The Little Bear Dog Blog

I really dislike mornings. In the words of that profound philosopher, Garfield the cat, “I’d like mornings just fine if they started later.” I can’t agree more my furry friend.

My method of coping with the harsh reality of early alarm calls is to ease myself in slowly. I make a veritable bucket of very strong coffee, park myself in the armchair in the kitchen and listen to the Today programme on Radio Four until I feel at least vaguely human.

This used to be a fairly solitary experience before Annie arrived.  The Cat would be happily tucking into her breakfast before disappearing to conduct her morning ablutions in some off-limits flowerbed and Little Bear would still be curled up in his bed upstairs.  He dislikes mornings just as much as I do but has the luxury of missing them entirely if he chooses to.

Annie however  just LOVES mornings. She greets my bleary-eyed decent by the light of my iPhone with super wags at the foot of the stairs and then skips along with me as I put the kettle and radio on and feed The Cat.  She very helpfully licks the fork clean en-route to the sink too which is very good of her.

When we first got her I put her enthusiasm down to the fact that she’s a Lab and mornings of course = breakfast.  But Annie has settled into a routine of her own that – shock, horror, doesn’t involve food.  She sits patiently as I make my coffee and then gives me just enough time to set my mug down and park myself in the chair, before popping onto my lap for her morning snuggle.

Now the armchair isn’t that big and although neither am I, there’s precious little room for the two of us in such a small space. Cue the pitty-patter of little paws on tiles as Bear wags his way into the kitchen. Their morning greeting, nose to nose with copious wagging, is a bucket full of cuteness that never fails to cheer me up. Not wanting to be left out and now brave enough to get up close and personal with the big ginger girl, LB now joins us by hopping on my lap, something he’s never done before now.

If she'd just budge over a bit we could snuggle...

So, here I am, buried under the weight of two dogs, trying to listen to the morning news and drink my coffee before Little Bear can take advantage of my early morning slowness and sneak a slurp from right under my nose.  Yesterday proved a particular challenge as The Cat decided to join us too and plonked herself on the arm within swiping distance of LB’s nose which caused us all to sweat and forced me to abandon my coffee so that I could put both hands on tickle rotation.

It was stone cold by the time she sauntered off through the cat flap. Turfing LB off my lap as I rose to make a fresh one, he promptly hopped back onto the chair and snuggled up next to Annie. I still don’t like mornings, but even I have to admit that they’re now a little more bearable than they were.

Little Bear & Annie sharing the chair

My other half writes a wonder blog called ‘Be inspired’ and he recently posed a question: ‘What if everyone in your life is here to teach you something?’

And by everyone he means EVERYONE, not just your grandma and your kids and the ‘nice’ people in your life, he means the idiot boy racer who cut you up on the motorway, your supercilious boss, the neighbour who throws the loudest parties at 3am…. It’s a philosophical question, but a powerful one because it asks us to question our reactions and our thoughts.

Our ponderings over the breakfast table on this question made me realise that two of my most influential teachers were currently sitting at my feet (probably hoping that the table would miraculously collapse and deliver them a jackpot)

Where would I be now had it not been for Little Bear? If he had been the take anywhere dog of my childhood, would I be blogging? Would I be spending my free time studying canine behaviour and assisting at puppy classes in my quest to inch towards a better understanding of dogs and our relationship with them? Would the idea of a second dog have even arisen? Probably not.

At it’s not just dogs that I understand a little better now either. It’s me. In trying to help Little Bear deal with the things he finds frightening or frustrating I’ve also had to learn to read myself too.

I’ve mentioned his ability as a ‘barometer Bear’ before, picking up and reflecting my emotional state straight back at me, but I’m lucky in that I can talk about my fears or irritations, Little Bear on the other hand has a severely limited repertoire of emotional outlets.

Once I recognised this, I realised that I had to work hard to control my energy, my body language and even my outlook in order to help him. It’s work that will probably never be ‘finished’ but we’re both learning and growing through the process and that’s what matters.

