The Little Bear Dog Blog

Little Bear

The thing about our modern pace of life is that we often allow it to rob us of our triumphs. We write a challenging report, cook a fantastic meal or haul ourselves to the gym on a wet Monday night and instead of taking a moment to metaphorically pat ourselves on the back, we’re off, rocketing onto the next thing on the never-ending to do list.

Maybe it’s a sign of getting older but I’ve developed a bit of a leaning for books which depict a slower pace of life.  The excellent ‘Cat Who’ books by Lillian Jackson Braun, although crime books, have a relaxed charm that make me hanker for a lifestyle which is walked as opposed to sprinted.

Anyway, now that I’m feeling decidedly pedestrian, I’ll get to the point.  Little Bear is doing brilliantly. I just took a few minutes to bask in that statement and cuddle him for all his hard work.  In fact, he’s been doing brilliantly for weeks but of course “I’ve not had time…” to reflect on it yet alone write about it.

Reactivity

The main progress is in his reactivity to other dogs. We’re now at the stage where 85% of the time, if he sees another dog across the road he’ll whine and look at me instead of launching into a full out bark-fest.  It’s not foolproof, other dogs barking at him is something he can’t ignore and he still can’t stand puppies but it’s progress and that’s fine with me.

Persistence and consistency with the clicker training plus I hope, slightly better timing than I had before means that if I can get in with a better alternative before he rapidly runs out of coping strategies and resorts to barking and lunging, we’re in with a good chance.

We use ‘watch me’ and ‘find it’ for treats as distractions but I’m careful to make sure that the food is a reward for non-reactivity; get the timing wrong and it’s easy to end up rewarding and therefore reinforcing what you don’t want.

So that’s my moment and Little Bear’s triumph and now that I’ve taken the time to reflect and record it, I’m going to go give him another cuddle.

Annie

When Annie disappeared that fateful first day, it was thanks to the buckle on her new collar exploding at the first hint of pressure.  Collarless and terrified she bolted into the night and so began our three days of hell searching for her.

That experience taught me many things; one of the most sobering is that you don’t forget moments of real fear.  That night will live with me forever I think.  Watching impotently as our new charge, terrified and in a blind panic sprinted into the road… I get sick just thinking about it.

I carried her old collar with me  as we searched in vain. It stank to high heaven and it was slick with oil from her grubby coat, but it was my only connection to her and as such it was never far from my hand.

When we at last found her, three agonising days later, the first thing we did was pop on a new sturdy collar and a harness (belt and braces!)

Neither Annie nor Little Bear are ever walked on a collar.  Humans are flawed (didn’t we just know it!) and even the gentlest of souls is prone to yanking on a lead if startled or frustrated or just plain not concentrating and I’d rather not have my dog’s neck on the receiving end. Had this not been my view before losing Annie, it sure as heck would have been afterwards.  Hence, their collars are more decorative rather than truly functional.

When we were searching for her people would ask what she looked like and if she had ID on her collar. “She doesn’t even have a collar on?” was a common response to our answer, as if this made it all the worse.  And to me it did.  This poor little soul didn’t have the most basic symbol of belonging. Somehow without a collar she seemed even more lost.  Silly perhaps, but it mattered to me. Today, I was reminded that it probably mattered to Annie too.

You’re not listening!

After her bath today we couldn’t understand why she was being such a nag.  We’d been out on a long walk in the woods (hence the bath); she’d had her lunch and she’d refused all offers of a loo break in the garden.  But still she wagged and woofed and pawed at my leg until frustration got the better of her and she let out a high-pitched woof that made me slop my tea in my lap.

I checked with OH that she had indeed had her lunch, as unlike LB, she’s not big on letting misdemeanours in her routine go unchallenged.  Yes came the reply, 2pm on the dot in her Kong Wobbler as was the norm.

“What?” I asked her exasperated. She stared at me wide-eyed, still wagging wildly. Then it hit me. I ran upstairs and retrieved her collar from the bathroom and she started bouncing just at the sight of it.

