The Little Bear Dog Blog

I turned into my Grandma the other day. I caught myself saying one of those phrases that as a teenager you cringe at and swear that you’ll never ever utter for fear of sounding like an oldie.

It’s wasn’t, ‘aren’t policemen getting younger these days’ although that could be a contender. I bumped into my friend with her young son and said ‘Good grief! Haven’t you grown!’ I know. My inner teen was squirming. I just needed a bag of toffee covered in lint to complete the stereotype.

The point is, from the outside looking in things happen in huge leaps.  In the six months since I last saw my friends’ son he’s obviously grown. To her, it’s been so gradual as to be almost unnoticeable. To me, the change is dramatic.

When you’re working on a behaviour problem it often feels as if nothing’s happening. It’s hard, often frustrating work and requires huge amounts of patience – something that I for one am not known for!

I tire of hearing about how ‘modern life’ is reducing our attention spans and fuelling a culture of instant gratification, but that’s my boredom button being pressed, in fact, I completely agree! Maybe this is why the skills needed to help our dogs and indeed even our children are in shorter supply these days.

Living, feeling creatures, human and otherwise still need love, support, patience and most importantly time to practice the new skills we aim to teach them.

I was reminded of this last weekend when one of my dog walking friends commented on how LB didn’t bark as much at strange dogs in the park. I was quite taken aback, but on reflection, she was right. Just like my friend’s son, growing quietly right under her nose, LB too has been improving incrementally day by day – learning to control his emotions and trust me to keep him safe from things that worry him. We’ve worked on this every single day and aside from the odd ‘breakthrough’ day where we’ve taken a real leap, I’ve hardly noticed.

My grandma tried to teach me to knit. I was hopeless (did I mention I’m not a fan of repetition either?) and I soon gave it up as a lost cause. “You can’t learn anything worth doing overnight you know.” She’d say while picking up another row of dropped stitches for me. “Practice really does make perfect darling.”  And of course, she was absolutely, positively right. Thanks Nanna – I still can’t knit but I finally got the message. x