Little Bear and Annie got their jackpot in the form of a share of my scrambled egg and a toast crust each, their reward for bringing me to where I need to be and inspiring me every single day.

It’s been three months, give or take, since that fateful day when, before even getting foster dog Annie home, she broke her collar and bolted into the night. Three days of searching ensued before she was found, safe but completely exhausted and totally traumatised. She lived under the dining table for another three days coming out only to eat and drink (ever the Labrador). She growled and lunged at the doors and window if Little Bear or the cat ambled past and was so worried about leaving her new refuge, we ended up having to carry her outside to go to the loo for fear that her bladder would pop.

It took countless weeks before she felt brave enough not to hide behind my legs when visitors came. Weeks more of air-lock type conditions to keep her and the cat apart until we could be sure that her early growls weren’t anything serious.

Walks, to be polite have been ‘challenging’. LB is reactive – but Annie took it to a whole other level.  A dog a football pitch away would set her off into a frenzy of barking and lunging so determined that I couldn’t physically hold her without OH’s help.  So much for our chilled out foster dog!  I was kicking myself for thinking that a second dog would be part of the solution and trying hard to ignore the nagging voice which was whispering triumphantly “Well, you’ve done it now.”

They say that you don’t see a rescue dogs’ real personality for at least a few months and we can certainly testify to that one.

Thankfully, what started out as scary just gets sweeter and kinder by the day. Three months in and Annie no longer barks and lunges at other dogs when we’re out. She’s met more dogs than we can count and is beautifully mannered and fluent in ‘dog’. The Cat’s given her a couple of pastings for putting her nose where she shouldn’t and we’ve seen not an once of aggression in her. We’re still working on the heel and on her reactivity at night (three nights fending for herself probably hasn’t helped that), but she’s getting there.

So, Annie is now officially part of the family!

Little Bear & Annie

Little Bear & his big sister Annie

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

Poor Little Bear Dog Blog. If it was a real dog I’m sure the RSPCA would have been called by now on the grounds of neglect – and quite rightly so too!

The reasons for my tardiness on the blogging front are numerous – work, (obviously) and life in general are probably reasons enough on their own, but the best excuse (if I can look at it that way) is that I’ve started studying. As of the 1st October, I started my certificate in dog behaviour. Plus, in my efforts to up my observational and practical handling skills, I’ve also started assisting at puppy classes once a week too.

Little Bear and Annie obviously take up a huge chunk of time too so I’m justifying it by feeling that I’m at least getting my priorities right.

But how I miss blogging! I started as a way of keeping a diary on LB’s progress purely for my own benefit (there are only so many times you can regale your friends with dog training stories without dinner invites plummeting!) I’ve always found writing a powerful way to deal with things – for me it is truly cathartic. So as my time gets ever more stretched, I find myself hankering after a spare half an hour, not to soak in the bath or get my nails done, but to curl up with my Mac and blog about my favourite topic.

I have an essay to finish today, two dogs to walk and one who really needs a groom (LB is looking like Tatty Teddy from the greetings cards at the moment) so I’d better get on with it.  But somehow, I feel far more ready for my day than I did half an hour ago – see, much more fun than a soak in the bath!

Trips into the London office are thankfully few and far between these days, but I can’t escape them completely.  It means a 5.15am start, (never a pleasure) and as I do it so infrequently these days, a pretty rubbish nights sleep as I wait for the dreaded alarm to go off.

Five meetings later and team drinks after work and I was seriously ready to head home. My train journey is a full hour and I usually resign myself to working on my laptop or trying to read the evening paper really slowly to make it last the whole way. So, imagine my delight when a lady and her dog came to sit next to us.

City dogs

I always love to see dogs in the city.  Little rays of reality trotting amongst the silliness of posh suits and designer handbags.

I wasn’t the only one to be lifted by the new arrival either – the carriage seemed to come alive.

A chilled out Lab, he accepted every pat and compliment given to him.  Two teenage boys stopped being cool long enough to lean over and take their turn at pooch patting and an elderly gentleman changed seats, I think just so that he could walk past and tickle his head.

