Moving with the times

Going wherever I get taken

Well, she’s finally opening her doors…

Moving Beyond Fear & Anxiety: Next-Generation Approaches for Fearful Dogs

Read more here.

I’d planned on releasing this in early April 2025 (where she will sit annually from 2026) but it was quite clear the course was running away with me. I whacked up the work time and cut out the me-and-Lidy time, but even that wasn’t quite enough. In my head, I thought that starting last November would give me enough time to get at least four modules in the bag, that there would only be eight modules, and a hundred other ‘that’ conditions which turned out by February not to be possible.

Having just finished a session on canine cognitive competences, on appraisal, on cognition, on decision-making, on volitional action and volitional inhibition, on attentional biases, on shifting biases, on a whole range of complex psychological phenomena, I’m starting to appreciate why it’s now July and I’m even further behind the schedule I’d set out for myself despite having spent - count them! - over 500 hours writing and putting things together so far.

But so necessary.

I was even digging back down into ethics & philosophy when trying to justify my choices.

But it reminded me of two things. The first is that if we don’t start thinking seriously about canine cognition, eventually we’ll be left so out of step with our simpler theories of behaviour that we’ll be left like flat earthers in a world of Brian Coxes. The second is that our legal systems are moving on apace to include the inner experiences of our dogs, and if we don’t keep up, our focus simply on behaviour, as if it doesn’t come with a healthy side-salad of subjective feeling as it is, will leave us perhaps in untenable legal and ethical positions too even if we work from the kinder side of the animal training agenda.

Last week, France shared its new legislation related to the keeping, rearing, breeding and training of companion species. There’s much to unpick, much to wonder over and much for legislative authorities to put into practice, but the inner experience of animals is no longer off limits. That inner experience is rooted in providing appropriate habitats and experiences, based in practical evidence about the concerns of fish, rabbits, rodents, cats and dogs.

L'exercice des activités d'éducation, de dressage ou de présentation au public dans des conditions et avec des méthodes ou des accessoires pouvant occasionner des blessures, des souffrances, des douleurs, du stress ou de la peur est interdit. Il est tenu compte de l'âge, de la volonté à agir, du sexe et du niveau et des capacités d'apprentissage des animaux.

“The exercise of education, training or public presentation activities in conditions and with methods or accessories that may cause injury, suffering, pain, stress or fear is prohibited. The age, willingness to act, sex and level and learning abilities of the animals are taken into account.”

It feels like this has been a long time coming.

Notably, because stress and fear go so far beyond the physical, the behavioural and the physiological.

This week, I was reflecting very much on our need to treat dogs as the complex cognitive beings they are, not least to keep up with where animal science is taking us, but because if we don’t do so, we run the risk of being left behind by legislation as well as science, no matter how sharp our positive reinforcement and our conditioning.

A friend is a juriste in France - she studies the implications for laws and writes reports on their practical applications, as well as their grey areas. I asked her, dog lover as she is, for her thoughts as to these statements, particularly in relation to this statement: Les animaux dont le comportement est agressif ou craintif ne sont pas présentés au public. It comes in the context of animal training.

Animals whose behaviour is aggressive or fearful are not to be presented to the public.

I was wondering about whether this was just ‘in person’ or ‘online’.

It could be both, she says. It does not exclude online ‘presentations’. We were discussing the meaning of this word ‘presentation’ or ‘showing’ in its legal sense, mainly because I’m interested in those kind of ‘before’ and ‘after’ videos of dogs lunging and barking at things in terms of how they are used in videos for advertising or even for education. Of course, I know not many of my colleagues would place themselves in this category if they show a dog responding fearfully and describe how they worked with the dog. I’m sure we act with benign intentions. But I was wondering if this meant that dog trainers who use coercive methods would be allowed even to video such sessions, for those with more nefarious intentions.

Yet they so rarely do, do they?

I remember early videos of Adam Spivey of Southend Dog Training and that other ‘Alpha Male’ lunatic with the beard who pop up on YouTube every time I open it. Their propaganda & marketing videos never show the kinds of harms they perpetrated with shock collars upon dogs behind closed doors… dogs with compulsive behaviours and stereotypies, dogs with fearful responses to the world… that were available to industry insiders where someone had videoed in secret. Threats of litigation come swift and often from many of the internet’s most popular and dishonest dog trainers if they catch you revealing how they really do things. Public presentation of dogs is not the problem, is it? It’s what goes on behind closed doors.