Still done up, I held the leather circle out in front of me.  “Is this what you want?” I asked her.  She wagged and stuck first her nose, then her whole head through the collar. Once back in place, she turned on her tail and wandered into the lounge to take up residence on the sofa for her delayed afternoon nap.  Seems like us humans don’t have the monopoly on security symbols after all.

Little Bear and his friend Bonnie

How much of your time does your dog take up?  Personally, I can’t even begin to add it up and to be honest, nor do I want to. It feels like one of those ridiculous business surveys that seem to endlessly whine in the media that if the British workforce just stopped having toilet breaks/sharpening pencils/laughing with colleagues [delete as appropriate] then our GDP would rise by 20%. I don’t want to reduce my relationships into something I can plot on a spreadsheet thanks.

That said, time spent with our dogs is still a crucial issue and is inexorably linked to their behaviour and I think our own levels of happiness.

Pressure

As pressures in the day job mount and the hours I spend working canter swiftly past the ‘half-the-day gone yet and what about sleeping?’ mark, it’s tough to fit it all in. Life is busy, no news there for any of us, but part of having dogs in our lives is that commitment to mould our time, no matter how scarce, around their needs.

As we still walk them separately, yesterday I did four walks, one each in the morning, one each in the evening. Other half did the same on Thursday while I was in the office. Then of course there’s the feeding, playing and general cuddling that are part of their daily routine.

Had I said ‘too bad, I’m busy’ yesterday and retired upstairs to my home office, I doubt I would have got anything done; primarily because of the guilt, but also because a tired, contented dog with a predictable routine is usually a lot less trouble!

Even though Little Bear hides at the sight of his harness he loves his walks. If he can find someone to play with all the better. Annie is the best time-keeper I know and will actually woof at you when it’s time to go out. Once home, they then crash on the sofas for hours on end, only stirring their stumps to give the postman a good barking at from the window or in Annie’s case, to remind me that it’s their lunchtime. I’m glad she does too otherwise I’m very likely to forget my own!

Benefits 

But the benefits run deeper than a quieter life. Forcing myself out the door four times a day and putting myself in training mode (what’s their body language telling me? How are the likely to react to that cat, child on the scooter, dog across the street?) is a great balancer.  It gives me another focus and allows me to get away from myself for a while.  Top of the benefits list though is that it’s a lot of fun. We get to clown around as we play ball or chase and even the distraction game of finding food on the floor can be entertaining if you approach it with the right attitude.

We have fun on our walks because I want it to be something we do together.  I’m not just lead holder and pooper-scooper, I want to be the coolest, most fun person in their lives because if I am, then the behaviour problems improve.  So, that’s my learning for today.  I may be perpetually busy, but I’m never going to be too busy to have fun with my dogs.

Annie with her award

Annie’s had a big week. After a year of lead walking, we finally plucked up the courage to let her off last weekend. We chose a huge, open and slightly boring field and, way past her dinner time, plied her with treats for the five-minute test.

The next day, out walking with friends in the woods we bit the bullet again and guess what? The little dog lost that 12 months ago bolted, terrified into the night has amazing recall.  In fact, she can turn on a sixpence before we can even get to the second syllable in her name!  She’s still a little anxious still but the delight on her face as she splashes Labrapotamus-like through big muddy puddles or romps off sniffing with her new doggie mates is unmistakable. I welled up and Other Half pretended not to have a lump in his throat.

What a difference a year makes 

To think that this was the dog who hid under our dining table for three days and then went ballistic at the sight of a dog a football pitch away!  Filthy, flea-ridden and nearly eight kgs heavier I didn’t dare dream we’d have the sweetie pie we have today.

She’s had one heck of an eventful year.  Three days lost and living rough, then a new home, new people, new rules, major surgery 12 weeks crate rest and then a crash course in how to be a well-behaved dog. She’s got a long way to go as the Hay-on-Wye story suggests, but if you’d met her today at the park, romping off lead and meeting new dogs without incident you’d never guess her chequered past.

Award 

It was a fitting tribute to her character and the work that OH has done with her that together they collected a special award from Labrador Rescue yesterday at their annual Dog Party.  Amazing too that to do this she had to spend hours surrounded by strange dogs, something that would have sent her into a tail-spin not too long ago.