But this lad had quite a story to tell. He was on the demure side so his mum explained to us that she had in fact rescued/stolen him from Singapore a few years ago.

Shaved almost bald and seriously underweight, he’d been chained since a puppy in a back yard and kept as a guard dog enduring endless days in the baking hot sun without shade.  He’d spent his entire life on the end of that chain until she’d befriended him. Fearing for his life, she’d dog-knapped him, arranged a safe haven until his paperwork could be organised and then flown him back to her home in England.

A nation of animal lovers?

As the newspapers once again fill with the horror stories of animal cruelty and neglect, I think we need to remember that there is thankfully, another side of the coin.  There are people out there who move mountains with the love they show for their animals, we just hear about them less.

In the October edition of Dogs Today, Terry Doe recounts a story of a couple who re-mortgaged their house to pay the vet bills for their Lurcher Lennon who was hit by a van. This is pretty impressive in itself, but the truly amazing thing is that Lennon wasn’t even their dog at the time!  He was a stray when he was hit and the couple were merely witnesses to the horrific accident. Thankfully their love and investment has paid off and four years later Lennon is alive and well if missing an eye and held together by some very clever metal-work.

Overwhelmed

For the sensitive souls amongst us, the horrors inflicted on our furry friends can be almost too overwhelming to cope with.  I can’t bring myself to even watch the RSPCA television appeals let alone the You Tube nasties that out abusers. An ad for a charity rescuing bear’s kept for their bile had me in tears for days. They sap my energy and plant seeds of knotweed hopelessness that as a species we’re really just neanderthals in suits.

I don’t need to see cruelty in order to know that it exists and by focussing on it we give it power it really doesn’t deserve.

So I’m taking the same approach to training my world as I do with my dogs: I’m going to ignore the behaviour I don’t want and reward with my attention, the behaviour that I do.

This means giving no time to the negative and actively seeking out those soul nourishing, heart-thumpingly joyous stories of love and courage, selflessness and devotion that give me hope. Let’s celebrate all those wonderful people who, each in their own small way are proving that we are indeed a nation of true animal lovers!

P.S

Please leave a comment if you have a good news story to share – I’d LOVE to read it.

Working with a ‘problem dog’ can be exhausting. You love them but there are days when it’s really hard to like their behaviour.

As humans I think we often get confused with where the person stops and the behaviour begins.  So in the office, your boss makes a decision that really annoys you and your reaction might be to think or even say ‘That man is an idiot!’

You may think the decision was idiotic, but is that enough to judge the whole person on? Even if it’s the latest in a long line of less than perfect choices, do you have enough to go on? Probably not.  I think this is because what we’re really commenting on the behaviour, not the whole person. As we know, people are a lot more complex than that! So if we make these leaps to judgement with our own species, it’s easy to see how we can make the same mistakes with our dogs who like us, are so much more than the behaviour they express.

Some time ago, a friend of mine, listening patiently to my anxious ramblings about Little Bear’s nervous aggression, calmly smiled and said ‘Don’t worry, it’s just behaviour.’  I must have looked at her like she was a lunatic because she said ‘Just think about it.’

I did. And now I get it. 🙂

There are occasions when Little Bear looks thoroughly miserable.  I’m no canine body language expert, but even to the untrained eye ‘cheesed off’ is pretty easy to spot.  He shuffles about the place, woofing at the slightest noise and flopping into his various snoozing spots with an audible huff. If he could speak English, I think it would be to protest that he was bored.

To test this hypothesis, you only have to produce a teddy or a tennis ball to see him instantly transformed. Tail’s up, ears go gremlin like and he’s bouncing around like an excited puppy.

Like most people I want my dogs to be happy.  Annie seems quite chilled by nature and as long as she gets walked, fed and cuddled according to her timetable, she looks quite content.

But LB is another matter. So, I’ve been doing some reading and the one thing I think could be missing from LB’s life are more opportunities to use his brainbox a little more.

