On building skill sets
Living with imperfect endings
I think one of the hardest things for me is when clients arrive at the end of the road with a single problem that threatens to be a deal-breaker. Often, they’re the clients looking for board-and-train solutions, as if I can magically take their ‘faulty’ dog off them and return them fully trained, a perfect version of themselves.
Why is this so hard?
Partly, the unrealistic aspiration that perfection can ever be achieved.
The notion that a dog might ever exist in some mystical ‘perfect’ form.
By ‘perfect’, I recognise that I mean ‘perfect for us’.
Usually, that is a cover for ‘faultless’.
A dog without fault.
Flawless.
You see the problem therein, I know.
It seems such an idyllic place, the land of ‘If Only!’
If only my dog didn’t have hip dysplasia and could romp through forests with me to their heart’s content!
If only my ill-bred Malinois had received a better deck of cards in life, had had someone in her life who cared for her to give her the foundations she so sorely needed!
If only I didn’t have to go through this dreaded adolescence with this giant baby-dog who seems intent on driving me to the edge of my sanity!
If only they could sit when other dogs go past and not react!
If only they sat quietly in the back of the car when we’re driving!
If only they enjoyed going to the vet!
It gives us the impression, should such situations be rectifiable, that perfection can be achieved. Surgery will remove all pain and limping, so the dog can now go on forest romps… thoughtful exposure to the world alongside training, so the dog can cope with the deficits left by biology, traits and early development… entering into adulthood, so the dog will put all their crackerjack hormones behind them… some kind of training hack, so they no longer lose their nut when other dogs go by… some kind of training hack, so they’ll sit quietly and we can take them out on trips… some kind of medication or training hack so they’ll love the vet rather than trembling.
But as we know, perfection is impossible. Life has ways of casting us other problems.
I, for instance, had got to the point with Heston where things were just right… months before he’d start with seizures and hip dysplasia and degenerative myelopathy…
Lidy and I are at that point in her life where most of the big woes in our life are either no longer an issue or they’re manageable. Sure, the recent heat brought the world and his wife out at the same ungodly hour we usually walk, but such woes are transient. But she’s now entering into seniority, where a few hot days of deciding to lie on shady stones or uncomfortable slabs is clearly more painful than lying on the couch all day.
That’s our new evolution.
One, to be fair, I had not really thought about.
Thinking of Lidy making old bones wasn’t something I’d really imagined. Not least because she’s still so puppyish in so many ways. She’s much more puppyish than any of my other adult dogs have ever been. I don’t think of her as a grown-up dog at all.
But this knowledge that any so-called perfection is fleeting and transient makes me wary of clients seeking that one fix - not just that they wish the fix would be applied quickly without any effort on their behalf. The knowledge that perfection - should it ever be an attainable reality that our dogs might one day be ‘flawless’ - is transient.
Not only that, it feels like a peculiar human foible to dream of perfection.
I confess, I engage in it from time to time.
You know, that dream that at some point, you too will have it all together.
Whatever ‘it’ is.
That you’ll be healthy, wealthy and wise.
Not only will you be healthy, wealthy and wise, you’ll live in less ‘interesting’ times.
A small consolation thought to the influencers living in the Gulf states right now thinking that they’d got it made only to have the Tangerine Tyrant bring down property prices and turn what feels like living life large into the reality that you’re only ever one madman’s decision away from not being able to profit from your youth, wealth, inheritance or smarts.
YOU might indeed be the least flawed version of yourself; your dog might be the least flawed, most perfect version of a dog you could ever imagine, and some tinpot dictator the colour of coal tar will decide that today’s a good day to jettison the world into chaos temporarily.
I’m sure we’ve all had those moments with our dogs.
Even just that longing for the singular day when you’re off work, the weather is at a pleasant temperature, your dog isn’t bouncing off the walls and you can put the planet’s bigger worries to a smaller part of your brain for half a moment just to enjoy the day.
The hard part about such wistful longing for a future that can never be is having to be the pin going around popping everyone else’s balloons.
When we say, I don’t to one client or I can’t to another. Even it’s impossible.
We’re not just frustrating them. We’re crushing that hope that there’s a flawless future out there where life in all of its splendid magnificence will be handed to us on a platter and we can live like somebody else’s carefully curated Instagram feed for just one singular day.
That’s the tough bit.
There they are with their impossible catalogue dreams of a photoshopped tidy reality, and here I am with my giant pin to poke an enormous hole in it.
No wonder they go with the prong collar salesmen and the shock collar ‘trainers’. Sure, that awful implement might indeed be unpleasant, but if we’re still hoping there will be a perfect future on the other side of that ugliness, it’s a trade off many are happy to make. They’re not ignorant of the harms, after all.
I mean, who would be?
But there’s more to it than that.
I’m not ever hoping to impart a one-trick solution that will resolve all their woes.
I’m looking to build a skillset that is future proof.
