Continuing the transformation

Pancakes, Valentine's and Easter Eggs

Wow - how are we here? I blinked and it was Christmas. I blinked again, and the world’s turning shades of Easter Egg. A little reminder popped up on my phone the other day to remind me that it’ll not be this dark again until the end of October.

Get your legs out, ladies and gents. It’ll be summer before we know it!

I used to do that in France when I first arrived… Go into shorts at the end of April and not put them aside until the end of October. Somehow, with all the squalls and the snow and the rain and the wind, I don’t think I’ll be getting my shorts out just yet.

It’s also reminded me that I have had a headache since Christmas Eve.

I thought I’d got a brain tumour, so I did that thing where you ask Dr Google. Turns out it’s just a trapped nerve and my lovely physio friend has given me some neck exercises.

Must. Step. Away. From. The. Keyboard.

To be fair, he actually blamed my phone. Like I’m even on that anymore?! I held out against smartphones until it became absolutely impossible to leave the country without one, and let’s just say I’m still not a fan. Twitter keeps trying to woo me back as well - I’m finding it a lot nicer to hang around in quiet spaces and empty corners of the internet, though I miss my favourite scientists who are still on Twitter.

I’m pretty sure the physio doesn’t know about my very bad e-book habit.

Oh well. I won’t tell if you won’t?

Anyway, if it makes you feel better, the pain has now migrated down my spine into my sides, which is just ace.

At least if it is a brain tumour, I hope it puts paid to me very quickly.

Anyway, it’s been a focused kind of a week here at Lighten Up Towers.

Who am I kidding? As if it’s a tower. Or more than one tower. More like the swamp from Shrek, I reckon. Lidy gets to play Donkey and I get to play the Ogre.

Given all the rain recently, it is a swamp as well. It’s been a swampy kind of a week. I’ve just finished the substack for Thursday about places for dogs, and turns out a whole load of shelters are built on or near marshy, muddy, swampy places. Who knew?!

Anyway, what did I get up to last week?

Last Week’s Compendium

• There was a blog post on the difference between flooding and desensitisation. How do we know we’re actually desensitising our dogs rather than just causing them to shut down? It’s not as clear cut as you’d think, believe it or not. I’ve always been mindful of the fact that repeatedly exposing a dog to stuff they’re scared of, even at low levels, could contribute to chronic anxiety - it’s one reason I don’t use desensitisation so much without a bunch of other things in place too. I don’t want it to be one of those things that we look back on in thirty years’ time and think has caused all kinds of damage unnecessarily, even in the name of something benign. After all, our dogs aren’t reacting, right? It’s especially important though if our dogs are on the lead.

• A post about frustration. Yes, it can be good, and yes it affects all of my clients - but I’m not afraid of it. Don’t fear the frustration! That was up on Facebook. I’m not sure people are always mindful of the fallout of frustration when it comes to our dogs, though. One comment made me realise how frequently it’s probably a factor in animal abuse cases and I’d not even thought about that, even though I had once to help our vet nurse at the shelter cut off a string that had been tied around a dog’s mouth every day for a year in between eating and drinking. String is clearly cheaper than a bark collar… And both are easier and less bother than actually teaching your dog to chill out, clearly… You’ll be glad to know that little act of tying the dog’s mouth up came with a police record, a nine-month suspended sentence, a supervisory order, ten years without keeping animals and a big fine.

• A post that seemed to resonate with a fair few people about the responsibility for being calm. I’ve been the person who was told that their dog just needed to be calm, so I feel that one. It seems like there are a few people out there who feel the same or who are struggling to find ways to reduce triggers so their dog can reappraise them a little and downregulate. I read a lovely phrase in a book I’m reading (by-the-by, I thought it was about sea squirts and it isn’t, but it’s still an interesting book!) that our fight-or-flight mechanisms were supposed to be for occasional use throughout our life, not spending their whole life going, ‘I’m good to go!’ at DEFCON 1. That really blew my mind.

• A post about skills. Is the behaviour there in the first place, because if it’s not, then that’s our starting point. I see a lot of dogs who have no breadth of behavioural repertoire. The one lying on the couch behind me moulting prodigiously right now is one example. She has one behaviour - stuck in fight mode.

