The Dog Listener

by Jan Fennell

  I have come across dogs who cower from the slightest, most innocent noises. A gentle ring of the telephone is enough to send them scampering for cover. Some dogs are so chronically nervous I consider it a major achievement if by the end of my time with them they have come more than two or three feet towards me. I have seen dogs that freeze at the sight of anyone dressed in uniform. On many occasions I have seen dogs who display the ultimate signal of submission and simply flatten themselves out on their belly and wet themselves. I am sure I will continue to come across new manifestations of this problem for as long as I continue to work with dogs. The root cause of this behaviour is always the same, however. The dog is simply overwhelmed by its responsibility as leader. It manifests this through nervousness and obsessive behaviour.

  Riby was a four-year-old black Labrador named after the village near Grimsby in which he lived. His owners called me in because Riby had developed the particularly nasty habit of chewing his own feet. The problem had started as a minor habit but had grown more and more obsessive. When they called me, he was at the stage where he would bite at them continually. Obviously this was far from healthy and Riby had a series of nasty open wounds. If it continued like this, there was every prospect that his feet would become infected, perhaps even gangrenous and he would be destroyed. His owners were understandably desperate to find a solution. They had tried all manner of treatments including sedation. When I visited them, Riby was wearing what I call an ‘Elizabethan collar’, a white, plastic funnel over his head. The collar was designed to stop him from getting at his feet.

  Riby displayed the normal range of symptoms. So many people imagine that it is normal for a dog to jump up, to pull on the lead, to harass visitors to the house. I can assure them it is not. Riby did all of these things too. Most telling of all, he had got into the habit of lying in his bed in the morning. He would not get out until his owners coaxed him out. It was as if he was lying in state, it was the powerful sign that once more I was dealing with a dog that believed it was leader.

  I began by going through the normal bonding process. Riby responded well. I sensed fairly quickly that this was a timid dog that was ready to relinquish its leadership as soon as possible. After about one-and-a-half hours, I asked his owners to take off the collar. No sooner had they done this than he had started gnawing at his feet. Riby’s problem was a variation on the human condition known as self-mutilation. The important thing was to show Riby there was no need for him to do this; that he could be rewarded for other activity.

  So I knelt down and called him to me with a reward. When he came, I covered his feet with my left hand and with my right hand cupped his head and stroked his chin. I did this without saying a word. I wanted the process to be nonstressful, calm. He remained distracted for a few moments but soon started picking at his feet again. As soon as he did, I again distracted him. This time I asked him to come to heel, again rewarding him with food. Again it was a positive association. I continued in this way for a while. Every time we stopped and he turned on his feet, I started working with him again. I just kept him going. We worked like this for about twenty minutes. He was behaving much better by this time so I went to the kitchen for a cup of tea with his owner. As we chatted we forgot about Riby for a few moments. It was a few minutes later when we noticed Riby had fallen fast asleep on the living room floor. At last he had given up the stressful role of guardian and could relax for the first time.

  This was the first time I had ever come across such severe behaviour so I asked his owner to keep me posted on his progress over the next few days. I think I heard from her once or twice over the coming weeks. Her message was the same on both occasions: Riby’s feet had healed and he had adjusted back to normal life. In the aftermath of our few hours together, he had never eaten his feet again.

  The psychology of the dog is a subject for another book – and a rather large one at that. I am not going to analyse the workings of the canine mind here. All I will say, however, is that the dog has a capacity for obsession that is no different from our own. I have seen all manner of weird and wonderful behaviour over the years. A German shepherd called Rusty, for instance, could spend entire hours chasing his own tail. His owners could not fathom what he was doing and called me in. I arrived to discover a fairly well-adjusted dog with a few tell-tale signs of leadership. He jumped up and whined a little, but not in an excessive way at all.

  It may well have taken me some time to work out what was causing the problem. Lady Luck was smiling on me that afternoon, however. As I spoke to Rusty’s owners, their three-year-old daughter fell asleep. Rusty was clearly deeply attached to the little girl and duly curled up alongside her. The girl did not sleep for very long at all. It was as she woke up that the lights came on in my head. As she came around, the little girl instinctively reached out for Rusty’s tail. She took hold of it and began to shake the tip of it around like a plaything. Almost immediately Rusty was transformed into a whirling dervish. He was up off the ground, spinning around like a Catherine Wheel on Bonfire Night.

  His owners had never noticed what was happening before. I explained this was being caused by their daughter’s playing with the tail. As I have said earlier, it can be difficult to teach a young child the correct way to behave around a dog. In this instance, I asked the parents to keep the two apart when unsupervised. I also asked them to play games which focused the little girl’s attention away from the tail. I got them to play retrieving games, anything that got the girl to concentrate on the dog’s head area rather than its rear. Soon, Rusty had been relieved of his habit. His whirling dervish routine disappeared, and he was free to spend his life chasing toys in the park instead.

