by Jan Fennell
Dogs are pack animals, they like to live in groups. I often say to people that two dogs are half the work of one. They do play together, they do amuse each other, and when their owner is absent they provide company for each other. Whatever the domestic set up, however, it is important to remember that the dog regards the other animals, including the humans, that share its space as fellow members of its pack. We all need to live by the rules and the dog is more willing to live by the rules than we are. The key to everything I do lies in establishing a set of rules that the dog will understand within the context of its pack. Once an owner has begun applying the four principles I have outlined here, it should take him or her around a fortnight to get their dog to digest those rules fully. Of course, no two pets are the same. The more damaged the dog, the longer it takes; the more severe the behaviour, the longer it takes. There is no place for fear or pain in my method so my message is always the same: be patient, be gentle, and it will happen.
Chapter 7
Separate Lives: Dealing with Separation Anxiety
From obsessive behaviour to bedwetting or biting, I begin every case I see with the process of Amichien Bonding. Only when the dog’s misplaced sense of status has been removed, can it and its owners begin to lead a more relaxed and rewarding life. But of course no two sets of circumstances are the same and no two problems are precisely the same – in fact every dog I have worked with has demonstrated more than one problem, not just the problem the owners were concerned about. As a result, I have found myself adapting my method to deal with a wide range of dogs and an even wider range of problems. If one thing became apparent as soon as I began doing so, it was that my life was never going to be dull.
No case illustrates this better than one of the first I dealt with, that of Sally, a district nurse who lived in a lovely cottage in a village a few miles away from my home. Sally rang me one evening in an agitated state. ‘I’ve heard about the work you’ve been doing,’ she said. ‘I wonder whether you can sort out my Bruce.’ Bruce was a four-year-old mongrel, a handsome, fox-like chap. Sally loved him to pieces and he felt much the same way – the problem was he loved her just a little too much. And he simply could not bear to be parted from her!
When she was at home, Bruce would trail around after her wherever she went. He would be constantly under her feet. Her real problems began whenever she left the house, however. The moment Sally went out of the door, all hell broke loose. Bruce would fly around the house, frantically grabbing hold of whatever pieces of Sally’s clothing he could find. She would often return home to find assorted pieces from her wardrobe arranged in the form of a bed in which Bruce had been lying. Needless to say, her dry cleaning bill had become astronomical. Many of her favourite outfits were unwearable.
By far the most disturbing aspect of Bruce’s behaviour, however, was the way he had begun physically attacking the front door of the cottage. At first he had begun chewing at the wooden frame. His attacks had slowly stripped the wood away to expose the wall underneath. By the time Sally rang me, he had gnawed his way through the wallpaper and the plasterwork so that the bare brick had now been exposed. The doorway looked awful. Sally had become desperate to call in the local carpenter but knew there was little point fixing the frame until Bruce mended his ways.
In the years that have followed, I have seen these symptoms on countless other occasions. Bruce’s behaviour represented a classic example of one of the more common problems I have to deal with: separation anxiety. There is no question that being separated from its owner can be terribly upsetting for a dog. The sense of anguish the dog feels can be the cause of some terrible destructive behaviour. I have seen dogs who eat furniture and curtains, clothes and newspapers. I recall one dog who ate a cassette tape; it had to be operated on so that the spaghetti-like length of tape that had unspooled in its stomach could be removed. It hardly needs saying, but dogs can kill themselves in such situations.
Yet my experience has shown me that a dog’s anxiety is not through pining like some abandoned child, but that it is the dog who sees itself as a parent, and it is distressed because its child is out of its sight. It did not take me long to realise that this was precisely what Sally’s dog Bruce believed. It was soon clear too, that the life the two of them led together only served to underline this situation. The first thing I noticed when I visited Sally was that Bruce came bounding up to me. This was clearly something Sally perceived as normal dog behaviour. As a result, he had no appreciation of personal space. On top of this, the dog trailed her wherever she went, often walking at her heel from room to room. Their companionship, on the face of it, was rather sweet, particularly given that Sally had recently split up with her partner. But I knew it was exacerbating the problems that had developed.
