by Jan Fennell
After ten days they had virtually given up, then they got a phone call from someone in Dublin who had found a stray dog fitting their description and had taken it in. They went back up there in their car and sure enough it was Kerry. Enid thought they were pleased to see her. But what really moved them was that Kerry shot past them and raced straight to the car where Gypsy was waiting. When they opened the door, Gypsy leapt out, crying and twisting in the air with absolute delight to see her friend. I still get Christmas cards from the four of them – ‘Ernest, Enid and the girls’ – and whenever I do, I picture that moment.
Chapter 19
Biting the Hand that Feeds: Problem Eaters
On the face of it, feeding time should be the most straightforward part of a dog’s daily life. Eating is the most elemental of instincts after all. It is surely a simple matter of placing a bowl of food on the floor and leaving the dog to it. Isn’t it? Well, yes and no. Provided there are rules under which food is being dished out, meal times should not be a problem. The difficulty, as I have discovered in a number of cases, is that dogs have a habit of dictating those rules themselves. And that is a recipe for nothing but anarchy.
Of all the dogs I have dealt with, the most interesting was an eleven-month-old Tibetan, lhasa apso called Jamie. Jamie had arrived in his owner’s home at the age of eight weeks and had always been a picky eater. At some point the family had begun feeding him by hand. In the month before I was called in, however, his eating habits had declined to almost nothing. He resolutely refused to eat anything his owners put in front of him. As they grew more desperate they had tried everything, from prime steak to the most expensive prepared pet foods. They even ordered him a meal from the local Chinese takeaway in the hope that it might appeal to his ancient Oriental heritage! All to no avail. He was now painfully thin and his ribs were beginning to poke through. Adding to their frustration was the fact that he would prowl around the bowl endlessly but never dig into it. Jamie had been taken to a vet who had found nothing wrong physically. It was the vet who recommended his owners should call me.
As I have explained already, it had been while observing life within wolf packs that I first came to see the immensely important part played by food. One particular incident I saw in a documentary film always springs to mind. The film observed a coyote as it circled the carcass of an elk which had been slaughtered and eaten by a wolf pack. The wolves were resting after having eaten their fill, about three-quarters of the carcass. The outsider’s presence was clearly not appreciated, however, and it was the Alpha female who drove it away. What was interesting was what happened afterwards. After seeing off the coyote, the Alpha female returned to the carcass and almost ritualistically pulled off a piece of meat. The message to the coyote was clear. She had the power to decide who should eat and when. She was reasserting her leadership in the most powerful language imaginable.
I have seen this behaviour replicated almost precisely in dogs. Many an owner has smiled sweetly recounting how their dog regularly appears with a biscuit in its mouth. Part of them is, I’m sure, disappointed when they learn the dog has not come to display the biscuit because it is hungry but rather to reassert its place as the household’s prime distributor of food.
When I travelled to meet Jamie and his owners, it was soon clear his behaviour was rooted here too. As soon as I arrived in the house, I saw the classic signs of a dog that believed it ruled the roost. He jumped around and barked furiously when I arrived, clearly keen to put me in my place. I, of course, ignored him. When I sat down with his owners he jumped up on their laps, sitting in on the meeting. I was not at all surprised when I discovered a supply of food sitting in a bowl in the corner of the kitchen. Similarly I barely raised an eyebrow when Jamie’s owners told me it remained there 24 hours a day and was replaced with fresh supplies at least three times daily. It was clear to me that food had a particular significance to Jamie. Just to be one hundred per cent sure, however, I headed to the bowl. The moment I did so he scampered over barking even more furiously.
I explained to the owners what was happening. The reason he was not eating from the bowl had nothing to do with his lack of appetite. All dogs react differently to finding themselves out of their depth in the role of leadership. This little puppy’s reaction had been to fixate on food, what he saw as the ultimate symbol of his power. This was why he patrolled it like a guard on duty at Fort Knox, almost daring his owners to eat from it. And that was why he never ate from the bowl. On the surface it is completely irrational. His action was ultimately destroying him. And I have no doubt that this little dog really would have starved himself to death. But why should a dog behave according to the logic of another species? Seen from this perspective, it all made perfect sense to his owners. Why would any leader eat the contents of his power base?
The family’s treatment of the problem had been the polar opposite of what was required. Of course I understood completely why the family had done what they had done in placing food all over the house. And it was clear to me that their decision to feed Jamie by hand had been more responsible than anything in starting the decline. To the dog, that would have seemed like grovelling of the highest order. It would only have added to his belief that his pack was totally reliant on him. My job was to explain to the family the need to shift the balance of power within the household – and the power of feeding time in particular. I requested that the family apply the usual bonding techniques. But in this case I also asked them to concentrate their attentions on meal time, carefully going through the gesture-eating routine three times each day. However, if Jamie deserted the bowl, they were to pick it up and not put it down again until the next time he was due to be fed. This gave Jamie no choice: either eat when he was provided for, or go hungry.
