In 1993, I was working as an animal behaviour specialist and had been doing so for the preceding 12 years. At this time, I was at the top end of the referral chain and worked closely with John Fisher and a number of other behaviour specialist to create new approaches and paradigms in the face of ever growing numbers of companion animals with severe behaviour problems.
We had by that time already developed major breakthroughs, such as the role of allergic responses to food in particular which caused severe and otherwise inexplicable behaviour problems; most notably the overfeeding of digestible proteins to under exercised pet dogs, causing hyperactivity and numerous other kinds of problems, but also responses to various other additives, colorants and flavourings in many other species and including zoo and farm animals.
John Fisher was working particularly with the so called "Dominance Reduction Programmes" for dogs, and if you are not interested in dogs or don’t like them much, I would suggest you still listen carefully because this is centrally important and the key points are beautifully portrayed in the problems of dog owners and the Dominance Reduction Programmes or DRPs for short.
Trying to take a "scientific" approach to the problems of disobedience and behaviour problems in companion (pet, house kept) dogs across the breeds, it was decided at some time to try and copy the visible behavioural strategies that naturally exist in a wolf packor in a pack of laboratory beagles, and have the human parts of the "pack" play the role of the "alpha male" by copying what "alpha males do" – the idea being that you "speak alanguage that an animal might understand that is too neurologically limited to understand in any other way."
The owner was advised to "take charge" of all forms of interaction with the companion dog and to create a "power gradient" through a brick-by-brick approach that would clearly show the dog in question who was the ruler, the leader, the confident "alpha dog in the human pack".
The areas where this charge was taken were global and comprehensive and extended over the following:
All forms of social interaction. The dog was not responded to unless it first "submitted" in some form - if it would come to the owner for attention, for example, it would have to go through an obedience ritual first before it was stroked. It was purposefully ignored in preference of other creatures/humans in the house upon greeting, and in many other contexts.
Power Games in movements and exercise. In "the wild" (what wild!) it is held that "the Alpha dog goes first" – gets the food first, leads the pack on the hunt, gets every bone byrights and enforces this entirely, does everything first. There is a famous picture that at that time just about every animal behaviourist had on their walls – of a wolf pack in thearctic in single file with the Alpha male up front, in strict hierarchy, and not one of these 20 wolves put a paw out of line ever as the snow trail behind them testifies.
Power Games in food and feeding. Once again, the owner would eat first – if only demonstratively, a biscuit whilst the dog was waiting to be fed, and the dog would have to wait for permission from the owner before it was allowed to eat. Shock devices such as the so called "dog training discs" or the more old fashioned (and cheaper) version of "two stones in a coke can" would be used in set ups, like having food in the centre of the floor, to "negatively condition" the dog to the fact that all food belongs to the owner, the shock device replacing the shock of an Alpha male flying out, teeth bared, to protect their bone "in the wild".
Physical/spatial power games such as forcing one’s way through a doorway ahead of a dog, up and down the stairs, making the dog get up and move out of one’s way deliberately numerous times a day, forbidding "privileged" resting places such as beds, arm chairs, power hot spots such as thresholds and landings, "taking the dog’s bed" bysitting or standing in it just to show the dog "that you can", ensuring the dog walking behind the owner as a pack member would follow the alpha leader and so forth.
As time went on, the DRPs became ever more specific and watertight as the power divergence between dog and owner was extended into virtually every waking moment of their lives together. And the results at that time seemed near miraculous. Dogs started to pay attention to the owners, became more "obedient", pulled on the lead less and it is true, we really thought we had cracked it as far as dog behaviour was concerned.
In the spring of 1993, two things happened that began to erode my confidence in DRPs and gave me a severe headache at the time. The first of these was that I was seeing a number of dogs and their owners with extreme problems that had not become better as the result of applying DRPs, but were getting ever worse.
I must admit to having fallen prey myself to the unhelpful human behaviour of "if at first you don’t succeed, try harder". DRPs worked, right? The owners were just not doing them hard enough! The effect of tightening up on the DRPs further and further was appalling. One dog in particular and one who, it could be said, gave her life for us all and me in particular at that time, was a Doberman bitch by the name of Bridget. When we started, she had some mild moments of general disobedience in an otherwise loving relationship with her female owner. After 3 months on the DRP, she was a ravening mad beast who turned and tore apart an old cat she had played with happily her entire life and the owner had her put to sleep on the spot.
That is when I stopped dead and knew something was terribly wrong. I closed my behaviour counselling practise and turned with a passion to finding out just what had happened and to investigate the whole DRP situation from a new standpoint. And then the second piece of evidence came to me. Previously, I had been involved in setting up a long term study of the effects of DRPs on the dog/s and owner/s – in order to have scientific back up data on how good they were and how useful.