To some degree, were such a law applicable to those who harm dogs on video for marketing, ‘education’ or propaganda using shock collars, garrots, prong collars or the lines, then at least it would mean that the most heinous videos could be used to prosecute trainers too stupid to do it behind closed doors in a teaching environment. And there are plenty of those. I mean we’ve all seen the Dog Daddy. That’d be the end of the Dog Daddy’s online career for sure.

It also makes the kind of work I did back in 2015-2017 with One Voice really important: we were surreptitiously videoing dog training classes for a One Voice exposé - a big part of why the French government finally put this legislation into place.

Harming dogs in class using fear, shock, prong or slip leads without a stop and being caught on video will now have consequences that it did not back then. The same for keeping dogs for long periods in tiny travel crates or on tethers.

Those consequences are yet to be determined, but it won’t simply allow authorities to keep abuses from being used for marketing, but would also mean that many of the trainers who got away with it in 2017 could be prosecuted with these sharper, more robust laws that are deeply rooted in the canine experience. Footage like that I recorded for One Voice could be used as evidence.

Of course, this is a good thing for all dogs, not just those in contact with trainers who use shock, choke collars or prong collars or who make enticing videos of the changes that occur in one simple thirty-minute session with them.

None of us on the fluffy side of the spectrum would like to think we sit in here, would we? These laws wouldn’t apply to us?

Actually, I’m glad that in many ways, it will force us to confront some of the uglier aspects of fluffier dog training too.

Such as what?

Potentially it would put paid to using dogs in marketing who are fearful, even if used with the best of intentions.

I’m glad about that. I’ve long since kept dogs off my socials because I was uncomfortable with it. Before and after videos are for hairdressers, interior designers, Turkish dentists and manicurists, not for educators, therapists and psychologists. If social media and social pressure was trying to push me into sharing my dog of the day or the work I’d been doing, I refused. This law favours the slow and gentle video of trainers working in parks with dogs who are very happy to be working in parks, where any discomfort should be a red flag that prevents us from sharing.

And that means having a word with ourselves about fearfulness, frustration, stress and aggression.

It would also mean that we’d need to be mindful of dogs in our educative sessions.

I’m glad about this too. We should always be enough in touch with ourselves to be mindful of distress in our animals especially if we are using them as a teaching aid.

You may remember earlier in the year, I was distressed by a training session shared by an industry leader on the fluffy side of the spectrum working with a dog in a shelter who lunged and barked at other dogs. It distressed me a lot because the dog was very frustrated and no care had been taken in exposing other dogs to a large, lunging shepherd doing all the big behaviours. They were repeatedly put in front of other dogs, and their barking and lunging used as a teaching point to remind us to observe the measurables of behaviour: intensity, duration, topography, frequency and so on.

A good point. We should measure behaviour.

Another delegate asked if the dog wasn’t distressed by these frequent exposures at close proximity to other dogs, where the trainer was advocating for tinkering with tiny contingencies. She was quite soundly told off. We can’t measure distress, she was told. Only behaviour. Ironically, the course leader wasn’t even making an intervention that changed behaviour. I was quite surprised to see they hadn’t the most basic understanding of habituation, sensitisation, context, priming and the likes. In fact, I wasn’t quite surprised. I was disappointed and saddened.

There were so many issues: the use of shelter dogs for whom nobody advocates; the use of stooge dogs who definitely didn’t sign up to be yelled at by a big lunging, barking dog for an hour; the impact of the dog’s behaviour on others; the fact that the course was paid-for, and therefore the presenter profited from this dog’s discomfort.

It felt very much that the presenter had retreated into a position of absolutes, where environmental reinforcement is the only thing that fuels behaviour. It also felt as if they were completely dismissive of the inner experience of the dog (and the other dogs involved), that it didn’t matter. That is was subjective. That we humans were bringing our human biases to it. That it was fine to use the dogs and their discomfort as a teaching point about working with behaviour.

It’s not even the first time I’ve heard those messages from other industry leaders on the fluffier side of the spectrum this year.

