Making my own path
My village is sitting between the sea and the fields. It sometimes feels like it is squeezed between these two sides, and cannot quite decide which way to go. All walks from my house either go to the sea, or into the fields. Sometimes they oscillate between these two sides. The shortest route from the house to the fields is through the neighbourhood, then across the main street, and then past a few houses. We have reached the first field.
But until this year there was no way to continue. The network of farm tracks through the fields starts somewhere else and is not linked to my personal shortcut. A rough margin of grass, one metre wide, leads along the edge of the houses and also along at the edge of the field up to the proper tracks. It is a fantastic shortcut which allows me to go straight up into farm country, with its various loops, and then connect back through the village. But the shortcut is overgrown for most of the year. Wet. Difficult to walk. Until this year.
This winter, a few months ago, we decided to walk that margin, over and over again. In the winter is was a muddy line of land, with hardly any grass. But I knew the grass would come back and the soil would dry out eventually, I knew if we just keep walking that path, once a day, maybe twice a day, consistently, that bit of land would become a path. And that’s what happened. It is not much, and we are the only people who walk that bit. But we are now in May and still have our shortcut, along the edge of the village, a direct link between the sea and the fields. We’ve made our own path.
There is no shortcut for learning how to have a dog. All dogs are different, and all relationships between dogs and owners are different. There is no shortcut. Even more so, when the dog has a difficult and mysterious past, and the opportunity to form the bond from the beginning is just not there. The series of decisions that are forced upon the dog owner is endless. What training philosophy to choose, positive or balanced? (Both sound nice, but depending on who you listen to, one is the only one that works and the other is animal abuse.) What food to feed, raw or dry? (Again, either one might ruin everything.) Harness or collar? (Again!) Positive reinforcement or negative punishment? Off leash, yes or no, and if yes, where and how? What is the dog allowed to do, what not? We control every aspect of the dog’s life, but how? What do we expect from the dog, what do we let go? How long can we leave the dog alone? It never ends.
Too often we see dogs as problems to be solved. Figure out how to stop him from pulling, and then it’s fine. No more chewing on furniture, and then it’s okay. My dog digs in the garden, my dog pees at home, my dog eats too fast, or drinks too much, or barks at the fence, or growls at other dogs. An entire industry offers shortcuts for solving these kind of dog problems, tools with alluring names like ‘no pull harness’ or ‘gentle leaders’ or ‘no bark collar’, training methods which promise a solution within ten minutes. Just play this game and you will have a good dog. That’s what we want, a good dog. What that means is that he doesn’t cause any trouble. Nobody is asking the dog what he wants.
A dog does not know what we mean when we say ‘good’ or ‘bad’. He knows what happy means, though. His entire life revolves around his relationship with his human, and that relationship is ultimately what is going to determine how he feels and how he behaves. There is no shortcut for solving that part of the problem. You can train and countercondition and socialise as much you like, in the end it will come down to trust between dog and human, trust and happiness. There is no shortcut for that. And there is no clear, obvious path that takes us there. We have to find it for ourselves.