  Chapter 22

  The Yo-Yo Effect: Overcoming the Problems of Rescue Dogs

  Animal sanctuaries and dogs’ homes have become, for many people at least, an ideal place to find a new pet. The idea of taking in a dog that has had a hard time in life appeals on many levels, of course. It is heart-warming for dog lovers to think they might be able to provide a little of the affection that has been so sorely missing in the lives of these canine waifs and strays. If they are taking on a dog that has misbehaved in the past, they like to think they are the ones who can straighten it out. Yet the rescue dog comes with its own unique set of problems. More often than not, in my experience, the behaviour that has led to its being abandoned or consigned to a home in the first place repeats itself time and again. And when this happens, owners who start with the best of intentions find themselves unable to cope. It is why so many dogs become what I call ‘yo-yo dogs’, spending their lives heading back and forth between families and institutional homes. In the end, of course, they run out of chances and may even face being destroyed. Only by understanding their particular problems can owners hope to avoid this and provide a happy and permanent home.

  The first thing to say here is that it is not the dog’s fault that it has become caught up in this vicious circle. In 99.9 per cent of cases, the dog’s behaviour is a direct result of human mistakes, mainly laziness, stupidity or, sad to say, cruelty. The problems displayed by almost all rescue dogs have been exacerbated by the violence they have faced at some point in their life. Violence begets nothing but more violence, however. The irony is that dogs that have been confined to a home for attacking humans have merely been defending themselves. They have generally been cornered in situations where the option to flee has been removed. Within the human world, self-defence is a perfectly acceptable legal principle. For dogs, however, it is they who have to bear the consequences, regardless of where the blame lies.

  I saw at first hand the traumatic effect bad treatment can have on a dog when I took in my own rescue dog, Barmie, the little companion who taught me so much when I was evolving my method. If there was one central lesson I learnt in working with him, it was that the bond of trust between dog and owner is even more important in cases like this. Barmie, quite rightly, harboured a deep distrust of all humans. He – like all rescue do
gs – needed to learn that the hands that had brought pain can deliver affection and food too.

  As in medicine, prevention is far better than cure. During the course of my television series, I was asked to help prepare an owner for the arrival of a particularly troubled little dog. Tara had been taken in by a friend of mine, Brian, who ran a refuge in Leeds. He had discovered she was within a day of being destroyed. What made her case even more heart-rending was the fact that she was heavily pregnant at the time: her puppies would have perished too. Brian had seen Tara through the birthing process and was now ready to find her a good owner. In Hilary he had found the perfect owner. She was a genuine dog lover, desperate for a new dog with which to share her life.

  As is so often the case with rescue dogs, there were no real clues as to why Tara had been abandoned. She had behaved perfectly well at the sanctuary and seemed a normal, well-adjusted dog. I tell people not to worry about a dog’s history. The past colours everything a dog does but it is rare that anyone can supply a full history in any case. Far better, I think, to concentrate on the dog’s future instead.

  Of course Hilary wanted to do everything she possibly could for this poor dog. She had, for instance, laid down some food for her arrival. After I explained why this was not appropriate, she removed it. In my experience, it generally takes two weeks for things to go badly awry. It is at this time that that the dog is transformed from a lovely, peaceful dog to one that seems completely out of whack with the rest of the world. In Tara’s case, it took even less time than I had imagined.

  At first Tara just mooched around. Hilary was so eager to fuss over her that I had to keep telling her to leave her alone. After a short while, however, Tara approached her new owner directly. She came over to Hilary and placed her head in her hands. It was here that Hilary made her big mistake.

  Hilary instinctively stroked her new companion. Truth be told, she had been aching to extend an affectionate hand in Tara’s direction ever since she had arrived. It was the trigger Tara had been waiting for. Tara immediately jumped and leapt around. She became completely hyperactive. It was as if Hilary had tripped a switch inside the dog’s head. And it was as if Tara really was a schizophrenic, as if she was two dogs rolled into one. It was soon glaringly obvious why she was in care. In a home situation like this, she became completely hyperactive. A succession of owners had been unable to handle her behaviour. Her nomadic existence had been the result.

  Hilary was determined to break the cycle, however, and was set on understanding what the problem was. I had already outlined the general principles of my method. As we watched Tara flying around the house, I explained that the normal problems ran much deeper than usual because of this dog’s history. As I have explained in detail earlier, dogs can become highly stressed by the role of leader. In the case of a rescue dog, the pressure is almost intolerable because the stakes are even higher. We only have to think about it for a moment to understand. Here is a dog that desperately wants to be a part of a normal pack environment. Yet as soon as it finds a home it likes, it is elevated to the role of leadership. When the dog finds it cannot cope with this responsibility, it tries even harder to please its owner. When the owner reacts violently or angrily, its behaviour becomes more and more excessive. I have seen countless cases where rescue dogs jump up, drag on the lead, bark and bite and become generally hyperactive. They genuinely believe it is what their subordinates expect of them. In more ways than one, it is a vicious circle. The owner’s reaction only serves to stir the dog into an even greater frenzy. And soon the dog is being returned to the sanctuary from where it came, its reputation as a problem dog underlined by what has happened. The yo-yo effect has continued.

