The Little Bear Dog Blog

I cried when I first read the excellent ‘Click to calm’ by Emma Parsons. Here was a professional dog trainer who’s dog seemed to become aggressive out of a clear blue sky. Just like Little Bear, her dog Ben barked and lunged at a dog one day for no apparent reason. You can see how my brain was working…”Well if it could happen to her and she’s a pro, then…”

That book, in fact even just the introduction to that book, helped heal a gaping wound for me. I stopped looking for the reasons why he was behaving as he was (and blaming myself in the process) and started looking for solutions.

The book offers great practical training exercises and so I bought a clicker and…..ground to an abrupt halt. Even muffled in my jumper behind my back, Little Bear reacted to a click like a rocket had gone off in the lounge. He’d shoot me a ‘how could you?’ look and scurry away upstairs to his bed.

I bought soft clickers. I bought adjustable volume clickers. Super soft clickers that I wrapped in layers of fabric…but even clicking from another room got the same reaction. I eventually gave up and used a marker word, ‘good’ instead, but it never felt the same.

Apparently, what I needed all along was a Labrador. Annie took to clicker training like a duck to water (there’s food involved, she’s a Lab, what more needs saying?!) but what absolutely amazed me was the fact that LB crashed the training session and lined up calmly for his reward on hearing the click. No running to bed. In fact, not even an eyelid batted.

From there we’ve gone from strength to strength. We use the clicker on every walk, rewarding non-reactivity to things he might have once found scary, like screaming children or other dogs. I also mark eye contact with me on the cue of ‘watch me’.

Today we achieved something huge. We went to an agility class. With other dogs! Four other dogs in fact, none of whom we knew.  Reverse a few months and this would have been a recipe for being asked never to come back.

There were a couple of woofs at the start when a huge Doberman started barking and lunging at another dog, but a little more distance and a few rounds of watch me was all he needed to calm down again.

He barked frantically when he saw the tunnel, but this time out of sheer joy! It was a super waggy ‘Is it my turn now? Is it? Is it? Oh boy of boy! It’s MY TURN!’ His delight was unmistakable.

Otherwise he was impeccably behaved, even though at times I’m sure he found it a bit stressful. The real joy for me today was that he looked to me automatically when he was stressed. He sat and gave eye contact without being asked. He leaned into my leg from time to time and so we took ourselves a few steps away and did some simple tricks or a bit of massage.  By listening to him I was able to help him manage his anxiety for a whole hour.  He even met one of the other dogs, both on leads and said a lovely, polite hello.

As we left, incident free, I just couldn’t stop telling him what a clever boy he was and how proud I am. I think he knows it, but it never hurts to remind him all the same.

Chilling out after the car boot sale

The thing about dog training is that you can turn anything into an opportunity. Yesterday’s opportunity was the local Bank Holiday car boot sale. My mission to help Little Bear feel happy in just about any situation means lots of practice in lots of different locations.

Despite the crowds and the distractions in the form of lots of stuff to sniff, Little Bear behaved impeccably. Attentive but relaxed, he sat without being asked when he saw children anticipating his click and treat as per our ‘little people mean good things’ training. He said lovely banana shaped waggly hellos to  the people who asked if they could meet him and accepted his ear rubs and shoulder scratches with great enthusiasm.

In fact, we managed the whole sale with only one half woof which he quickly thought better of and sat down instead. It’s days like this that are the most important to record. Little Bear and I are a team. We’re in this together and we’re learning on the job. I’ve no doubt that on the days when I’m frustrated, tired and disappointed in him, he’s probably feeling exactly the same way about me! All the more reason to give ourselves a team high-five when we ace it!

How often do you praise your dog?  was a question posed in the really excellent ‘Bonding with your Dog’ by Victoria Schade.  Defensively, my brain jumped to ‘Oh, all the time.’ But when I really thought about it, I started to wonder if I praised my dogs as much as I thought I did.

Yes, I said well-done when Little Bear retrieved a ball, or when Annie sat when asked, but was it enough?

As recommended, I decided to look for as many opportunities to praise Little Bear and Annie as possible. Out for our morning walk, Little Bear trotted sweetly by my side (compared to steam-train Annie, he’s like a mouse on the lead!) so I told him what a lovely walk he was doing then clicked and treated him. Other Half looked confused. “Eh?  He didn’t do anything.” he challenged.

In a way he was right. I hadn’t asked Little Bear to heel, but then I hadn’t needed too because he’d already learnt not to pull on the lead and was now doing what he’d been taught. Most people don’t need their boss to remind them to do their work before they get their salary, so why should we not reward our dogs for doing the things they now do automatically?

