return to us. The book stressed the importance of beginning with something very lightweight. The idea was to teach the dog to be ‘soft mouthed’ with the objects it recovered.

  We decided to use one of Ellie’s old bibs, which we tied in a knot. One morning we took Kelpie outdoors, threw the bib into the distance and waited for her to return it to us. We were so thrilled when she bounded off and picked up the bib, but our expressions soon changed as she ran straight past us into the house. I remember my husband looking at me with a blank look: ‘What does the book say we do now?’ he said. At that point I think we all collapsed to the floor with laughter. We made an awful lot of mistakes with Kelpie but we had great fun too. Whenever I feel too full of myself or over-confident about the control I am able to achieve over dogs today, I think back to that moment.

  Kelpie was very much my husband’s dog, however. I was so pleased with her and the way she had fitted in so well to our life that soon afterwards I decided to get a dog of my own. I had fallen hopelessly for the spaniel and bought a nine-week-old puppy, a bitch from the show strain of the springer spaniel. I called her Lady after the imaginary dog I’d had as a child.

  My interest lay less in hunting than in breeding and showing dogs. So it was that Lady became my introduction to that fascinating world. By the middle of the 1970s, I was travelling with her to shows all over the country. She was a lovely dog and was popular with judges wherever we went. By 1976, Lady had qualified for the most prestigious dog show of all, Cruft’s, in London. The day we travelled down to the famous arena at Olympia was a moment of great pride for me.

  I found the world of dog shows rewarding and hugely enjoyable. It was, apart from everything else, a great social network, a way of meeting like-minded people. Two of the closest friends I made were Bert and Gwen Green, a well-known couple in the dog world, whose line of dogs, under the Springfayre affix, were hugely popular. Bert and Gwen knew of my interest in moving on to breeding dogs. It was they who gave me Donna, Lady’s three-year-old grandmother. Donna had all the makings of a good, foundation bitch and helped me start my own breeding line. I had soon bred my first ever litter from her, and kept one of the seven dogs for myself, calling him Chrissy.

  Chrissy was a show dog that became a very successful working gun dog. He won a puppy class at the age of eight months and qualified for Cruft’s too. The highlight of my time with him came in October 1977 when I took him to the Show Spaniels Field Day, a prestigious event for gundogs that have qualified for Cruft’s. The competition judged the dogs on their working ability only. I was, as the footballing expression goes, over the moon when Chrissy won the prize for Best English Springer On The Day. I vividly remember the moment the judge handed me the winner’s rosette. ‘Welcome to the elite,’ he told me. After that I truly felt I had arrived in the dog world.

  Encouraged by this success, I went on to improve my line through two well-bred bitches and I think I gained a pretty respectable reputation. Throughout this time I was also adding to the family’s collection of dogs. Tragically, Donna died of a tumour in 1979, aged only eight, but in the aftermath I also bought a cocker spaniel for my daughter, named Susie, and bred from her daughter Sandy.

  It was, however, Khan, one of the English springer spaniels I had bred, that brought me my greatest success, winning many classes and Best of Breed. He was a wonderful dog with beautiful features, in particular the sort of warm but masculine face that judges were always looking for. In 1983 he qualified for Cruft’s, emulating the feat of six of my previous dogs. To my delight he won his class. Again the memory of receiving the winner’s card fills me with pride.

  As I have explained, I met some wonderful, warmhearted people who taught me a great deal. There was no wiser soul than Bert Green. I remember he used to say to me: ‘I doubt you do the breed any good, but don’t do it any harm.’ By that he meant we had a responsibility to be faithful to the principles of the dog breeding fraternity.

  To me, breeding dogs came with its own set of responsibilities, particularly as the majority of the small number of dogs I bred were being carefully placed into family homes. My job was to ensure these dogs had temperaments that made them a pleasure to own. So inevitably I had spent a lot of time working on training the dogs, working on what everyone generally referred to as ‘obedience classes’.

  It was here that the unease I had long felt about our attitude to dogs really broke through to the surface. The memory of Purdey was a constant cloud at the back of my mind. I was forever asking myself what I had done wrong, wondering whether I had somehow given her the wrong kind of training?

  My growing unease was fuelled further by the mistrust I felt about the traditional enforcement methods of training. There was nothing radical or revolutionary about my training techniques then. Far from it, I was as conservative as everyone else in most ways. I would go through the routine of teaching a dog to sit and stay by pushing its bottom on the ground, to come to heel with a jerk on a choke chain, and to follow. And I would instil these disciplines through the time-honoured methods.

  Yet as I spent more and more time training, I became aware of a nagging doubt about what I was doing. It was as if a voice at the back of my mind was constantly saying: you are making the dog do this, the dog does not want to do this.

  In truth, I had always hated the word ‘obedience’. It carried the same connotation as ‘breaking in’ within the horse world. It simply underlined the reality of the situation, that what I was using was a kind of enforcement, a means of going against the will of the animal. It is, to my mind, like the word ‘obey’ within marriage vows. Why not use words like ‘work alongside’, ‘pull together’, ‘co-operate’? ‘Obey’ is just too emotive for me. But what could I do about it? There were no books about how to do it any other way. And who was I to argue? There are no two ways about it, you have to have your dog under control, you can’t have it just running amok. It is our responsibility as it is with our children to make them socially responsible. I had no real alternative.

  Nevertheless, it was at this time that I began trying to make the training process more humane if I possibly could. With this
in mind I began introducing a few subtle changes in my technique. The first involved nothing more complex than a simple change of language. As I explained, I was using the traditional methods of enforcement, including the so-called choke chain. As far as I was concerned the name was a misnomer. Used correctly the chain should never choke a dog, it should merely check it. There was no use in using it to jerk dogs back as far as I was concerned. So I tried to soften the terminology so as to soften the attitude of the humans.

  In my training, I taught people to use the chain to make a light, clicking noise that the dog would recognise as an anticipatory signal before it moved forward. When it heard the chain, it reacted so as to avoid being choked. So to me and my pupils, they were check chains rather than choke chains. It was a minor change but the difference in emphasis was fundamental.

  I tried to do the same in heel work. I did not approve of the method most people used which involved taking the lead and pulling the dog down. I thought that was wrong. My original way of getting it to lie down was to make the dog sit, then tip the dog gently to one side by taking away its inside leg. Wherever I could, I was always looking for a softer way within the traditional parameters of the work.

  As I did so, I was very successful at teaching people how to work with their dogs. Yet the changes I was achieving in softening the approach were so small. The central philosophy remained the same. I was making the dog do it. I always felt I was imposing my will on the dog rather than making it do what I wanted by choice. And I sensed that the dog did not know why it was doing it. The ideas that changed all this began to form themselves at the end of the 1980s.