Jamie’s stomach was by now shrunken so I asked them to feed him only morsels of food. He was, in addition of course, going to be offered lots of rewards for his actions as part of the rest of the process. On the first day he hardly ate anything, partly due to his delicate condition but also because his owners were giving him signals he had never seen before but which he understood. He needed time to think. By the second day, however, he had got the message and was eating again. He ate two mouthfuls from his first meal, three more from his second. To the family’s delight he ate his entire dinner that evening. By the fifth day, he was eating three full meals a day. By the time his first birthday arrived, he was back to his optimum weight and displaying all the signs of being a normal, well-adjusted little dog.
Jamie’s problems were far from uncommon in a puppy. Eating time has the potential to send out more false information than almost any other situation. It is why it is one of the key elements of my method. The wrong signals can prove disastrous. And the younger and more impressionable a dog, the greater the scale of that disaster can be. It is no surprise many people get this wrong. There is, I am bound to say, a lot of confusing and downright dangerous advice around regarding food. For instance, I have in the past seen supposed experts argue that it is good practice to remove the food from the dog while it is eating. One television programme I saw, filmed at one of the best-known dog homes in the United Kingdom, showed trainers bringing a dog into a room on a lead, placing it in front of a bowl of food then doing their level best to remove the bowl from the animal as it ate. The more they tried to disrupt its eating time, the more the dog growled and snapped at them. As a result of its actions in this situation, the dog was destroyed.
In my opinion, those so-called experts killed a dog for no good reason at all. As I have explained, feeding time is absolutely sacrosanct within the dog’s natural environment. Every dog takes its turn. And during its turn nothing can be allowed to interrupt it. I can think of nothing more certain to provoke a dog into defending itself than trying to interrupt its feeding time. The dog home’s argument – that if they could not remove the food, the dog must be too dangerous to be given a new home – was unfair. I must admit I wept when I watched what they were doing.<
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I have witnessed the type of aggression this poor dog displayed many times. None proved how effective my method is in solving the problem more than Mulder, a golden cocker spaniel. Mulder had a perfectly good appetite. The problem his family had was that he was just too aggressive and impatient in his desire to take charge of his mealtimes. Whenever meal time arrived, Mulder would start growling. As Yvonne opened his tin of food he would get more and more aggressive. Worst of all he had developed the habit of jumping up and biting Yvonne’s hand as she placed his bowl on the kitchen floor, a classic case of biting the hand that is about to feed you if ever I saw one. To Mulder, the Alpha, it did not make sense that a subordinate was feeding him; any dog owner who has had a dead animal brought to them by their pet will have witnessed a dog trying to reverse these roles. In Mulder’s eyes, Yvonne was behaving badly by having access to the food before he did.
When I arrived at the house, my job was to show Yvonne how she must handle feeding time from now on, so I explained the process of gesture eating. Mulder had, of course, been called after the character in television’s The X Files. I’m sure Yvonne never found the show as scary as her dog. Her nerves had been so shredded by Mulder that she was shaking violently as she walked into the kitchen. Somehow Yvonne regained her composure, prepared a cracker for herself then emptied Mulder’s meal into his bowl and placed the two together on a raised surface. Mulder’s expression was frozen as Yvonne began eating first. He couldn’t quite believe her audacity. I stressed to her that she must take her time. This she did, chewing away for a full minute or so while her dog continued to look on in disbelief.
Only when she had made a fuss of showing she had finished did Mulder get his meal. She was so terrified that she had taken to throwing the food on the floor. So as to reassure her, I placed his bowl on the floor without making any sound at all then left him to it. Gesture eating communicates one of the most powerful messages available in the language of a dog. It never spoke more loudly than it did in Mulder’s case. To borrow a phrase from The X Files, the truth was out there. Yvonne simply had not known where to find it. After two weeks of the process, Yvonne was preparing Mulder’s meals in peace. He has not been a problem since.
Chapter 20
Have Dog, Won’t Travel: Dealing with Car Chaos
To many dogs, the back seat of a car can seem like hell on earth. In the course of my work I have come across a dog that barked the two hundred miles and four hours from Lincolnshire to Scotland and another that would literally try to scramble out of the window on motorways. Many owners had admitted defeat and given up on the idea of travelling more than a few miles with their petrified pet.
Yet a dog’s anxiety is hardly surprising if we think about it. In almost every respect the car is little more than a condensed version of the den. Whenever it gets in there, it is surrounded by some or all of its pack. Yet coming at it from all angles are an array of sights and sounds it does not comprehend, cannot reach and is convinced is going to harm its charges. Placed in such a situation who wouldn’t go into a blind panic? The reality is, however, that any owner can deal with the problems of what I call car chaos. Two cases I have encountered illustrate how easily and effectively even the most severely disturbed dogs can be transformed into happy travellers.
