And I’d recommend it to anyone, even if you’re only a tad worried about your dog’s behaviour. He was fantastic and came highly recommended (plus I ran him past Top Barks for approval ages ago) and was not expensive. It was worth every penny of £90 to me to have him tell OH to stop playing tug-o-war with Mollie (I’ve only been saying this for 5 years . . .)
He cleared up a lot of confusion for me about Mollie’s behaviour because I could never tell if she was fear aggressive or a big bully. I was looking for an either/or when in fact she is both. Apparently it’s not common but it happens, and it’s not an easy one. (And I noted the word to use is “pushy” and not dominant or bullying.
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First off he had us categorise Mollie’s issues (pinning Alfie, snapping at visitors when they pet her, snapping when touched during stroking/grooming/medicating, and guarding stolen high-value items) and we each had to prioritise them. For me, the main issue was her pinning Alfie to the ground (quite often on some days) as I worried about Alfie. They fought for the first year they were together (fortunately bloodless) but for the past couple of years he has chosen not to fight and just lets her get on with it. I worried about him becoming depressed or getting low self-esteem (whatever that is in dog terms) but the behaviourist said he thought Alfie was handling it reasonably well and he had no concerns about Alfie, which I can tell you was a load off my mind. For OH, the big issue was me not interacting with Mollie enough. (My fault – I’m a wimp, she’s scary sometimes and as a result I don’t like her that much to be honest.)
Anyway, she’s lacking in self-confidence , cannot deal with frustration, and has very poor communication skills (all partly because of her poor start in life). We’ve got basic exercises to do to reduce her frustration levels (so she doesn’t take her anger out on Alfie) and exercises to build up her ability to be touched all over and some basic basket muzzle training. It’s all quite simple and very time-consuming. But I think I just wanted inspiration, clarification, and for OH to take it all on board (which he has).
One interesting thing for me was that he said her poor communication skills are compounded by her being black (ties up with Black Dog Rescue Syndrome that was mentioned on COL a bit since). Her black face is less easily read by us, and because she has spaniel ears we can’t read them like for instance a GSD’s where they prick up or flatten, and hence she feels she has to enlarge her responses to let us see she doesn’t like something, i.e., by snapping. As far as visitors are concerned, well the thinking seems to be that since they’re our visitors and Mollie’s our dog – we must simply control the visitors rather than the dog.
Regime change starts tomorrow, and it'll take several months to accomplish whatever can be accomplished, and at almost 6 years old it won't be very perfect. Only problem at the mo is that we’ve got visitors staying almost constantly (some with dogs) from now through the back of August. Ho hum.
Huge post but wanted to share. And wanted to hear how others have got on with behaviourists’ advice. And does anyone else have a bolshie/scared dog?