So, armed with the excellent, ‘Mind Games for Dogs’ by Sarah Whitehead, we spent the weekend putting both dogs through the canine equivalent of suduko.

The results? WOW!

Annie has enjoyed herself judging by all the tail wagging, but LB is practically transformed! He’s crashed out on the sofa now, but he’s been full of beans today and he’s been grinning like a loon. For anyone who thinks I’m bonkers describing a dog grinning, I probably am for numerous other reasons, but trust me on the grinning – it’s this soft mouthed, smiling eye, lolling tongue look of a super chilled out pooch.It’s a joy to see.

So what did we try?

Find it

Bear’s played this before but it was brand new for Annie.  I’m using it to get a recall and a strong watch me, so I call their names, ask for a sit and a watch me and then throw their biscuits in different directions for them to find. The rules are that they must come back, sit and make eye contact before the next piece gets thrown.

Annie, being a Lab would have played this all day but LB was showing signs of getting bored.  He’s not that food motivated so the reward for him is the game and, I think the praise he gets. To liven it up I had to change position a lot – so we ended up with me standing and him sitting on one sofa, then the other one, then the armchair ….it was part training game, part workout for me!

Hide it

Next we tried the hide it game. I put some biscuits under the quilt in his crate while he sat and watched then told him to find it. The thing I’ve noticed with LB is that he needs encouragement. Like a kid who lacks confidence and gives up too quickly, if at first it seems too challenging, he walks away. But praise him and encourage him and he’s a different dog.  In under 4 minutes he’d worked out that the only way to get the treats was to back out of the cage and drag the quilt out with him. The wag went all the way to his ears when I told him how clever he was!

What’s in the box?

Today we played with a couple of cardboard boxes.  I’d hide a toy inside while he sat & waited and then when told ‘ok’ he had to find it. The large box  frustrated him for a while until he learned how to tip it over but once mastered, he did it time and time again.  The enthusiasm was unmistakable and his tail never stopped wagging.

The cup game

Annie got in on the act after watching from the sofa for the first five minutes but was a bit more reserved. For a dog just learning how to play she did brilliantly though.  She has a great technique in the cup game. The game is essentially find the lady, but to keep it simple we started with just one cup with a treat hidden underneath it.

This is definitely her forte. She doesn’t waste time shuffling it around with her nose – oh no. She picks it straight up and goes to her bed with it, wagging fit to bust. Trouble is, she leaves the treat! Bless her.

The power of play

I’ve been amazed and thrilled to see how the dogs responded to the games.  I’ve not seen LB look so thoroughly happy in a long time.  The wag he does in response to ‘clever Bear!’ goes all the way up to his ears and he just looks so proud of himself.  It’s also helping Annie to come out of her shell a little and she just loves the attention.

The other upside of course is that OH and I have been in stitches watching them. At this rate, we’ll also be racking our brains for new ideas to keep them entertained!

Okay, so that post in which I ranted about the ‘it’s always the owners fault’ mentality?  Well, hands-up, sometimes it is.

At the park yesterday we met Little Bear’s Bichonpoo friend. They get on really well and it’s lovely to watch them play. Except that yesterday LB had a ball in his mouth when he saw his friend.  We stood chatting and the dogs said a nice hello.  Then stupidly, I thought ‘Oh, better not let LB get possessive of his ball, I’ll just take it off him so that he can play’.

Doh!

Here he was not at all worried that his pal wanted his ball until of course I try and take it away and put the idea into his head. Now his friend showing up means his toy gets taken away. The second I did it I could have kicked myself because of course, what happened? Yep, LB all grumpy and guarding his beloved tennis ball and all thoughts of playtime gone.

Have I beaten myself up about it? Course I have. I hate getting it wrong for his sake more than mine, but I’m learning to be stoical and see my mistakes as the lessons.  Of course I like the triumphs far better, but that’s life. <sigh>

LB doesn’t have a mum who gets it right every time, but he certainly has one who will never, ever stop trying.