Living with Lidy and helping her learn to live a life that is in some way pleasant for both of us has given us both bags of skills. It’s given us an I Can Do This attitude, no matter what ‘this’ is. It’s given us the reinforcement history of a thousand successes of small victories we’ve accomplished, a thousand small, mundane problems we’ve faced.
She’s sitting outside right now under a patio umbrella enjoying the early morning freshness without feeling the need to respond to every sodding thing that changes in the neighbourhood. She doesn’t bark if other dogs bark. She doesn’t rush to the fence to see who’s going by. She’s not pestered by mice and flies and birds. She’s just chilling while I try to pull together thoughts on a Monday morning. After breakfast, she let me give her a miniature pedicure with our new grinder - infinitely less cumbersome than the Dremel and a hundred times better than clippers.
We got to this small island of imperfect perfection because we’re both really good at solving life’s problems.
And isn’t that what life is about?
This morning, I switched our walk to avoid a particular garden filled with bird seed holders that has become an assault course for wily squirrels. Neither Lidy nor I need that particular challenge. Yet a squirrel’s life is not without problem. What’s easy for the goldfinches and sparrows is tougher for a squirrel. What’s easy for a squirrel is frustrating for a dog.
You can see these things as ‘problems’ - or, like a wily squirrel - see them as ‘opportunities’.
That’s not always true with the harder, darker adaptations life asks us to make - ageing, illness, hormones, relationships. Nobody is really looking at ageing and thinking, ‘This is a marvellous opportunity!’
But our small successes and our long reinforcement history make it easier for us to adapt - if we’re used to adapting.
And that’s one thing I find in common for so many people who arrive with me to ask if I do board-and-train or if I’ll be able to ‘fix’ all of their dogs’ ‘flaws’ - they often don’t have that reinforcement history of having to work it out for themselves or make adaptations that are temporary fixes that just work.
A friend of mine from back in the day is a very fine mechanic, woodworker, tile layer and plumber. If you want a friend who has a 3/4 inch pipe bender or every type of screwdriver, he’s your guy. He often makes the point that it’s not privilege that’s given him such skills, but necessity. If there’s nobody else to fix your car and it’s too expensive to take to a garage, you get good at learning how to fix anything that’s fixable. You learn where to order parts. YouTube ends up your best mate because you can get a free education in ten minutes from some guy in Thailand who can show you how to make and tighten knots you never knew you needed, or how to use cable ties and glue in ways that’ll keep things together until the next pay cheque.
My friend has a good point. It’s deprivation and necessity that have been his university of life. It’s the same with dog training. I did the same with Zak George’s videos back in the day simply because I had neither the time nor the money to take Heston to a proper puppy class. In some ways, I’m kind of glad because the place I’d have probably have taken him turned out to be a yank-and-jerk kind of place jacked up on Cesar Millan methodology.
He feels mildly aggrieved that he’s had the kind of life where, if you didn’t fix your blocked toilet, you sure didn’t have the money to pay someone else to do it. You learned to do it yourself. I can see how that might make a person cynical.
But I think he misses something too - and I tell him. He misses the competence building this brings. When you know you can fix it yourself, that builds enormous capability. It’s a reinforcement history that drives us to try again and to solve our own problems in the future.
He says he could have done without that competence building.
I kind of wish he didn’t have to do it, just as I do for myself.
At the same time, the only difference between me and a guy on the phone yelling at me because I don’t do board-and-train and I won’t promise to fix his dog in 24 hours is the fact that I’ve got a long history of facing problems and resolving them.
It’s yet another reason why I don’t do board-and-train or 24h solutions…
At some point, we need the capacity to start solving things in our relationships with our dogs.
We need to be able to find the ways to say, ‘oh, that works!’
We also need the other thing that comes with that… putting up with the imperfect solution. When you solve your own problems, quite often you live with the imperfections because it’s ‘good enough’. Sure, it might not be the kind of perfect craftsmanship that you’d have got had you paid for the service from a professional at the top of their field and at the top of their game, but you learn to live with the duct tape and the gaffer tape, the cable ties and the loc-tite, the things that are held together imperfectly but just as strongly. A bit like the nest of a pigeon, it might not look pretty, but does it work? Sure, it’s not a bower bird’s nest or a swallow’s abode, but does it work?
Because if it works, who cares if it looks a little rough around the edges.
And, with all problems we resolve ourselves, we get to have that burst of pride that says, ‘hey, do you know what? Crap as I am, I sorted that out!’
And, like the squirrels mastering bird feeders, that gives us a little moment where we realise that problem solving and adapting is what living is truly about after all.
None of us get life handed to us on a platter, no matter what Instagram and influencers would like to have us believe. And real living comes not through having perfection for some duration of time, but through resolving things.
No matter what Lidy’s old age throws our way, I’d like to think we’ll cope, imperfect and wonderfully human as that coping may be.