In my last post I mused over ‘what good looks like’. My thinking being that if you don’t know what you’re aiming for, how do you know when you get it? Sensible enough, but what about the steps in the middle I wondered. How do you keep track of your progress along the way? If ‘good’ is not barking and lunging at another dog across the street, what’s a woof but no lunge? Is one short-lived woof but easy distractability headed in the right direction? What we needed I thought, is a sliding scale! Yes, that’s it, we need a Richter style scale for canine reactivity.
Yes dear reader, be careful what you wish for because thanks to our utterly disastrous holiday with the dogs, we now have one, we like to call it the Hay-on-Wye scale of humiliation.
Preparation
It’s not as if we’d not put in some solid preparation for our holiday. Little Bear and I had some excellent training trips to town under our belt where we scored a perfect ten on the no-woof scale. Other Half had been doing training of his own by taking Annie to the local pub regularly, something LB has been doing since he was tiny. In fact he was accidentally baptised in Guniness on one trip and had a lovely time licking his beard clean, but I digress.
Could we have done more? You can always do more, but we thought we’d got them off to a good start at least. Our first trip outside of rampaging through the forest was to the lovely little market town of Crickhowell and both dogs were brilliant. My ‘pastry face’ (a term coined by OH to describe my incredibly smug expression the first time I made pastry) came out after we passed within six feet of a Corgi without either of them batting an eyelid. Chest puffed out and grinning like an idiot, I started wondering how soon I could enrol them in some fun obedience classes.
Well I might as well have had the whole cream pie including the flaming pastry on my face two days later when we went to Hay-on-Wye.
The Hay scale is born
I’ve longed to go to Hay since I was a little girl. My grandmother was born there and despite growing up only an hour away, I’ve never been. It was a bright sunny day and after the forty minute trip down winding lanes from our holiday cottage in Brecon, I couldn’t wait to get out and start exploring. Armed to the teeth with treats, sqeakers and clickers as usual we set off excitedly.
Hay is a charming little place. It’s narrow streets are crammed full of book shops as you’d expect, but with gorgeous boutiques, gift shops and galleries too that had me mentally mapping out our route for maximum coverage. Our first stop was an antique shop and the owners dog, a nervous rescue himself, jumped out from behind a table and barked his head off at our two, who of course, responded in kind. On the plus side, the barking was short-lived and once sushed we carried on our way. Minor blip, I thought to myself – oh how naive!
Dog town
Hay is full of dogs. Calm, confident and more importantly, QUIET dogs loiter on every corner. Genteely waiting under cafe tables, purusing the open-air honesty book shop in the grounds of the caste with their owners, trotting to heel obediently or just sitting patiently outside shops. Our usual strategy of distract and retreat fell flat as every retreat brought yet another corner and yet another dog. Annie was the first to kick off and did he best rabid Labrador impression. Little Bear soon joined in and within seconds it seemed the whole town was staring at us. We moved on, only to bump straight into a Great Dane (what are the odds?!) and off they went again.
Retreat! Retreat!
After ten minutes of scuttling down side-streets and hot-footing it any direction that didn’t look like it had a dog in it, we had to admit defeat before someone called the police. I could just see the headlines ‘Tourists barred from Hay after delinquent dogs breech noise act.’
We beat a hasty retreat back to the car and drove until we found a pub. I passed up my usual shandy for a double brandy and it was as I drained the glass that I decided that the only good to come out of the foray was a new benchmark, Hay is without doubt what good DOESN’T look like!
Maybe one of your followers would like to adopt 2 beautiful dogs for a while? I’m thinking a couple of weeks, months, maybe years! We would take them back anytime (if they could find us!). 😉
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Free to a good home
Forty-something male, fully housetrained and good with children and other animals. He has some basic training but would benefit hugely from additional obedience work.
Lovely temperament but prone to spontaneous outbreaks of sarcasm so experienced owners only please.
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Woof woof!
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