Much has been written about the rewards of taking on a rescue dog. I can only agree – there’s nothing sweeter, nothing more rewarding than seeing a dog turn away from fear and embrace life with the joyful abandon that only our canine friends seem to possess.

Hay-On-Wye

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!

If, like me you have a day job in the corporate world, the title question will probably be familiar to you. It’s bandied about willy-nilly in relation to objective setting, programme evaluation and performance reviews.   But unlike some other management speak, this one is actually a big favourite of mine. Why? Because it’s so darn useful – especially when it comes to dog training.

Positive

I’m a massive fan of positive reinforcement, simply because when I first got Little Bear I was ignorant to the point that I listened to a trainer who told me to lead correct him (i.e. pull on his collar with the lead) when he mis-behaved. Punishment didn’t work for us, it made things 10 times worse, plus I’m a useless punisher (thank heavens) so when I found a more enlightened way to help my dog I grabbed it with both hands.

Learning how to positively reinforce your dogs’ behaviour is pretty easy, but the very first step is deciding what that behaviour is going to look like.  Now this might sound so simplistic as to be insulting, but looking back, I had no idea what good looked like because I was so pre-occupied with trying to avoid the bad stuff.

Am I being good now? 

Now when we walk I’m conscious to look out for the good. So if LB is trotting nicely by my side I tell him what a great walk he’s doing. If we see a jogger these days he rarely woofs, so I always praise him for being calm.  Just because he’s learned not to bark at them is no reason as far as I’m concerned to stop praising him for keeping up the great work.

By understanding what the ultimate goal looks like, it’s also so much easier to break it down into manageable chunks.  So for us, walking around the block without him barking at another dog is one of our ultimate ‘goods’.  But that doesn’t mean to say that until he can do that he won’t be rewarded – he’d never learn anything that way.

So, the first ‘good’ was not reacting 60ft away from another dog walking away from him. Another was giving me eye contact when I asked for it, a third was giving me eye contact when there was a dog 60ft away etc etc. By understanding what the ultimate good looks like, plus the increments that will get us there, I’m able to set us both up for success. The best bit of course is that I also get to focus on every opportunity to praise and reward every step he takes in the right direction.

Don't Cook Your Dog

Despite the fact that I’m writing this huddled in a woolly cardigan, it is, technically the height of summer in the UK.  The weather doesn’t seem to have a clue what it’s doing at the moment so when walking the dogs there are two things you can be certain of: you’re going to get wet and at some point en route, you’ll have to tie your coat around your waist to save yourself from melting.

We complain about it, such is the national tradition, as if a stiff letter to an MP could have the matter sorted out in a jiffy, but we’re all resigned to the fact that it’s just weather and we just have to get on with it.

Dogs die in hot cars

You’d think we Brits would be an adaptable lot as a result, but just last month yet another police officer let his dogs, one a young puppy, bake to death in his locked, unventilated police van. The story hit just about every front page national newspaper in the country and yet just a few days later, my friend found a small Yorkshire Terrier, locked in a car in a supermarket car park with the window open just an inch (he survived by the way – just!) Which begs the question, why isn’t this message getting through?

Dogs aren’t able to sweat like us, because, hey, surprise surprise, they’re covered in fur. That leaves them their paws and mouths as their only means of venting excess heat. Pop them in a car, which is effectively a roasting dish and even with all of the windows open wide, temperatures can soar rapidly even during weather like this. Your dog’s temperature only needs to rise by 5-7 degrees above normal for them to get brain damage. What they’d suffer on the way is beyond thinking about.

So, please, if it’s hot and sunny or even wet but warm and muggy like today, never, ever, EVER leave your dog in the car – even for a minute. You never know if you’re going to get held up, plus, with dog thefts from cars on the rise do you really want to take the risk?

Don’t get mad get motivated!

Dog’s Today is running an excellent campaign called ‘Don’t cook your dog’.  Do check out the blog where you can download posters, order car stickers and get Facebook avatars. I’ll be ordering car stickers for our cars and for friends and family and I’ll be printing and distributing posters in our local shops. Please help spread the word and who knows, maybe it could just save a life. x