I think trust between yourself and your dog plays a much more important role than most dog professional’s advocate and it is something that has not given much attention in recent books, tv program’s etc. Maybe this is due to the current public obsession with dominance theories. Theories that have a LONG time ago proven to be totally wrong, but are oh so handy explanation to everything and places the blame on the dog, not on yourself. (Even the academic who wrote the original paper has admitted being wrong. They studied unrelated wolves in captivity where they competed for scarce resources. You can imagine what happened if you were to put a group of unrelated young men in a cage and only fed them occasionally…!)
How does one go about achieving trust?
The short answer? Time, patience and love
As with any other being, human or animal, there is only one way to achieve trust. It takes a long time, but is fragile and can be lost in an instant. It takes a lot of consistency and patience from your part, particularly if your dog has been let down and hurt in the past. You need to have true love and good intentions behind it all, since insincerity is an easy ploy to detect. Dogs are not really that different to us. Their emotions are as complex as ours, it is only in the perception of the world they differ from us human’s. And just to make this clear, I am not advocating anthropomorphism here! They have very different physical needs, but inside we are very similar. This creates a very fine line and as I have said before, it is the responsibility of us human’s to know where this line lies.
As always I do draw from my own experiences, mainly with Benji but also with Lucy. Everyone said to me that it takes around 6-9 months for the dog to settle and I would say it did really take about a year for them to truly trust me and me to know their character well enough to trust them. (well.. in most situations anyway..!) This bond has only deepened over the last 2.5 years they have lived here and I have recently seen a big difference in Lucy in particular. She used to be very quick to disappear if let off lead and given the chance to run free, but this has diminished to almost zero over the recent 6 months. I have used a lot of positive reinforcement whenever she comes close to me in the form of treats, ball (her favourite) and most recently also cuddles. She get a variable schedule of these rewards and sometimes she gets nothing, just to reinforce the randomness. Occasionally I might also put her on lead and let her off almost immediately. She still likes to hunt, but I have seen her self-regulating this behaviour recently by doing a tiny charge towards a bird, but immediately looking back at me for a reward. she ge s a very special bonus amount of rewards every time I catch her doing that!! Special girl!!
Benji has been his usual good self, apart from having a slight issue in the obedience with so many new dogs in last week’s class. Him being a typical BC, he has almost got a fixed bullet point style response to this event. (Amongst many others…!!) When we started the obedience classes he was still very aggressive with other dogs and this has now stuck in his behaviour repertoire at this location and setting. It is now narrowed to new dogs and the dogs he has only seen less than approximately 5 times, but once he sees them enough times he is fine with them. I assume this is typical to badly socialized rescue dogs – things just take their own sweet time.
Lots of time, patience and love needed.
Have a good week everyone and visit again soon! Dont forget to subscribe on the left – you can leave anytime! And feel free to leave any comments below.
I leave you with a lovely photo of Benji looking over the horizon! I wonder what he is thinking 🙂
Leave a comment