Category: dogs

The last couple of weeks have been a bit of a shock to the system. Rita went back to school two weeks ago, which meant that I went back to walking Winnie a couple of times a day (not quite every day, because Rita's schedule often has gaps, but certainly a lot more than I'd done over the summer). Of course, I wanted to keep on doing all the other things I'd been doing: work (standing at my desk for 8+ hours per day), yoga (an hour or so every morning), circuit training (3-4 times per week), running (4 times a week), and so on.

Anyone who wasn't an idiot would have seen where this was going. I was completely knackered by the end of the first week, was suffering a bit from "being on my feet"-related malaise (pain while running, pain while walking, pain while standing: oops). Silly boy.

Our dog Winnie is a great little dog. Of course, we would say that, but it really is true. The more I read about dog development and behaviour, the more pleased I feel about how far she's come since we adopted her.

Sweet as she is though, there's one thing she does that drives both me and Rita spare, something that can make a nice outing into a big pile of stress. Winnie is a hunting dog, and oh, does she love to hunt. She never catches anything, but she loves to chase things. Birds and squirrels mostly, but deer, hares, cats, anything that runs away. (She will stand and watch deer that aren't moving or that haven't seen her, but if they run, she's off.) She has in the past thought about chasing Gämse in the high mountains, but I managed to put her off that -- she had no chance of getting anywhere near them and she would probably have killed herself falling off a cliff trying to keep up with them...

Today, we had an early morning outing to the Plage de l'Espiguette, a _big_ beach about 30 km east of Montpellier. We got up at 6:15, picked up the Modulauto car at 7:00, persuaded Winnie into the back (she's still a bit scared of cars...) and off we went. We arrived at the car…

Yesterday evening, we had a meeting with Martine, the dog behaviourist who's helping us with Winnie. Winnie has come a long way from the terribly frightened little dog that we picked up from the animal shelter four months ago. She's no longer terrified of everything in sight, she runs around with her tail up, likes to play with other dogs, likes to sniff in the bushes, likes to run crazily through the fallen leaves in the forest. She's still jumpy and easily gets scared of people in the street or sudden noises, but she's come a long way.

by John Bradshaw

Those of us who live with small furry friends have a vested interest in understanding what our beasties are thinking. They don't talk, they won't use SurveyMonkey, and they sometimes act like they're not human at all, no matter how we might like to think of them as little people in dog costumes. But never fear. There is a whole industry out there that promises to help you interpret your dog's slightest ear flick and nose twitch, that will allow you to correct all "undesirable" canine behaviours back to the acceptable human norms, that will turn you into a veritable Dr. Dolittle.

Just one little problem. Most of what you read is wrong, and quite a lot of it is harmful. Dominate your dog! Tame the wolf in your home! Show your pooch who's boss! All complete crap, based on romantic story-telling and what makes good TV, rather than on decent science.

In In Defence Of Dogs, John Bradshaw, a researcher in canine behaviour at the University of Bristol (although he has appeared on TV, including The Colbert Report!) presents some of the recent thinking on dog behaviour, based on, of all things, scientific research.

What does it mean when your dog yawns at you? She's tired? She's bored? She's embarrassed of your choice of socks? If you don't know, you probably want to read Turid Rugaas's book about the body language signals that dogs use to display unease and to calm each other down.

Winnie is a dog, probably half beagle, half something else. She lives with us now, but her life wasn't always wall-to-wall belly rubs, salmon for breakfast and as much love as she can stand. We adopted her from the animal shelter where we work as volunteers on September 4, and for 3-4 months before that, she'd been cowering at the back of her cage, frightened even to show her little nose to the people outside.

We think Winnie was raised as a hunting dog, locked up in a kennel with other dogs and no humans to bond with, since she has a bad case of kennel syndrome: she's scared of more or less everything except other dogs, and now, us. Loud or just sudden noises, cars, bikes, trams, other people, big boxes (no idea why), and so on. All send her into a panic. We think that she probably wasn't aggressive and confident enough to satisfy the assholes who had her before, so they abandoned her.