Why you should never say ‘no’ to your dog …and let them take you for walkies!

• Jessica Pierce is responding to a severe epidemic of dog-anxiety in the U.S. 
• READ MORE:  Life as private vet to the world’s oldest tortoise

ANIMALS 

Who’s a Good Dog?

by Jessica Pierce (University of Chicago Press £20, 304pp)

As the happy but frazzled owner of a three-month-old black cocker spaniel puppy called Dinah, who is busy pulling the stuffing out of her dog bed as I write, I needed this new book, Who’s A Good Dog?, by American writer and dog owner Jessica Pierce.

If I hadn’t read it I might even now be saying, ‘NO! Dinah! Stop that!’

But Pierce’s main message to all dog owners is that we must let dogs be dogs. What has gone wrong in human-dog relationships, she believes, is that ‘we ask them to suppress their natural behaviours (roaming, barking, digging, jumping, foraging), and we tell them “No” all the time without offering alternatives’. 

We send them to puppy trainers, who work on them to suppress their deepest doggy urges.

I admit I do say ‘No!’ to Dinah quite a lot. What else can you say to a puppy who’s taking socks out of the washing basket, chewing the computer cables and climbing inside the open dishwasher? 

Author Jessica Pierce’s main message to all dog owners is that we must let dogs be dogs and not expect them to suppress behaviours such as roaming, barking, digging, jumping and foraging

But Pierce asks us to think what this must be like for the dog: ‘The word “No” becomes a background noise to our dog, a kind of nagging leaf blower across the street in their awareness.’

Well, you do need to stop them wreaking havoc in the house. But Pierce implores us to rethink our relationships with dogs, so that they become more a collaboration than a state of dominance in which we expect the dog to adapt 99 per cent to our way of life.

Instead of ‘systematically de-dogging our dogs’, so that we live perfect, clean, tidy lives in our homes while they suffer in our ‘minefields of scary stimuli’ (loud music, vacuum cleaners, blaring televisions and strongly scented cleaning products), we should think about what it’s like to be a dog.

‘They compromise,’ Pierce writes, ‘and so should we.’ So I think I’ll sacrifice that dog bed, and will let Dinah chew her way through the yoghurt pots in the recycling sack, if that’s what she needs to be a full dog.

Pierce reminds us that, with their instinctive urge to forage, dogs need to feel that humans are not the sole provider of their meals. 

The utter delight a dog shows when it discovers an edge of stale pizza in the park and runs off with it, looking guilty, is a sign that it yearns for such moments of self-sustaining bliss.

This is far from being one of those ‘how to be a good parent’ books written by a perfect mother of a perfect child. Pierce admits that her own beloved rescue dog Bella is far from perfect when it comes to supposed ‘good’ behaviour.

She begs at the table, and Pierce enjoys sharing her food with her. (That’s one thing we’re not going to allow with Dinah, having had an increasingly ‘beggy’ Norfolk terrier the last time round.) Bella doesn’t much like playing with other dogs, or being petted by strangers.

Pierce feels this book needs to be written because there seems to be a severe epidemic of dog-anxiety in the U.S. 

‘The single most significant problem facing pet dogs right now,’ Pierce writes, ‘is their lack of agency.’ 

She strongly believes we should let our dogs take us for the walk, rather than the other way round, and that the dog should choose the route. That’s giving the dog some agency — and don’t worry, she writes: this won’t fill your dog’s head with dreams of total canine domination.

There seems to be a severe epidemic of dog-anxiety in the U.S. This is why Pierce feels this book needs to be written. 

She has chatted with dog trainers who are weeping and burned out from the stress of it all: both the miserable dogs and their miserable humans.

U.S. dogs are living in tiny apartments, left alone for eight hours with a strip of AstroTurf as their designated peeing area. They’re shut away in crates, ‘one of the most unnatural things we do to them’.

They’re fitted with shock-collars by owners at their wits’ end trying to train them. Those collars (sometimes euphemistically branded ‘electronic collars’) are cruel, Pierce writes, creating a ‘landscape of fear’ for the dog.

Horrifyingly, a great number of dogs in the U.S. are being drugged on a regular basis: given medication for separation anxiety and Prozac for ‘inappropriate urination and aggression’. Not to mention anti-psychotic drugs for their seemingly mad behaviour.

When talking to our dogs, we should banish the word ‘bad’, because a ‘bad’ dog is usually just struggling to adapt and not meeting our unrealistic expectations, says Pierce 

With an epidemic of human depression going on, people are acquiring dogs expecting them to be therapists, so ‘dogs are soaking up pools of human despair’, poor things, when all they want to do is love and be loved and allowed to go for a long walk, or ‘sniffari’, as Pierce calls a dog walk, emphasising how important it is for them to be allowed to sniff delicious smells in the park, as well as leave ‘pee-mails’, as she calls the calling cards that dog urine represents.

Pierce wants us to change our vocabulary of dog behaviour. Instead of ‘begging’ we should say ‘solicitation of food’. Instead of ‘stealing’, we should think of it as ‘home-foraging’.

Instead of ‘commands’ (which imply ‘Do what I say, or else!’) we should call them ‘cues’. 

46%

of UK dog owners let their dogs sleep with them

One of the main commands or ‘cues’ we all use, ‘Sit!’ should be changed to ‘Lie down’, Pearce insists. When you command ‘Sit!’, you’re coercing a dog into adopting an unnatural position.

We should banish the word ‘bad’, because a ‘bad’ dog is usually just struggling to adapt and not meeting our unrealistic expectations. 

Instead of ‘unfriendly’ we should use the label ‘DINOS’ — ‘Dog In Need Of Space’. There’s nothing behaviourally or morally wrong, Pierce says, with dogs who don’t want to be petted by every human or play with every dog.

As for the supposed psychotic behaviour, this is usually just pure doggy joy. One of the most delightful traits of dogs is exactly this: their sudden boundless joy, which can manifest itself by their zooming round and round in crazy circles for no reason, so it looks as if they’ve lost their mind.

We should keep a list, Pierce advises, of what gives our dog pure, unbridled joy, and we should come back to it often. I’ll do just that. Dogs will be dogs.

Source: Read Full Article