Like anything, it takes a while to get into the mindset of praising but once you get in some practice it’s quite addictive. It also makes walking so much more fun!

Mad dog woman 

I’m teaching Annie to walk on a loose lead after Other Half’s shoulder started wracking up bills at the Chiropractors. It’s a long, often frustrating, sometimes physically exhausting process, but we’re getting there.

Annie loves the praise game too and we very nearly had a party in the street when she not only walked the whole way around the block on a loose lead, but then topped it off by managing to ignore ‘the Collie who must be lunged at’ this week.

It was 7am and assuming there were only dog people around I pulled out all the stops and threw in a little dance as we skipped along. While I’m in confession mode, I might have also  sang a few bars of  the entirely made up, ‘Annie is a good girl’ as we jiggled up the street too, just for good measure.

She was totally delighted and wagged and wiggled so hard she was in danger of poking out her own eye with her tail, but judging by the odd look and frosty good morning I got from one of my neighbours, I think I might have  well and truly cemented my reputation as ‘the mad dog woman’. Like I care.

Seeing my dogs bubbling up with pride as I tell them how clever they are is worth a thousand odd looks.

So my thanks to Victoria Schade for that and the countless other great suggestions and insights in ‘Bonding with your dog.’

Best Buds - Little Bear & Annie

I can’t remember exactly when I decided that a second dog would be a positive  influence on Little Bear, but I know I waged a long campaign of persuasion with OH. Little Bear would, my fuzzy little brain reasoned, learn the finer points of dog manners from the example of an older, calmer dog far easier than he would from me. I might be doing my best on the learning front, but let’s face it, I’ll never be a dog.

I’d seen it happen many a time. He was far more relaxed meeting a new dog when on a group walk with his friends and far less likely to growl out of fear or try to bully a youngster. He  lives to play and loved friends dogs coming to the house, moping horribly when they left and being reluctant to leave his pals at the dog sitters.  It made me question the limits of what I could teach him. I’d made huge mistakes in his training up until then, but even with the remedial work, would I ever be able to teach him everything he needed to control his fears?

It might have worked a treat, had Annie lived up to her billing as a chilled-out, laid back Lab. But she isn’t. She’s also fearful and reactive. So much for doing your homework before you adopt!

Now I know the pros out there will be shaking their heads at the dumb logic, and they’re right. Two reactive dogs have a sort of synergy that just means more barks and lunges per square kilo. So, instead of one fear aggressive dog to train, I now have two.

But, despite the hindsight, I still stand by my initial instinct. Little Bear is a happier, more contented dog because of Annie. There have been things that she’s been able to teach him that I just wasn’t able to. His loathing of dog coats for example. Years of flat-out refusing to go out in the rain or walk in a coat evaporated the day Annie got hers.

Pre-Annie, Fireworks night was hell in our house. LB would cower and shake so hard it broke your heart. But this year, as Annie sat and watched the pretty lights in the distance from the patio, LB decided it was safe enough to venture out and join her. No shaking in sight.

And then there’s the miraculous u-turn on the clicker. Pre-Annie, clicking the softest clicker on the market, in my pocket, from another room would send him scurrying upstairs to his bed to hide. We muddled on using a marker word, but it never felt as comfortable and my timing was never as good. On a hunch, I left the door open at the end of a clicker session with Annie and was amazed to see LB scamper in and line up happily for his treat. He’s now a click addict and actually gets waggy when he sees it!

I still wonder how we came to have not one, but two reactive dogs. It’s hard not to feel an occasional pang of envy at the ‘take anywhere’ dogs but if Annie has taught Little Bear something about dealing with fear, it’s nothing compared to what the pair of them teach me every single day – and for that I’ll be eternally grateful that they found their way into my life.

Annie

When I was running my ‘Little Bear needs a friend’ campaign,  my attempt to convince Other Half that a second dog would be no more bother than one, I genuinely believed it. I anticipated a few weeks of settling in, yes. A few sleepless nights perhaps plus a little remedial training, but then I saw us basking in the joy of my first multi-dog household. Long leisurely walks, the dogs playing in the field, curled up together in their bed…

If this was a movie, this would be where the film would slip off the reel.

Nine months after adopting Annie, I think it’s fair to say that it’s been a rough ride. Her terrifying disappearance for three days; separation anxiety; the super strength off the scale reactivity to any dog within 400 yards; the ruptured cruciate; hip-dysplacia and arthritis and then the (not insured) TPLO operation to re-build her ruined leg. For six weeks post op she was my umbilical dog, only leaving her crate if she was tethered to one of us.  We took it in turns to sleep on the sofa for the first week and for the next two she woke us every 3 hours through the night. Because she hurt, or itched or was just plain old miserable on her own.