When I asked Sally about her routine, it was soon clear there was none to speak of. Being a district nurse, her calls came at odd times during the day. There was no real consistency. She would usually leave in the morning but sometimes she would pop home for lunch, other times she would not get back until late at night. It was clear there was an element of guilt about this. For instance, the house was full of toys of every conceivable kind. There was also a bucket full of biscuits near the front door. When I asked what that was for, Sally explained that it was part of her leaving routine. As she left each morning she would pat him, tell Bruce she’d see him later then give him a biscuit as she left. The biscuits were left out there so that Bruce could help himself while she was away. There was no question that Bruce was very well loved but that Sally was channelling that love incorrectly. She needed to turn her affection in a different direction.
The diagnosis was not long in forming. I felt pretty sure that I had got a dog that was feeling responsible for its owner. Bruce felt that Sally was his baby and not vice versa so that whenever she got up to move he – like any good parent – followed to make sure she was all right. His attacks on the door frame were expressions of pure panic on his part. The area he had concentrated on was where the separation had taken place. His biting of the door was his attempt to break out of the house and reunite himself with his baby. When I explained to Sally what was going on she understood his reaction perfectly. Wouldn’t you be out of your mind with worry if your baby left you in that way? Apart from anything else it was all he could do. (It has now been proven scientifically that a dog’s endorphin levels increase when it is chewing – like an adrenaline rush, it dulls the pain.)
In addition, Sally was doing a lot of things that did not help the situation much. To begin with I pointed out that the way she was leaving the house was agitating Bruce. The ritual she went through before leaving each morning was underlining his status as the leader of their little pack. As he had begun to understand the ritual, he could anticipate what was going to happen. The dog felt that he was responsible and did not want her to go out into a world he felt she did not understand: an Alpha, by definition of its status, knows best.
His anxiety was heightened by her mood when she returned. Whenever she returned to find a mess Sally scolded Bruce. As far as Bruce was concerned, this must be connected to something she encountered while she was out there. So the dog was anxious when she was gone and anxious when she came back because of what had happened to her. As if all this was not enough, the situation was exacerbated even more by the way she kept leaving biscuits at the door. Food is provided by the leader. So if you can get food at any time, you must be the leader.
Whenever I come across a case like this, I am reminded of that scene in Peter Pan when Wendy and the children fly off with Tinker Bell the fairy. As they leave, some of Tinker Bell’s fairy dust lands on their dog, Nana, who floats up with them. When her chain stops her floating any farther, her face is wreathed in a mixture of sadness and terror. She is worried at where her family are going and desperate that she is not going along to offer her protection. I felt so sorry for that dog and I felt a similar sympathy for Bruce. Like so many of the dogs I come across, it believed it was responsible
for its owner. Because its origins lay in a society where the preservation of the pack was the key, its separation from its child was making it desperate. My job was to reverse its roles: its job description had to be changed.
Each owner I deal with has to begin the same way. The first thing Sally had to do was to go through the process of Amichien Bonding. Only by going through the four elements would she be able to rebalance the relationship so that Bruce was relieved of the responsibility that was causing him such stress. Sally’s closeness to Bruce was such that she felt terribly guilty about ignoring him at first. Like so many people, she wondered whether her dog was being upset by this. To this day, people who begin the process say to me, ‘I’m sure my dog thinks I don’t love it any more.’ My response to this is that we are once more hung up on a human idea of the world, specifically our idea of love. If you really love someone or something, your whole motivation should be to do right by them. In circumstances like this, I ask owners to think less about what their need is and more about what the animal’s need is. And besides, once the bonding process has been achieved, you are free to shower your dog with as much affection as you like: it is affection in a different direction.
