What Really Matters by Joan Weston

Joan Weston is a dog trainer and behaviourist as well as a rescuer of
bulldogs. We use her for the rescue alot and I consider her one of the
best trainers I know. Here's one of my favourite articles of hers,
written after her bulldog, PotRoast, passed away.

What Really Matters (*published in the April, 2008 issue of "Dogs,Dogs,Dogs!")

By: Joan Weston

In
this space, we normally find a question about a dog’s behavior and how
to alter it to fit our demands. People write in about their dog barking
or digging. Not this month. This past week, our dearest boy PotRoast
lost his ongoing battle with illness. Many of you have seen Potty
performing with The Superdogs, waddling through a tunnel or backing up
with his butt high in the air. Others may have seen him on the cover of
Dogs In Canada for February. He was a character, he was full of
confidence and he was the joy of our lives.

When you get a dog,
you sign on for heartache. We all do. We raise fur kids for 5 years,
for 8 years for 13 years if we’re lucky, but they all leave us
heartbroken and we’re never really ready. They come into our lives for
a reason, and when they leave, they force us to take stock of
ourselves, as a person and as a parent. If you’re really lucky, you get
the lessons that they were sent here to teach you before they go, and
after they’ve left, you hold onto those parables as shining fragments
of their love left behind in all the heartache and pain.

PotRoast
was sent to us to teach us what really matters in our relationship with
our dogs. It isn’t sit, down, heel or stop digging up the %#*
pachysandra. Because on the day you lose them, rarely will your
thoughts turn to whether or not they lay down the second you asked. You
won’t care that they didn’t quite hold that stay for one minute, or
that they jumped up on the couch after running through said
pachysandra. The things that matter, brobdingnagian in your
relationship with your dog and with yourself are as follows:

o

Treat
your dog with respect not just love. If your dog is curled up on the
couch in a sound sleep, once in a while, resist the urge to go pet
them. Just admire them from where you are and respect that they, like
you, should be able to nap unaccosted.

o

Just because
something works, doesn’t make it right. Remember that there are more
important things in the world than absolute compliance. Things like
love, silliness and personality. If you want a dog who does everything
you ask the moment you say it get an Aibo by Sony. I’ll take my boy who
sometimes heels beautifully and sometimes bites my shoe as I’m trying
to walk. I love him when he does that, just don’t tell him, ok?
o

Spend
some time with your dog curled up on the couch either beside you, on
top of you, or above you on the back. Just watch a movie and know that
it is enough to sit with your arms around them feeling their breathing
and wincing every time they fart during the good scenes.

o

You’re
going to make mistakes when you train or parent. I can’t think of a
single stronger moral argument against correction based training than
that. When you make a mistake, your best friend shouldn’t have to pay
for it with a sharp pop of a leash or a prong poking them in the
throat. The only way to truly learn is to be free to make a mistake
without fear of pain or retribution. If it’s true for you, then why on
earth shouldn’t it be true for them?
o

Can we not get past
the Dominance thing once and for all? There is no scientific or
academic corroboration for applying dominance theories of behavior to
domesticated dogs. None. Dominance should finally join its brethren the
dreaded hair growing on your palms if you uh, overindulge and not
forwarding this e-mail will condemn you to eighteen years of bad luck.
Let’s clarify this once and for all and get all the charlatans out of
the limelight. Playing tug of war will not make your dog aggressive.
Letting him win will not result in him killing you in your sleep. Dogs
don’t particularly care who eats first, so long as they eat at some
point. They want to get through doorways first not to establish control
of the household finances, but rather just to get the hell outdoors
fast. Sleeping on your bed, cuddling on the couch and sitting on the
steps looking down on you means they like being under the covers, the
couch is soft and they can see stuff in that order. That’s all. They’re
not that deep. Get over it.