Just for fun she’s thrown in 3 monthly seasons and a phantom pregnancy to squash any cunning plans of getting her spayed. On the training side she’s a master of lunging out of a Halti and gets spooked by all manner of strange things. Today it was a man with a skipping rope, yesterday an owl. For the first two months I couldn’t walk her at all for fear that she’d pull me off my feet.

But…

Despite the traumas, we love her. I very nearly burst with pride yesterday as she did a 20 minute walk on a loose lead. This is the dog who pulled like a train! She grins back at me as we walk now, looking for her click and her treat for checking in and I smother her with praise until she grins and wags some more. She chose to watch me instead of barking and lunging at a dog earlier in the week and as she shied away from the scary skipping man today, she believed me when I said he wouldn’t hurt her.

I’m writing this, not because I want to catalogue her faults, far from it, I want to celebrate how much she’s achieved. Re-homing is traumatic for any dog, for a fearful dog who spent 3 days lost living off her wits, it’s even more so. Watching her squashed into Little Bear’s bed now, snoring the deeply contented snore of a dog who’s found her place in the world, I can honestly say she’s been worth it all.

Little Bear’s behaviour problems started to really take a hold when he was just under a year old. The product, we think of a couple of attacks by other dogs, although it’s easy (and very human) to try to pin the behaviour on a single incident where he was the innocent victim. With hindsight, it was probably a whole combination of things including my reaction straight after the event which was to scoop him up and cuddle my shaking pup.

As the barking, lunging and then pinning and growling started to emerge I tried to fix it with the help of Mr Milan. Big mistake. Although there’s much about his approach that I agree with, (the focus on exercise, assertiveness and the need to work on the owner sometimes more than the dog), that’s as generous as I can be.

So I went to my vet and was referred to a very well qualified behaviourist. She assessed him and a few days later I got the written report and my training plan along with a lifetime guarantee of follow-up support.

All very good, but the crux of the advice was to avoid all other dogs on the basis that he shouldn’t be allowed to practice the bad behaviour. Although this didn’t make sense to me, she was the expert, so I tried. For months we picked quiet times at the park and would hot foot it in the other direction (as instructed) the minute we saw another dog approach.

Now for a young, playful dog used to romping around with his friends every day this must have been pretty miserable.  He became more and more frustrated and reactive and I questioned the advice on more than one occasion and was told firmly to ‘stick with it’ which I did.

Then one day in a deserted park we were dive-bombed out of the blue by a huge young Labrador. She came out of nowhere and bowled LB off his feet and of course he went nuts, pinning her down and growling at her the minute she flipped on her back.

Never being able to secure a ring back from the behaviourist, I tearfully emailed her to ask what I should have done in that circumstance. Her advice was curt and uncompromising, ‘You shouldn’t have put him in that situation to begin with!’

A lengthy email exchange followed in which I explained that short of keeping him in a box, avoiding all dogs was just not an option. The ‘treatment’ was making him even more reactive and we were both miserable in our self-inflicted roles as the local lepers. We weren’t talking about a vicious menace to society, but a Miniature-Schnauzer who had learnt to growl at more submissive dogs, so surely isolating him from other dogs was a little over the top.

What I needed were the tools to be able to deal with such a situation if it arose.  I mentioned that a friend of mine made her dogs walk slightly behind her if they’d been naughty and asked if this might be a useful technique. This earned me a lecture about not taking advice from ‘amateurs’ and I was told that she didn’t advocate any form of punishment, including making him walk behind me or indeed telling him ‘no’ if he mis-behaved. The advice remained, I was to avoid all dogs and ignore all bad behaviour, period.

It was at this point that I decided that she wasn’t the behaviourist for us. After persevering for months with her plan, LB was even more reactive than before, but was also now pretty miserable to boot. My own confidence had been shot to pieces and I was more confused than ever. Probably the most frustrating thing was her refusal to explain the theory to me. With hindsight, this was probably the catalyst I needed to start the behaviour course,  but I’d wasted a lot of time and money following her advice and I was still without the practical tools I needed to manage LB’s behaviour.

Thankfully, the experience didn’t put me off seeking help and thanks to a couple of fantastic behaviourists, I now have the tools (and a bit of theory) to deal with LB’s behaviour if he steps out of line (see the magic of time out).

So if there’s a moral to the story, I suppose it’s about finding the right fit for you.  Finding properly qualified people is always important in dealing with any problem behaviour, but especially aggression of any kind, but so too is making sure that you can work with that person. Sometimes it clicks and sometimes it doesn’t, so moving on to try someone else is sometimes the best option.