Bruce was four years old, and he had been doing this for a long time, so he was definitely what I call a remedial dog. To deal with the specific problem of leaving the house, I needed to take the process deeper. The first thing I did was to get Sally to stop addressing the dog when she was leaving. I wanted her to behave like a leader and to come and go as she pleased. I also asked her to make a less drastic transformation in the atmosphere in the cottage when she left. While she was there the radio or television would be blaring away and she would be chatting to Bruce or on the telephone. The moment she walked out the door all that noise disappeared. Bruce was left there suffering silence. The house was going from this place where there was noise and activity to this place where there was nothing. It was obvious to the dog that she was about to leave.
I also asked her to stop leaving food around. The signal it was sending was completely wrong. It was underlining the dog’s feeling that it was leader. Besides, it was a fairly pointless exercise. The dog wasn’t eating the biscuits. What parent is going to sit down to a meal when it doesn’t know where its child is? Instead, I got Sally to feed the dog herself, gesture eating so as to emphasise her leadership. I asked her to continue this for the next two weeks.
As far as I was concerned, however, the key thing Sally had to do was take the drama out of her departure and arrival, to make it seem like an ordinary occurrence. To help Bruce understand that Sally’s comings and goings were commonplace, I asked her to try a technique I call ‘gesture leaving’. I must admit Sally gave me a funny look when I first explained what I wanted her to do but she went ahead nevertheless. I wanted her to leave without Bruce becoming agitated. She could not go out through the front door for obvious reasons. This was where all Bruce’s anxieties were concentrated. Unfortunately the cottage did not have any other doors so I asked her to leave by another exit, her living-room window.
Before she did this, I got her to put on her shoes and coat in full view of Bruce. I also asked her to leave the radio on so that there was no discernible change of atmosphere. She then climbed up and out of the window, walked around the side of the house and came back in through the front door. As she reappeared I made sure she completely ignored Bruce. The message she was sending out was that she was the leader and she would come and go as she pleased. She did not need to ask his permission to leave the house.
Sally thought the double-takes on Bruce’s face were marvellous. He couldn’t take in what was going on. More importantly, however, he wasn’t frightened by what was going on either. Encouraged by this, I got her to repeat the process, this time staying out for five minutes. Once more she returned to ignore Bruce. Once more he was relaxed at the prospect of Sally having left and re-entered the house. On this occasion, as in the first, Sally returned to find the door untouched.
I am often asked why leadership needs to be reinforced every time you reunite with your dog. There are several answers to this. On the most fundamental level the answer, once more, lies back in the wild. The make-up of packs is constantly changing. When a group of wolves heads off on the hunt, there is no guarantee each of them will return alive. There is always a possibility that the Alpha pair or their subordinates may be wounded or killed and fail to reappear. So after each separation the hierarchy is re-established, the pack redefines its power structure so that at any given time it knows who is going to lead, who is going to defend the pack and in what order the roles are to be carried out. It is an instinctive action on the part of the dog and it applies equally to the domestic situation. Whenever you leave the dog’s sight, it has no means of knowing or understanding where you have gone or how long you have gone for. So whenever you reappear, regardless of how long you have been absent, your dog will need to know who is performing the role of leader. This is the only way the status quo can be maintained.
With this in mind, it was imperative that Sally kept doing this for an extended period. We began working over the weekend. I got her to stay out an extra five minutes each time she went out. By the end of the weekend, Bruce was noticeably more relaxed and the door had been left alone. I don’t know what the neighbours were thinking of this woman jumping out of the window continuously but, frankly, neither Sally nor I cared.
Sally carried on doing the same thing when she went back to work. Soon, instead of rushing up to her when she reappeared in the evening, Bruce was standing there wagging his tail. The pair were more devoted to each other than ever. Soon Sally was finally able to make her long-awaited call to the local carpenter.