o

Teach them manners and be
fair when you do mete out punishment. Take care that punishment is non
violent and unemotional, and don’t use an elephant gun to kill a mouse.
If your pup is jumping up on you, start using your evolutionarily
advanced psyche to move beyond the knee jerk reaction of knee jerking.
How about you use that whole other layer of brain that we have to
figure out a way to set the dog up to succeed rather than keep letting
them get it wrong and then blaming the dog?
o

If you wouldn’t
do it to a toddler, don’t do it to your dog. Research in cognition has
shown that dogs function at approximately the level of a two year old
human. If you actually think about your dog, that should seem about
right. Two year olds are incredibly self centered, they want what they
want when they want it, and they aren’t afraid to throw the odd tantrum
in front of company to accomplish an objective. Having said that,
when’s the last time it occurred to you to throw a choke chain on your
two year old’s throat, or put prong collar on their neck so that when
they act out, you can just snap on it while you reassure your horrified
neighbors that it doesn’t really hurt them?
o

Your dog
forgives so much. That time you yelled at them when it was your husband
who knocked over the flowers. When you let some child run up and grab
them about the neck and squeeze them, and then scolded the dog for
growling at the rudeness. Or the time that you were working on that
project late for a few days, and so the most real exercise or one on
one time they got with you was an on leash walk at your snail’s pace
around the block. Remember when they wanted one more treat and you said
no, because you know, they should just do stuff without getting treats,
all the time, right? Never mind how her eyes lit up at the thought of
cheese, or how warm you felt watching her gobble up a piece of liver
that you’d just given her. You can’t just give her a treat every time
she does something or else… Or else what I now wonder; she’d be too
happy? She’d pay too much attention to you? She’d enjoy the work too
much? You’d have too much fun training?

We’ll never be able to
massage PotRoast’s toes again. We won’t be able to watch him skootch
backwards in joyous anticipation of dinner, or watch TV with him lying
upside down on top of us snoring too loudly to hear the dialogue. I
won’t be able to teach him obedience like his formal heel, his stays
and his tricks, all of which he loved to practice with élan. While we
regret our loss of this wonderful boy, we are so very thankful that we
don’t regret anything we did with him in the name of training.

This
was his lesson to us – this was his gift. We thought that we were the
smart ones. But in the end, he taught us what really mattered.

Thank you, Blanche. I'm leaking all over my keyboard now. That is so true and wonderful and good.

so true. I'm going to go curl up with the pugs and let them shed all over me for a while.

I love that, that is very very true. And yes, I love mine best when they misbehave (a little ).

Toddy, Toddy, Toddy. You are such a darling. Mummy loves you.

(So is Snifter, and I love him to bits too - but I'm sure you all know where I'm coming from here.)

That is lovely. Thank you for sharing it.

Should have come with a tissue alert. What a wonderful and on point read.

I refer people to Joan all the time. Her specialty is aggression (her company is called Fangs, but No Fangs), but she is great around a host of behaviours. She helps us evaluate any dog we have in where aggression is a significant issue.

She is practical and no nonsense--which I like. And she doesn't believe that it is ever warranted to use harsh methods on any dog--which I also like.

That was beautiful!

You know I needed that, I beat myself up a lot about if I am ding enough training with CP, I will remember this article and I WILL resist the urge to pet her when she is sleeping, I admit I am bad about that, I try but she is just SO cute!

That was a wonderful article. And I too, am going to have to start telling myself to resist the urge to pet LuLu while she's sleeping!

Thanks for reminding me what is really important about our dogs!

There's so much wisdom in what she wrote and a lot to be learned. It was beautiful.

So very true! It's so easy to get caught up in the day to day stresses and forget to step back for a minute and think before you act or remember what's really important.

We have a friend who has a lab/rottie mix that he has absolutly trained all personality out of. It has always made me so sad. He's such a sweet dog and just wants attention and affection but the second he even stands up, he is barked at to "sit."

I have considered the choke collar for the toddler, but never the pugs!