As the questionnaires came back from the owners who had undergone these miraculous changes for the better two years ago it became blatantly apparent that many dogs had become worse and Bridget had not been the only example of this at all; that many owners had stopped using the DRP strategies within days of the consultation and the old original problems had never been resolved at all; and that many more dogs developed behaviour problems of a different kind as well as the original presenting ones.
This rang a bell and I looked up a similar study conducted by an American animal behaviour team in the 70’s, a husband and wife – Hart & Hart. Their study had been conducted before the onset of DRPs and their popularity, and it mirrored mine quite perfectly apart from one detail – the statistics of dogs becoming much worse were absent. At this time I was also beginning the study of NLP and this incredible modality suggests that one should model excellence in order to know how to design trainings and strategies to re-create excellence in others.
When I looked carefully at people who I regarded as having an "excellent" relationship with their companion animals and including myself, I realised with astonishment that we were NOT applying any DRP strategies at all with our own creatures. Our relationships were NOT that of human wolves within a pack.
What we were doing was inherently and absolutely different. Instead of turning ourselves into wolves, we remained human and endeavoured to teach our creatures the ways of human communication. Instead of waging war with our animals, we were co-operating with them from a base line of mutual respect and understanding. And then one day, it hit me like a ton of bricks what it was that was so completely overlooked in scientific animal behaviour and yet so glaringly on display if only one would open one’s eyes as THE major factor of successful companion animal relationships:
Love.
With my heart beating high, I went through the many books on animal behaviour and especially, companion animal behaviour and I could not find that word in a single one of them at the time. It was an absolute revelation to me that opened my eyes to the universe as it really was in a heartbeat and probably changed me more than any other experience I have had on this plane.
We had by that time already developed major breakthroughs, such as the role of allergic responses to food in particular which caused severe and otherwise inexplicable behaviour problems; most notably the overfeeding of digestible proteins to under exercised pet dogs, causing hyperactivity and numerous other kinds of problems, but also responses to various other additives, colorants and flavourings in many other species and including zoo and farm animals.
John Fisher was working particularly with the so called "Dominance Reduction Programmes" for dogs, and if you are not interested in dogs or don’t like them much, I would suggest you still listen carefully because this is centrally important and the key points are beautifully portrayed in the problems of dog owners and the Dominance Reduction Programmes or DRPs for short.
Trying to take a "scientific" approach to the problems of disobedience and behaviour problems in companion (pet, house kept) dogs across the breeds, it was decided at some time to try and copy the visible behavioural strategies that naturally exist in a wolf packor in a pack of laboratory beagles, and have the human parts of the "pack" play the role of the "alpha male" by copying what "alpha males do" – the idea being that you "speak alanguage that an animal might understand that is too neurologically limited to understand in any other way."
The owner was advised to "take charge" of all forms of interaction with the companion dog and to create a "power gradient" through a brick-by-brick approach that would clearly show the dog in question who was the ruler, the leader, the confident "alpha dog in the human pack".
The areas where this charge was taken were global and comprehensive and extended over the following:
All forms of social interaction. The dog was not responded to unless it first "submitted" in some form - if it would come to the owner for attention, for example, it would have to go through an obedience ritual first before it was stroked. It was purposefully ignored in preference of other creatures/humans in the house upon greeting, and in many other contexts.
Power Games in movements and exercise. In "the wild" (what wild!) it is held that "the Alpha dog goes first" – gets the food first, leads the pack on the hunt, gets every bone byrights and enforces this entirely, does everything first. There is a famous picture that at that time just about every animal behaviourist had on their walls – of a wolf pack in thearctic in single file with the Alpha male up front, in strict hierarchy, and not one of these 20 wolves put a paw out of line ever as the snow trail behind them testifies.
Power Games in food and feeding. Once again, the owner would eat first – if only demonstratively, a biscuit whilst the dog was waiting to be fed, and the dog would have to wait for permission from the owner before it was allowed to eat. Shock devices such as the so called "dog training discs" or the more old fashioned (and cheaper) version of "two stones in a coke can" would be used in set ups, like having food in the centre of the floor, to "negatively condition" the dog to the fact that all food belongs to the owner, the shock device replacing the shock of an Alpha male flying out, teeth bared, to protect their bone "in the wild".