Chapter 8
Mean and Moody: Dealing with Nervous Aggression
As news of my reputation with problem dogs spread, I was increasingly invited to take part in radio phone-in programmes. Then, in the spring of 1999, I was invited by my local television station, Yorkshire TV, to apply my methods to six problem dogs. The dogs had been chosen from six hundred letters submitted, and represented a cross-section of the type of difficulties I am asked to sort out in my work. Among them was what appeared to be a bad-tempered, golden cocker spaniel called Meg.
Her owners, Steve and Debbie, told me that she suffered from sudden mood swings; she would break into a high-pitched bark whenever strangers approached, she would rip up the letters when the postman came in the morning. Worst of all she was a biter, and had nipped the young daughter of a friend of theirs. Even the owners, who had three children of their own, admitted they were apprehensive of Meg when she was in ‘one of her moods’. They confessed they had been advised to do one of two things: give her a sound beating or have her destroyed before she did any serious injury.
Even before I had met Meg, I was certain she was a classic example of a dog suffering from by far the most common problem I am asked to deal with: nervous aggression. Nervous aggression can manifest itself in an incredibly wide range of behaviour. It is at the heart of the problems many, many people have with dogs biting, barking at or jumping up on to visitors to their homes. It is the root cause of attacks on those most endangered of species the postman, the milkman and the newspaper delivery boy. Yet for all its myriad manifestations, nervous aggression can be conquered by making one fundamental change: removing from the dog its status as leader of its pack.
No dog decides it is the leader of its pack of its own volition. The dog knows instinctively that there must be a leader for the pack to survive, and Meg’s owners had inadvertently given her the position by the signals they had given out. Given this, Meg’s behaviour was perfectly understandable. She was merely trying to carry out the job she had been given. Her aggression was down to the fact that she had been placed in a situation where she had no experience and no guidance and was operating in a world of which she had no understanding. Her ferocious attitude towards strangers was her way of repelling intruders she believed might pose a threat to her
‘pack’. As if to exacerbate all this, Meg was the only dog in the household. Ask any lone parent about the stress that role brings with it!
As Steve and Debbie were discovering, in this situation an owner is powerless to help. Indeed what he or she sees as assistance is usually the opposite. The dog does not look to the owner for advice. In its mind, if the owner was superior, stronger and more experienced, he or she would be the leader. So the owner is ignored and, if too persistent, reminded of his or her subordinate role via aggression. It was little wonder the whole household was becoming wary of Meg and her moods.
I understood the feelings Meg’s owners were suffering all too well. They loved their dog, and they just wanted to help it. What they did not realise was that the best way to provide that help was to let it know who was boss. By doing that they could give it some peace and take the pressure off it.
In all the work I do, I like to lead by example. If owners are to follow my method properly, I need to show them precisely what can be achieved by establishing leadership. So from the moment I first walked into the living room I refused to acknowledge Meg in any way, there was no eye contact, no touching, nothing. As well as underlining my Alpha status, this conveyed to Meg that I posed no threat to her or her wards. To underscore my status further still, I also ensured I looked as if I belonged there, in fact as if I owned the place. People are constantly amazed at the power contained within this simple act. Rather than making her customary fuss, Meg simply ignored me in return. Even this was a revelation to a family whose normal reaction by now was to panic whenever a newcomer came into contact with Meg.
My challenge now was to enable Meg’s owners to behave in the same authoritative manner. So the first thing I did was to get Steve and Debbie to leave the room without acknowledging her. I then asked them to return to the room continuing to ignore Meg’s behaviour, whatever it was. Like most owners, they found it an unnatural thing to do at first. It was a step into the unknown. They had seen their dog display such eccentric behaviour, part of them, I’m sure, feared how she would react to this sudden snub. But the more I explained to them, the more they understood their constant deferring to Meg was prolonging her reign of terror. Each time they acknowledged her – in whatever way – they were re-establishing her position as leader. And by doing that, nothing was going to change.