It’s not a human bias to be interested in cognition and the subjective experience of the dog. That’s one message I’d like to leave behind in 2025 please, as we move towards the future.

So that French legislation really made me glad that it should make us all think about our practice and, most importantly, the experience of the dogs in front of us. It’s not just to outlaw animal abuse. It’s also to make us all hold a mirror up to our practice. Am I using a distressed dog as a teaching aide in behaviour work or in training? Am I missing signs of stress and fear that I should be taking into account?

We can no longer see dogs in part. We can’t think of them solely as stimulus-response machines. Take that, Descartes. The country of your birth is putting some nails in your philosophical coffin there.

And not before time.

But it also reminded me why I wrote the course, and that made me feel glad.

I was, I confess, having an existential crisis this time last week. Do not read I, Who Have Never Known Men in the same week as you read Orbital. If you ever want to remind yourself that you’re living on a small marble of a planet hurtling meaninglessly through space and that your life and death are so insignificant that they will not register as even a momentary blip on the radar of time and space, then these are two good books to read in tandem. But don’t read them if you don’t want to be reminded of those things and you don’t want to consider life, death and the meaning of it all.

Why am I even bothered about putting this course together, I asked myself.

Why can’t I just sink into the exam world and into my life with Lidy? Why can’t I just see the dogs I see and do that, rather than killing myself trying to put 1500 hours of my time into a course when I don’t have 1500 hours to spare?

That’s about where I was on Tuesday morning last week.

‘Ah, sack it off!’ I thought to myself. Who’ll care?! Why bother?

Just go off around Europe looking at dogs. Spend your time with Lidy reading books under trees. Stop straining your eyes and clogging your hard drive up with research. Spend your cash on nice things, not academic textbooks.

Stop stressing yourself out trying to write something that won’t even be a blip on most dogs’ radar. It’s so unimportant to everyone but you…

That’s what I was telling myself.

But then writing the session on canine cognitive competences and how they relate to fearfulness, anxiety and the likes… that reminded me that it matters. We can’t live in a world where people refuse to take dogs’ subjective experiences of the world seriously or refuse to study canine cognition as some kind of weird and hypothetical dark art or silly pseudoscience. There is more to life than simply behaviour.

It is important, after all. It matters.

And reading the legislation from France this week… that also reminded me why it matters. Even legislation now says there is more to life than simply behaviour.

Sure, mine is but a quiet voice in an overwhelming tidal wave of available materials. It’s a drop in a vast ocean on a small planet in the outer reaches of a silent galaxy.

By Friday, I’d reminded myself of why I thought it was important to do.

So here she is. The important thing that I’ve spent the last eight years thinking about.

We open officially on the first Monday in August, where new materials drop. Salers are open from today. Just to get people up to speed, there’s a bunch of pre-course material if you want to get a place beforehand. They’re available to you as soon as you join.

She’ll be a quiet launch this year, mainly because I’ve still got 675 hours to write before next April and I want to see how things pan out, where needs more, which bits might need a tweak. I’m only holding a small number of places because I want people who want to do the course, not people who want to buy the course and sit on it.

Meanwhile, I am still up to my eyeballs in marking (I’ve got the joy of the ‘illegible’ scripts this year where I have to decipher stuff that no-one else can read…) and my hopes that the exam season would break from the 10th July to early August for a bit of a blitz on those 675 hours are fading since marking predictions estimate we’ll be going until the 29th July. Will I get two days’ off?! It’s not looking like it! That means it’s a long, solid slog through to mid-October when the reviews are completed.

Realistically, that means a reassessment of all kinds of priorities, until the Fear course creation is complete. Oh well. Here’s desperately hoping for a stolen moment here and there to do some additional stuff for freebies and the likes as I have other stuff I want to get underway.

Feels like it’s not dogs I need to learn about decision-making, volition, choices and such-like, but myself. Instead of being tossed around like a windblown leaf, I need to wrestle back a little control!

It took a long time for that lesson to sink in.

Anyway, have an amazing week and may you feel like you’re surfing rather than being swept away by life.

PS don’t read books that give you existential angst. Go play with your dog. They give you purpose. The saddest thing about I, Who Have Never Known Men was not that she had not known men, but that she had not known animals. I feel like that would have been a different book, though.