Physical/spatial power games such as forcing one’s way through a doorway ahead of a dog, up and down the stairs, making the dog get up and move out of one’s way deliberately numerous times a day, forbidding "privileged" resting places such as beds, arm chairs, power hot spots such as thresholds and landings, "taking the dog’s bed" bysitting or standing in it just to show the dog "that you can", ensuring the dog walking behind the owner as a pack member would follow the alpha leader and so forth.
As time went on, the DRPs became ever more specific and watertight as the power divergence between dog and owner was extended into virtually every waking moment of their lives together. And the results at that time seemed near miraculous. Dogs started to pay attention to the owners, became more "obedient", pulled on the lead less and it is true, we really thought we had cracked it as far as dog behaviour was concerned.
In the spring of 1993, two things happened that began to erode my confidence in DRPs and gave me a severe headache at the time. The first of these was that I was seeing a number of dogs and their owners with extreme problems that had not become better as the result of applying DRPs, but were getting ever worse.
I must admit to having fallen prey myself to the unhelpful human behaviour of "if at first you don’t succeed, try harder". DRPs worked, right? The owners were just not doing them hard enough! The effect of tightening up on the DRPs further and further was appalling. One dog in particular and one who, it could be said, gave her life for us all and me in particular at that time, was a Doberman bitch by the name of Bridget. When we started, she had some mild moments of general disobedience in an otherwise loving relationship with her female owner. After 3 months on the DRP, she was a ravening mad beast who turned and tore apart an old cat she had played with happily her entire life and the owner had her put to sleep on the spot.
That is when I stopped dead and knew something was terribly wrong. I closed my behaviour counselling practise and turned with a passion to finding out just what had happened and to investigate the whole DRP situation from a new standpoint. And then the second piece of evidence came to me. Previously, I had been involved in setting up a long term study of the effects of DRPs on the dog/s and owner/s – in order to have scientific back up data on how good they were and how useful.
As the questionnaires came back from the owners who had undergone these miraculous changes for the better two years ago it became blatantly apparent that many dogs had become worse and Bridget had not been the only example of this at all; that many owners had stopped using the DRP strategies within days of the consultation and the old original problems had never been resolved at all; and that many more dogs developed behaviour problems of a different kind as well as the original presenting ones.
This rang a bell and I looked up a similar study conducted by an American animal behaviour team in the 70’s, a husband and wife – Hart & Hart. Their study had been conducted before the onset of DRPs and their popularity, and it mirrored mine quite perfectly apart from one detail – the statistics of dogs becoming much worse were absent. At this time I was also beginning the study of NLP and this incredible modality suggests that one should model excellence in order to know how to design trainings and strategies to re-create excellence in others.
When I looked carefully at people who I regarded as having an "excellent" relationship with their companion animals and including myself, I realised with astonishment that we were NOT applying any DRP strategies at all with our own creatures. Our relationships were NOT that of human wolves within a pack.
What we were doing was inherently and absolutely different. Instead of turning ourselves into wolves, we remained human and endeavoured to teach our creatures the ways of human communication. Instead of waging war with our animals, we were co-operating with them from a base line of mutual respect and understanding. And then one day, it hit me like a ton of bricks what it was that was so completely overlooked in scientific animal behaviour and yet so glaringly on display if only one would open one’s eyes as THE major factor of successful companion animal relationships:
Love.
With my heart beating high, I went through the many books on animal behaviour and especially, companion animal behaviour and I could not find that word in a single one of them at the time. It was an absolute revelation to me that opened my eyes to the universe as it really was in a heartbeat and probably changed me more than any other experience I have had on this plane.
What exactly is Love?
Right from the start, I was well aware that what I meant by "love" was not some kind of mushy, fluffy pink behaviour that results in putting knitted jackets on Alaskan Malamutes because "it makes him look so cute".
It was some kind of energy form that existed naturally between an owner and an animal and that was a major driver for otherwise completely inexplicable behaviours. Why, I ask you, why if this did not exist, could it possibly be explained that a seventy year old arthritic tiny lady can walk with that massive, uncastrated GSD by her side who obeys her and makes sure the lead stays loose as not to hurt her? She’s not dominating him, she’s not even hormonally targettable as an "alpha female" any more. She is asking him nicely if he would mind sitting there for a while whilst she goes into a shop and he says yes.
What is that? That is not and never, "dog eat dog" scientific laboratory beagle behaviour. This is a fully formed, deeply bonded, highly interactive, mature relationship between two entirely sentient beings who are trying to co-operate as best they can. Those two look at each other and something passes between them – and this something is not a result of training or communication, but the baseline for any of it in the first place.
An energetic connection of the highest order that will remain even through extreme suffering, that is at some level beyond reproach and quite regardless of either creature’s limitations. We can call it what we like, but it sure looks like "love" to me.