It’s been a tough week. I’ve spent most of it spontaneously blubbing to the point where my eyes are puffy enough to make a story about going a few rounds with Mike Tyson sound almost plausible. Everywhere I look there are horses or references to them or pictures of them. The world has been a grey and joyless place and my mind has conspired to remind me of all the times that I could have seen her and didn’t.  The time I’ll never get back.

Life has of course, continued apace around me. Camden clawed Little Bear in the face for no good reason on Tuesday night which resulted in everyone sulking; Annie’s been waking us up at 4am nearly every morning for the hell of it and there’s been the usual rounds of walking, feeding and playing. Oh and of course, throw in an emergency trip back to the Bionic Vet for Annie when she suddenly stopped putting weight on her ‘new’ leg.

But today, amidst the chaos and the gloom, we had an unexpected breakthrough. At the field, LB decided to try and bully two adorable but very submissive adult spaniels. As the first squirmed and went tummy-up LB fell into the horribly familiar bully boy mode growling and posturing over her.

In the past I’ve shouted at him and grabbed his harness which makes him ten times worse.  Today, I walked calmly up to him and said sternly ‘Do you want a time out?’ On hearing this…..he walked away!  To which I said ‘Good’, (which is our clicker replacement word because he’s afraid of clickers…oh the irony!)

Before I could get to him, second submissive Spaniel ran up to him and promptly threw himself on his back. LB slipped into the same routine and this time when I said ‘Do you want a time out?’ he STOPPED growling and started sniffing instead which earned him another ‘good’. I was amazed.

He barked and chased them a few minutes later which earned him a two minute time out on the lead until he calmed down, but I can’t tell you how proud I was when on the next lap of the field, even though the Spaniels were just as submissive, he approached them calmly and sniffed without a trace of a growl or a stiff body posture. My praise was of course effusive for this turn-around and within seconds they were playing together.

‘Time out’ has been THE most effective training tool ever and it’s all thanks to my lovely friend and behaviourist Lou. Yes, it’s a punishment of sorts because it temporarily takes away something that he values i.e. his freedom to play off the lead, or if at home, his freedom to be with us, but I prefer to think of it more in terms of a consequence.  After months of using this technique consistently at home, it’s acting as a really effective management tool out and about, to the point where even the threat of it ‘Do you want a time-out?’ is enough to stop him in his tracks and make him think.

Hearing me in the park the other day, one lady was reduced to fits of giggles and asked me if we had a naughty step at home too a la Super Nanny.  I know it sounds a bit silly, but it’s working for us. I finally feel that I have a tool that helps me to control LB’s less desirable behaviour but without resorting to aversives which I detest and simply made his behaviour worse.

So in the midst of my gloom, yet again my dogs have shone a little light. I sometimes wonder who’s actually training who…

I lost a very dear friend yesterday. She taught me to ride as a nervous adult some ten years ago and in so doing, she taught me that I’m sometimes better than I often think I am. She taught me that love and gentleness are far more powerful than force.  She taught me about patience and perseverance. She taught me that life is sometimes best lived just for the sheer hell of it. She taught me to be joyful. In her passing, she taught me that I have more courage than I ever thought I possessed.

Some of the happiest moments of my life so far have been spent perched upon her broad back.  My darling Apache, a Rubenesque, tri-coloured Welsh Cob, slipped away yesterday in the Spring sunshine while I and her devoted owners whispered our love in her chocolate-brown ears and tried to keep the agony from our voices. I’ve seen her fall a thousand times since and my heart is breaking.

Another lesson was waiting for me at home. Little Bear and Annie, usually exuberant in their greetings were off the scale frantic. As I sobbed, Annie tried to super-glue herself to my lap, snuffling my hair and hurriedly licking my face and ears – something she never does. Little Bear ran around trying to find the right teddy to bring me, stopping to lick my cheek here and there while barking like a lunatic. Every sniffle since has brought a cold wet nose to my hand.

You can write it off as anthropomorphism, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the animals we’re closest to recognise human pain and do what they can to comfort us.  Apache once did the very same thing many years ago. Seeing me cry in her stable over my disintegrating long-term relationship, she walked slowly towards me, put her great head over my shoulder and gently held me there while I hugged her neck and sobbed into her mane. When I was cried out, she snorted the remains of her garlic laced dinner into my hair and then nose-butted me in the bum as if to say “Right then Lady, time to get on with it.”

Following the tragic deaths of Lance Corporal Liam Tasker and his devoted dog Theo,  there’s been much speculation  about whether animals can indeed die of broken hearts. To me it seems to be a moot point, maybe what we should be celebrating is their frequent and often overlooked ability to help heal the broken-hearted.