• There was also my usual Monday post and I reckon that was it for social media.

• There was also a paid substack about the challenges of living in the ‘troubled middle’ with a predator for a pet. It finished with a line from Charlotte’s Web and I make zero apologies for that. It nearly finished with Homer Simpson crying as he ate his pet lobster that he’d boiled by accident in trying to give him a bath, weeping his eyes out as he stuffed his mouth full saying, ‘it’s what he would have wanted!’ I was also reading eighteenth-century naturalist vicar Gilbert White’s account of Timothy, a rescue tortoise, and his observations of Timothy. Let’s just say I’m surprised the Reverend White didn’t end up accidentally boiling Timothy in a bath by mistake and crying over his turtle soup. Seriously, though, if you want to read about a man who loved a tortoise, it’s quite lovely.

• Module 3 also dropped for the Success With Impulsive Dogs course. I’m putting things together for the 6-module 12-week course on fears, anxieties and phobias that will launch in April 2025, but I’m stuck for titles. If you have marvellous ideas, please share!

On the cards

This week, I will be mostly sharing:

• A blog tomorrow over on the Lighten Up website about flooding in a bit more detail, building on last week’s.

• Something that always tickles me about dog owners - the fact that owning a dog often comes as a surprise when the dog does dog stuff when able. It never fails to make me smile - we have such high hopes for our canine friends, and there they are, being a dog every moment they get the chance and giving us the ick on a frequent basis.

• A paid substack on Thursday about where dogs belong - and which dogs - and when. I’m more and more mindful of exclusion in society. Exclusion is often intersectional and it has a lot of impact on our animals. Not least on service and assistance animals whose exclusion then excludes their owners in favour of able individuals. Geography is so fascinating. If you have a dog - albeit the right type of dog - you’ve often got a reason for being in a lot of spaces. Just as I wrote it, some ‘concerned citizen’ shared her doorbell camera footage of a ‘man’ wandering around in the wee hours. I was a little alarmed since I often walk past her house at the same time with Lidy - but clearly a middle-aged white woman with a dog and a poo bag has access where others are out of place. Kind of interesting.

• A FB post about the need to generalise training wildly with our dogs - always important! They are such contextual learners and we often can’t get our heads around that.

• A post about bridging from the home to the outside world for guardians with anxious dogs, following on from last week’s post about not putting the burden of calm on the dog.

• I’ve also shared details of Sarah Hedderly’s Dog Training Summit which is open to all - it’s much more general this time and there’s some amazing speakers on the line-up. Very exciting! It’s completely free as well and the gifts you get alongside each session are usually really great too. If you want the All Access Pass with freebies and recordings you should also be able to do that too I think - I get a small commission if you do it via my link, just for transparency. I know all the freebies are worth bags more than that.

• I’m also live with another cocker-loving Emma - Emma Dufty - on Wednesday evening talking about all things frustration. As if dogs & frustration aren’t like rhubarb and custard - made for each other! I’m very excited to chat to all the people in her members’ group.

I reckon that’s it! FB lives, of course, if you’re in the Success group. It’s a week of follow-ups for me - weird to have a week with no new clients on the cards unless some emergency occurs.

Miscellany & Paraphernalia

It was kind of a worky week really with a lot of reports and client programmes to write, so I confess I did nothing much other than cleaning in the moments between screens. Lidy has seriously shed more fur than she has on her body. Plus, I was trying to use my non-screen time to do other stuff than kill my brain with over-attention and over-fertile content, so I gave it a rest with some delicious meditation and food.

There are weeks when it is good not to read much! One of my young students has given me a list of his favourite books and I promised to read them all. The first is about the dogs and wolves around Chernobyl, so you can tell he is a kindred spirit. I love his book obsession. Most of them are animal stories. We’re about to embark on Michelle Paver’s series Wolf Brother which is about a prehistoric boy, his friend, her raven and his wolf. I wish people wrote more books like that for grown-ups.

Have a lovely week, people. May you see Easter Egg colours wherever you go. If we keep telling ourselves spring is on its way, it’ll happen, won’t it?