Large Fierce Mammal

Nature is unpredictable. All Nature’s creatures are equipped to work with that fact, and it’s why we humans created such damnable things as religion and statistics. It’s also why, without looking like it, I have a tool and first aid kit either on my person or within reach 24/7  that includes a heavy duty multi-tool, a Swiss Army Knife, a cellular phone and three alternative methods of signalling, three methods of igniting a fire, three methods of finding navigational direction, and a minimum of two flashlights, even in the day time. It’s why cops swelter in body armor while they drag three pounds of handgun and spare ammunition through every shift when there is only one item in their gear they know they will need constantly – a pen. Because bad shit happens, even when you’re savvy, experienced, and prepared. Knowledge, realistic training, and good basic equipment will often bail you out when you reach down one fateful day into that bag labelled “LUCK”, and find it’s empty.

I have a unique perspective here because I am both a wilderness skills instructor and a professional in dog behaviour rehabilitation, and therein lies the catalyst for this article.

People will actually pay me, and and hang on my every word while I indoctrinate them in the joyous skills of wilderness living, even when what I’m teaching them conflicts absolutely with some of their long held beliefs. I bring the same teaching skills to the dog rehabilitation side of the equation, but therein lies an interesting and unsettling difference – when a person is presented with the fallacy of one or more long held incorrect beliefs about dog behaviour, they are often reluctant to embrace the new information, even when faced with the obvious truth by their own dog as it reacts appropriately and as predicted to sound handling by one or more instructors.

I don’t see the wilderness as something to be feared or to be “survived”. Instead, I revel in being able to actually live there, and how it makes me feel fully alive. That’s why I refer to my programmes as Wilderness Competence Courses and not survival courses, and focus on skills that can’t be lost, stolen, damaged, or taken away. My students over the years have included more than a few people who wanted to walk, overfly, or paddle the wilderness with the confidence that comes from actually knowing you can make your way there. That losing track of where you are is not a death sentence, the night time woods is the same as the daytime woods with the lights out, and every tree and shadow does not conceal a hungry bear or coyote with your name on it. Only then can you effectively face the inevitable curve balls that come out of the blue when the Gods laugh and Murphy’s Law holds sway.  Students come away feeling empowered, and they willingly cast aside their old ways of thinking.

Likewise, I don’t see any dog, regardless of breed, as anything but what it is – the beautifully optimized result of evolution coupled with human conceived selective breeding intended to engineer an exquisite tool to fulfill a specific set of purposes. Also though, a worthy and trusty  minion that looks to me to be led with respect, patience, clarity, decisiveness, sensitivity, empathy, consideration, understanding, and fairness. That expects and deserves my absolute devotion to its welfare. All domestic dogs trace their ancestry back to the grey wolf, and the diversity of breeds with all their specialized skills and physical attributes are the result of selective breeding over many many generations. Most of the breeds we know today came to fruition in simpler times when life was more at the mercy of capricious Nature than we like to think it is today, and no mouth could be fed if it didn’t earn its keep. The concept of dog as pet was foreign to most realities back then, and they worked for their living. Men chose their dogs as carefully as their horses or oxen, and quite likely even more carefully than they did their women.

Today dogs too often get chosen because of their appearance, historical significance (real or imagined), pedigree, somebody famous owns one, they’re cute, or because they were there when someone’s will power broke down. Rarely in these cases is it understood that the Rottweiler of the 21st century is still the Roman cattle dog of 2000 years ago, that herded livestock on the march all day, and guarded the encampment at night. That encoded in the DNA of the Miniature Pinscher that warms your lap comes a drive to relentlessly  hunt rats in your barn, and rouse the household to the touch of a door latch, even before its larger brethren have a clue what’s happening. That your cuddly Beagle wants to hunt – all day, every day!

As a result, all too often our phone rings because someone can’t understand why their dog is behaving in a certain way that actually links directly back to a directive originating from the most fundamental fibre of its being. People want us to rehabilitate their German Shepherd out of being suspicious of strangers, their Beagle out of barking at the sudden appearance of a neighbourhood cat. They want their dog to stop being uncomfortable around people it doesn’t know, stop being scared of loud noises so they can come along to watch fireworks, and to accept being man handled by any random stranger encountered on walks. The people involved see these as problem behaviours in need of fixing because they stand in the way of how they want their dog to be instead of how it is, and they must learn that they are only problems when they become obsessive or compulsive. They must learn that dog handling is built on a foundation of understanding, and is part leadership and part management. That the management part comes in when a dog’s personality and needs put the brakes on any further healthy acceptance of  going any further down a road it either won’t or can’t travel. That communication is a two way street, everything will take as long as it takes., and finding the end of a road where one hoped for a pathway to a desired goal is not representative of failure.

We routinely get people wanting us to rehabilitate their dog into accepting treatment from their children that would be considered abusive if the dog were another child, and stopped straight away. This, to my mind, is the worst sin of all, because the dogs in such situations that don’t end up dead because they issued a correction their owners refused to give were simply lucky enough to outlive the child’s invasive interest. And ignored in the focus on biting is the potential for unintended injury inflicted on a child by a boisterous dog that presumes everybody else is as rugged, rough, and ready as it is. For example, I never bend down near a dog without setting my jaw lest a sudden uprising connects a virtually armor plated canine skull with my chin. I’ve had my thigh bruised by the wagging tail of a happy Irish Wolf Hound the size of a pony, nearly had my left knee broken when a half grown Golden Mountain Dog charged into it while I was distracted with another dog, and recently almost lost a tooth to an excited female Kelpie who was so intent on kissing me on the mouth that she launched herself the entire height of my 6′ 5″ frame while I was standing erect, whereupon her lower front teeth connected with one of my upper ones. That one I should really have seen coming because it’s not without human precedent.

So what does this mean? Children and dogs are like oil and water – never to mix? Of course not. To quote myself in reference to a case discussed in a previous article:

We supervise children on swimming pool decks. We put baby gates at the top of stairs, annoying plastic things on door knobs, and caps on bottles holding medicines and cleaning products that senior citizens can’t open. We turn the pot handles in while they’re on the stove and make sure the kettle cord isn’t dangling. We stick plastic plugs in unused electrical outlets. Why? Because children need to be protected from doing things that will hurt them while they’re learning not to do those things. Yet it is seen as a failing on the part of a dog when it decides that enough is enough, or when it’s feeling ill, or is arthritic in its old age and its joints hurt. In this case, the parents of the infant sincerely saw nothing wrong with letting their baby use their dog as a primary source of entertainment, and yet would never hesitate to take action against injury due to any other cause. If their dog had been another child whose food and toys were being constantly stolen, whose hair and ears were being pulled, an intervention would have been staged long ago and the behaviour of the offending child corrected.

We implement the measures described here because children are, by their nature, unable to see to their own welfare and prone to be unpredictable at times. Part of parenting is recognizing this. Likewise, a skilled dog handler understands that while a mature, well led dog can be reliable and predictable for the most part, a dog is not human and humans are not dogs, and misunderstandings due to miscommunication and missed signals are inevitable, even in the best of relationships. We understand that children aren’t particularly good at being adults because they have a long way to go before they can be expected to function on that level. They are even worse at communicating with dogs, and so, for the millionth time, children can never be left to interact with a dog unsupervised and out of immediate control of a skilled and vigilant handler.