If you’ve read my column regularly – and why wouldn’t you, it’s gripping stuff – you’ll recall that last summer, the hubs and I adopted a 5 year-old dog. We discovered, when we took him on holiday with us, that this shaggy 6 stone beast of indeterminate breeding really liked floating around on a paddle board. Mind you, I had to be paddling the thing, but he seemed to take a keen interest in being on – as opposed to in – the water. In that column, I promised to get back to Munster in more detail in a future article, and guess what? This is your lucky day!
The thing we like best about Munster (and, no, we didn’t name him that) is that he’s such a cheerful fellow. He’s always got a big sloppy smile on his face, and he’s happy to do whatever the rest of the pack is doing, especially when it involves going for long walks in a nearby meadow.
The thing we like least about him is that he has a propensity for chasing and killing small animals. Regrettably, I didn’t know this about him until he’d killed a stray kitten. At that point, thoroughly horrified and disgusted, I returned him to the shelter. I have four cats in the house, after all; I wasn’t about to let him do the same thing to them. As it turned out, though, my heart couldn’t bear the thought of losing him. Two weeks after I’d returned him, the hubs and I went back, heads hanging, and asked very nicely if we might have him back again. The shelter director was more than happy to get him off the books.
In that two weeks without him, I did a lot of soul searching and a fair amount of digging online. I told the hubs (and if I may, I’ll take this moment to remind you that he’s notoriously cheap…er, frugal…) that if we were to take him back, there would be money spent on daycare and good manners lessons. If Munster were to come back, I wanted to ensure that I had a decent amount of control over him. Naturally, the hubs – who was chuffed about him from the beginning – agreed to my terms. He also, in the interest of cat safety, installed a door between the west side of the house and the east side in order to provide the cats with a safe area in which to live. And while the aforementioned classes and daycare certainly helped, I recognized a need for more. It simply wasn’t enough for him to sit when I said “sit.” I wanted him to come when I said “come” and to mind when I said “no.” In order for that to happen, I needed to take his training to another level.
I asked around, and learned that one of the women who worked at the daycare centre also trained dogs, and would come to our home and give a free demonstration of the shock collar that she sells, and trains her own dogs with. I’d seen how well her dogs behaved, the times I dropped Munster off at the centre. One word from her – literally – and the dogs did and/or went precisely as she’d directed. I wanted that level of control for myself! Impressed, I took her up on the offer, and looked forward with keen anticipation to demonstration day.
As it turned out, Gina’s a fellow horsewoman as well. When she found out that I was leasing Bit, she explained the shock collar (which I will refer to, from here on in, as the more appropriate e-collar) like this,
“You see how we’re talking to each other now? I have your undivided attention?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“But if you were out at the stable with your horse and I wanted to talk to you, I might have to tap you on the shoulder to get your attention. That’s what the e-collar does. It’s a tap on the shoulder and should never be used any other way. It’s not for punishment, it’s for emphasis.” And as I watched her demonstrate the collar first on her dog, and then mine, I was hooked. This was, indeed, exactly what my exuberant, I’ll-do-what-you-ask-when-I-bloody-well-want-to-and-not-a-moment-sooner dog needed in order to learn what he needed to know. I bought one immediately.
That’s not the end of the story, or even the beginning, necessarily. Gina didn’t just hand over the collar and say “good luck!” She also provided several training lessons that were more about training me than training Munster. In order to use the thing effectively, after all, I needed to know what button to push when. And so training began in earnest.
As we live in rural area, though, Munster needed more socializing than he would normally get out in the country. He needed exposure to people, and smells, and noises. In short, he needed exposure to those things so that I could train him how to behave in any environment. Thus I found myself having to get creative about how we spent our time together. The daycare centre proved an invaluable first step: exposed to other dogs – and not always the same ones as the week before – under the careful supervision of doggy carers, he was required to mind his manners. If any sign of dominant behavior reared its head, the carers would quickly quash it. Since the centre was located just outside the village, I decided to use the locality to my advantage: once I retrieved Munster from the centre, I drove into town and parked the car. Munster and I proceeded to take a leisurely stroll up and down the High Street, stopping periodically to take in the displays in various shop windows.
One had a sign that read “dogs welcome” but upon further inspection, I noticed that there were a number of small, breakable items on display shelves that sat at the same general height as Munster’s usually-wagging tail. We moved on. We also took in the river – he found the ducks very exciting – and made a brief stop to ascertain whether Steven the watchmaker’s shop dog would be amenable to a visit. She was not. Thus ended our first foray into new territory. Overall, Munster earned high marks but for the fact that he tried to wee on just about everything standing upright, including – but not limited to – pot plants, tables and chairs, and the odd decorative ornaments set out by some of the shop keepers.
Lying in bed that night, reviewing the day’s activities, I realized with a start that I was inadvertently doing the same sort of bomb-proof training that I used on Bit the skittish horse. That surprised me! And although Munster isn’t skittish in the least, the concept of training my dog to behave in a preferred way seems surprisingly similar to Bit’s bomb-proofing.
A brief tutorial for the uninitiated: ‘bomb-proof’ refers to a horse who, upon having a bomb explode just next to him, reacts very calmly and remains standing where he is. Some horses are born that way, others learn it, and some never do. Bit is firmly in the ‘learning’ category, so I school him in various exercises designed to give him confidence in a multitude of situations: scary noises, things moving in unpredictable ways, large things like lorries, etc. The more Bit is exposed to those things on a regular basis, the more used to them he becomes, so that waving flag that made him jump a few months ago now only warrants a second glance. That’s bomb-proofing.
While Munster doesn’t need bomb-proofing per se, he does need to learn appropriate behavior: jumping up on people = bad. Sitting politely while they pet you = good. And so forth, up to and including not ripping the throat out of any dog he takes a dislike to. That last one being rather important. So, inadvertently, I find myself doing double-duty in the training department. And in answer to the question I assume is rolling around in your head, no, the hubs doesn’t work on any of this training with me. He’s actually quite hopeless in the discipline department. It’s his contention that the dog won’t like him if he’s strict.
“I put the e-collar on him every day and he still loves me,” I take pains to point out. But hubs refuses to be what he sees as The Bad Guy.
“Then don’t come crying to me every time Munster tries to mount you. He sees you as someone he can dominate, and you let him!”
Suddenly, the need to train the hubs seems clear.