  I explained to Hilary that the answer lay in treating the central problem rather than the symptoms. Tara had to be taught that, in fact, this was completely the wrong way to behave in a household. The job Hilary faced was to introduce a different set of rules. As ever, I stressed the importance of good, strong leadership. I asked Hilary to maintain a quiet posture and ignore the command performance Tara was turning in. Everything was telling me that in the past the reaction had been the exact opposite of this. Every time Hilary looked like weakening, I reminded her of what lay in store for Tara if we failed.

  Sure enough, Tara had soon calmed down. There were a few, inevitable attempts to reel us in to her world. She kept trying to make eye contact with Hilary but failed. After a while, she went to lie on the floor. Once she was completely relaxed, I told Hilary to wait five minutes. At the end of that time, Hilary called Tara to her with a reward. Tara didn’t get it right immediately and started jumping around again. Once more I told Hilary to step away and ignore her. Only when Tara played precisely by Hilary’s rules did she get the reward. It was up to us to show her how she should behave. Within half an hour, Tara was a different dog. She and Hilary have been fantastic friends ever since. The cycle had been broken, she was a yo-yo dog no more.

  Chapter 23

  Toys not Trophies: The Power of Play

  I would not want to create the impression that all my ideas are unique, that I have come up with a complete process of techniques unlike anything ever used before. As I explained at the beginning of this book, I drew many of my early ideas from behaviourism. In many ways I am heartened when I see elements of my work incorporated elsewhere. I was never more surprised to see an element of my method being practised than in the spring of 1998, when I was invited to visit the country’s biggest and most high-profile dog training facility, the London Metropolitan Police’s handlers’ school at Bromley in Kent.

  I joined in a session with a senior trainer called Eric, in which a group of German shepherds was being taught to force humans out of situations in which they are hiding. There were fascinating elements to what the police were teaching them. The dogs, for instance, were coached to remain at least six feet away from a target. Eric explained this was a simple matter of survival; any closer and they would be prone to an attack by kicking or, even worse, a knife.

  It was within this highly-charged, very serious situation that Eric did something that put a knowing smile on my face. The object of the exercise was to encourage the dog to bark so furiously that it intimidated and ultimately forced the surrender of the human. Sure enough, the first dog pinned us into a corner with the sheer ferocity of its demeanour. When he was happy that the dog had done what was asked of it, Eric reached into the collar of his jacket (the dogs had been taught to react to any body movement lower than this). From there he produced nothing more sinister than the dog’s favourite toy, a battered old rubber ball. When he threw the ball over the dog’s shoulder, the terrifying animal of a moment earlier was transformed into a bouncing, bounding child. The dog’s handler had, of course, taught the dog to respond to the ball in this way at the very beginning of its training. Ever since, it had remained a very powerful means of signalling that the dog had done something that met with his approval. It was a means of reward, and one that I recognised very well indeed: play.

  Playtime provides perhaps the perfect opportunity to combine fun with learning: there is no greater pleasure. Yet it is precisely because it holds such a potent place in the relationship between humans and dogs that play has to be conducted in the right way. It may not seem like a particularly severe problem, yet being dictated to in this way can have disastrous consequences. I’m sure we have all found ourselves in a situation where we have just settled down at the end of a hard day only to see our dog appear with a plaintive expression on its face and a favourite toy dangling from its mouth. The dog wants to play, and it wants to play now. Hard as it is for most owners to see this at first, the situation is filled with potential problems.

  The act of throwing around a ball or retrieving it should be viewed from two perspectives. To us, these objects are mere toys. To the dog, however, they represent something far more precious. They are trophies, badges of honour if you like, to be won – and lost – within the pack environment. Packs of puppies, in
particular, fight for objects continuously. The winners strut around as if they’ve just won the World Cup.

  Again, it is a principle that extends all the way back to the wolf pack. In the wild, the pack’s survival depends on its leaders being up to the job. As a result, the Alpha pair must regularly prove themselves worthy leaders. Dogs constantly test the mettle of their leaders in the same way, and playtime offers a perfect opportunity to do this. If dogs are allowed to believe they have control of the toy ‘trophies’ an owner throws, they will also form a belief about their status within their pack: it is imperative the owner imposes themself as the leader during this time.

  Problems set in when the owner refuses to join in the game. Much like a child that throws a tantrum when it is denied something, a dog can treat the lack of response with bad behaviour. I have known cases where pets have started a nightly routine of getting into an agitated state over toys. It can escalate into destructive and even aggressive behaviour.

  There are a few simple rules I apply at playtime. The first and most powerful means of establishing control over playtime is the simplest. I discourage owners from leaving all the dog’s toys around the house. It is good practice to have one or two favourite toys available. That way the dog can choose to play on its own whenever it wants. But it is essential that the toys with which the owner interacts with the dog are stored away in a place where the dog cannot get to them. That way the power of playtime is entirely in the owner’s hands from the very beginning. It is they and they alone who decide when playtime takes place and which toys are used. As for the choice of toys, that is entirely a matter for the owner. The only caveat I would add is that all toys should be of a decent size. As with puppies, dogs can choke on balls, for instance, that are small enough to squeeze down their windpipes.