Secret Diary of a dog trainer
Braving the icy cold to track down a runaway Dalmatian isn’t the best way to start the year – not when your plans involved chilling under a duvet or two on the sofa...
Happy New Year!’ cheered everyone around me, as I sat on the sofa, completely smothered in dogs,
cat, and a blanket to ward off the cold. Much to the amusement of my family, I spend the entire winter swaddled in huge duvet-style clothing, ski bottoms, thermals, fleeces, hats, scarves and special mittens that convert to fingerless when needed.
Everyone clinked glasses and looked distinctly red-faced and glowing, possibly due to the alcohol and lateness of the evening, but there was nothing remotely sparkling about me. I smiled wanly.
I was just so cold and tired, not even the warmth of my family could lift me that night.
It was part of the job, to be working outdoors, and my assistant Rosie and I constantly joked about how people might fail to recognize us in the summer. What usually happened was that our dog-owning clients would spot us in the supermarket and loudly exclaim, ‘I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on!’ which made for very interesting glances.
This year, it was worse than ever. After every training morning, I had to come home, run a very hot bath, and boil myself alive to try to get my body temperature back to something resembling normal. Otherwise, my teeth would be chattering all afternoon and no amount of steaming tea or hot-water bottles would stop the bone-chilling cold.
Even at night, husband Andrew would complain as he slept in boxer shorts, while I shivered under a pile of blankets and an extra duvet on my side of the bed.
If I dared to poke my foot across to his obvious warmth, it would be met with a tolerant sigh.
Being cold doesn’t really work when you have our job, even though we spend a lot of it moving about. That morning I
had taught an agility class, but I was still frozen. My sprinting around had achieved nothing to raise my body temperature when my clients were sweating.
Little momentsLara, a member of the agility group, exuded warmth and charisma that drew people to her,
and she was one of our longest-attending clients. Her dog, Jilly, a most beautiful Dalmatian, was a kooky and keen beauty of a dog. Massive, with long, delicate legs that strode elegantly, she had a crazy moment every now and again that sent her charging around the edge of the field madly without care.
Lara had joined the agility class in an attempt to improve Jilly’s recall. The Dalmatian had always been trained to come back, but there were times when she seemed to feel the caress of the wind in her fur, a scent carried on a breeze, and she’d be gone.
There was no telling when it would happen. At other times, Jilly would fly back happily to Lara’s side, her expressive face telling us all how much she loved her owner.
Lara had become so cautious about Jilly’s ‘little moments’, as she glumly referred to them, that she would not take the dog off the lead on walks, but used a long line to ensure safety. This was working well since it meant that Lara would at least not see her dog vanish into the distance at inopportune times.
Wanting a dog to come back to you is something all owners would like, but not many achieve it reliably. Working in training and behavior, we have specific rules that aid success, but there’s always plenty of competition for what a dog would rather do. I recall a famous trainer once being asked when the owner could ‘stop using rewards’. The trainer shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘Whenever you want, but good luck with it!’ Put simply, if you want your dog to turn away from something they would much rather do, and turn back to you, they have to be well paid.
Pain, no gain
In the bad old days of yelling, choke chains and force, we used to put the dog on a long lead and yank hard when they didn’t rush back. In some cases, it worked (until the long lead wasn’t on anymore), but generally, it was nasty,
painful and dangerous to do. Why would you hurt your best friend? All sorts of problems were caused by dogs being stopped on a long line when the dog was running fast. A cartwheeling dog is not going to be free from injury. Instead, we work on a highly repetitive, highly rewarding cycle of calling the dog, letting them move away, call again and reward, repeat, repeat, repeat. It ends up that the dog comes back so that they are allowed to move away – a nice cyclical learning pattern. We had done all this with Jilly to no avail. Jilly had a very strong affinity with people. She adored children especially, and would always welcome their approaches. She would let them handle her and was very gentle, lying down o let them pet her. She was the most extraordinary dog.
So, the agility field was the next option. A year ago, Lara had stated that her New Year’s resolution would be making the next 12 months ‘the year of the recall’. She worked harder with her dog than any owner I’d met.
In agility, dogs learn to be apart from their owners, but still maintain a strong connection.
The dogs learn that a jump means ‘clear it’ rather than ‘run under it or knock it down’, a tunnel
means ‘dive through the gap’, and an A-frame means ‘scurry fast up and down the other side and don’t leap off the contact points’ (which incurs faults and risks injury). The bond comes with the owner and the numbered agility course. The dog needs to listen to the owner or they can run the course in the wrong order or miss out an obstacle. Jilly would stay close to Lara for the majority of the agility lesson, and then... off she went.
Racing around and around like a dervish, no amount of calling or distraction would help. I’d seen it time and time again where a dog had launched after a bird, another dog, even a distant lorry, but in this case, this young dog just loved to run for the sake of running. Where’s Mummy? Lara and I had a strategy. The field was enclosed so we would call between us from either side of the field until Jilly suddenly clicked back out of her racing demon mode and ran to one of us for a bit of hotdog. Lara, much to her horror, was known as ‘Mummy’. Poor Lara had earned this moniker at a fun training seminar where the dogs were taught to seek a family member, and her daughter had taught Jilly to ‘Find Mummy’. Jilly had lapped it all up and ‘Mummy’ had stuck. I was known as ‘Find Aunty’, and clever Jilly
knew us both.
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