The Cleethorpes couple who owned Blackie, a Labrador-Border collie crossbreed, had tried everything to overcome his habit of going ballistic the moment he was placed in the back of their car. They had tried turning the radio up to full blast, they had tried shouting at the dog. Nothing was working. Every journey had turned into a nightmare – even the daily half-mile run to their local beach, where Blackie would then proceed to enjoy his walk.
I spent the first hour or so of my visit in the normal way. As I explained my method to Blackie’s owners, I simultaneously began bombarding him with the signals central to it. As Blackie began to disregard his owners, he was soon coming to me well. When people first see their dog connecting with me in this way, they are often concerned. They wonder whether I have somehow directed the dog’s affection away from them, if I have somehow taken over from them. The reality, of course, is that the dog has found a leader that it believes can look after every member of its pack. It is a process that they will then have to go through themselves. They soon see that the best way for me to illustrate the method’s power is to carry it through myself. Their bond with the dog remains the same, it is just the power base that alters.
Soon I felt I had made enough progress with Blackie to attempt going out on a drive with him and his owners. As we climbed into their car, they took their normal position in the front and Blackie took his in the back section of the estate car. I positioned myself between them in the rear passenger seat. Unlike so many people who – quite wrongly in my view – let their dogs roam free in the car, Blackie’s owners had confined him behind a guard at the back of their estate-style car. I kept him on a lead and passed the lead through the guard so that I had some control over him.
As the engine started, I sat as quietly and calmly as possible. As we moved off, I placed an arm back through the rails of the guard and placed it on Blackie’s shoulder. When Blackie began to attempt to jump up, I applied a little more gentle pressure. He immediately eased back down.
We travelled for about three or four miles, heading, quite deliberately, through the busiest part of the town. I wanted Blackie to be faced with as many sights, sounds – and to his mind potential threats – as possible. Throughout the journey, I kept my arm in place on his shoulder. Each time he showed any sign of being apprehensive or excited, I gently increased the pressure. There is, in these instances, a fine line between force and reassurance. Most people can understand this instinctively. For those who can’t, I compare it to holding a child through its first visit to the dentist. It is a painful but necessary process. By ensuring the child is sitting calmly, it will be that much less traumatic. By the time we returned home, I hardly needed to keep my arm there at all. Blackie had spent the latter part of the journey simply sitting in the rear of the car, watching the world go by. He has been happily travelling in the car on a daily basis ever since.
Like humans, dogs can carry the scars of previous experiences. Anyone who has been involved in a car accident, for instance, finds it hard to get back into the car afterwards. It is no different with dogs, as I discovered when I was called in to deal with a particularly distressing case. The experience this particular Doberman had suffered had been so horrendous, it had made the pages of a local newspaper. He had been found wounded and deeply distressed on the verge of a motorway. It is barely believable, but what appeared to have happened was that his owners had physically thrown him out of a speeding car. The dog’s injuries were so horrendous it had been confined to an Intensive Care Unit. At one point, it had not been expected to live. Slowly but surely, however, it recovered. He was eventually taken in by a couple in the village of Barnetby. They quickly saw that one major mental block remained in place, however.
Dobermans are no shrinking violets, yet the merest sight of a car was enough to send him into a panic. When his owners had managed to force him into the car, he had duly urinated all over its interior. It would have been all too easy to write this dog off as a lost cause, his trauma was so severe. Again, however, I was dealing with people who genuinely cared for the dog’s welfare. They were determined to try everything possible.
During the day I spent with them, I explained they faced a long haul. This was a dog that was going to need a great deal of reassurance before he willingly went anywhere near a car again. Fortunately they were excellent learners. After two weeks or so, they had established leadership in the normal way. I then asked them to focus as much activity as they could on and around their car.
So began another month of work. They began by placing a bowl of food in the driveway with the car in full view. The idea here was for the dog to rid itself of the idea that the car was something with a purely negative association. From here I got the
m to move closer and closer to the car. Again I stressed the importance of calm and consistency here. They took their time, even starting to eat their evening meals on deck chairs in the driveway so as to underline the message they wanted to transmit. Eventually their work paid off. The breakthrough came when they persuaded him to eat his dinner in the back of the stationary car. From there they began playing retrieval games with toys in and out of the car.
Progress was painstakingly slow, but the owners were determined to make it work. Soon they had progressed to switching the engine on while he ate in the back. Then they moved up and down their driveway while the dog ate his meal. The mental scars were so bad it took almost eight weeks for them to get the car out on to the open road. I am glad to say, however, that they are now driving around as a family quite freely. His fear of travelling is a thing of the past.
Chapter 21
Feet-Chewers and Tail-Chasers: Nervous Wrecks and How to Salvage Them
All dogs have different characters. Like humans, there are those that are playful and those that are placid, there are the extroverts and the introverts. It is why individual dogs deal differently with the stress they encounter when they are given the job of leader. While some will lash out at the world, others will turn in on themselves, often in the most self-destructive ways. In the course of my time dealing with problem dogs, I have seen a range of symptoms that beggars belief.