by: Natalie Parletta

Dogs are loyal, devoted companions. Yet even with training, so many problematic dog behaviors puzzle and frustrate their owners, often resulting in abandonment and neglect. A new breed of dog trainers and scientists say it doesn’t have to be like this—we can educate ourselves to better understand our canine buddies.

I should have known when she yanked me off of my feet, face first into the mud as we walked to the car. I was leaving a dog sanctuary on Cockatoo Lane in South Australian countryside with my new adopted dog, Gemma. A 3-year-old Alaskan Malamute/German Shepherd cross, she was a stunning dog. Gemma had intelligent blue eyes surrounded by soft white fur, framed by characteristic darker husky colorations. She passed the child test by gently letting my 5-year old daughter pat her.

Things started to unravel after we got home. She barked and shied in fear from my husband. We guessed she had been badly treated by a male. We couldn’t venture within sight of another dog without her rearing up on the lead, pulling my arm out of its socket, barking viciously and leaving rope burns on my hands. I took her to standard dog training classes. The only thing that improved was my arm strength. We couldn’t leave her in our fenced-in yard without getting a call later in the day from the pound or someone who found our escape artist blocks away. We tried leaving her inside, but the final straw was arriving home to find doors (in our rental property) scratched beyond repair. Sadly, we returned her to the sanctuary.

Poor Gemma.

In Australia, 211,655 dogs were admitted to pounds and shelters in 2012 to 2013 (the most recent available data), and a staggering 43,900—over 1 in 5 dogs—were put down. European statistics tell us that nearly 14.7 million dogs are abandoned or homeless; it’s not clear how many of those survive. Around 3.3 million dogs end up in US animal shelters each year, and about 670,000 are euthanized. That’s approaching 1 in 20 dogs—an improvement on Australia’s statistics, but still tragic.

Adding to that, Paul McGreevy, professor of veterinary science at the University of Sydney, notes the paradox that our most domesticated companions are the ones most likely to land people in hospital. He attributes this to people’s seriously flawed understanding of dog behavior and body language that leads to inappropriate responses, in turn driving a wedge between dog lovers and society as our canine friends become less welcome.

“[U]ltimately,” McGreevy writes in The Veterinary Journal, “dog welfare suffers.”

Redhead Sarah List, an eccentric, devoted science lecturer in Adelaide, Australia, grew up with rescue dogs. Now she regularly fosters them herself. After eight years’ experience volunteering at a rural animal shelter, she has witnessed the problem first hand. Dogs end up there because of misdemeanors that include barking, chewing and excess energy. Sometimes, List has seen dogs left chained to the shelter gate. Other times, she laments, people will just dump their dog and drive off—the shelter workers arrive to find them running around.

Yet many of the abandoned dogs are amazing, she says. “You just can’t understand how they’ve ended up in a shelter.”

Does it have to be so hard? According to a modern breed of dog trainers, there is no such thing as a problem dog. “If you’ve got a flower that’s wilting, you don’t try and fix the flower,” explains Adelaide-based trainer Emma Tucker. “You need to fix the environment.”

To do this, McGreevy emphasizes that education—learning “dogmanship”—is key. Many people who undoubtedly love dogs, he observes, unwittingly make serious mistakes. “Dogs have all the answers. We just have to ask the right questions,” he told me. “You’ll get the best results from dogs if you learn to understand them. This means “treating dogs as dogs rather than small furry four-legged humans.”

Dogs evolved from grey wolves, and still have virtually the same DNA. Online dog trainer “Doggy Dan” says wolf packs have leaders—an alpha male and an alpha female—and the rest are followers. In his view, if owners become pack leaders, this creates order and harmony. Once dogs know we are in the driver’s seat, they can sit back and enjoy the ride. A dog who thinks he or she is boss will not listen and can be anxious and stressed, leading to numerous behavioral challenges.

Indeed, we are seeing an epidemic of anxious dogs who end up on medication. According to the Australian Veterinary Association, anxiety was the leading dog disorder in 2016. I’ve since realized that Gemma was one of these statistics, and that many aggressive dogs actually suffer from anxiety.

Traditional dog training methods don’t tend to address such problems. In this “obedience world,” says Tucker, dogs are trained to sit, drop, and stay. Although these mechanical commands can be important, she reasons, it’s like teaching children math or history and expecting them to be emotionally balanced members of society.

Tucker, who works with veteran dog behavior specialist George Lygidakis, recalls an anxious Chihuahua that she helped on the Gold Coast. The little dog’s doting parents had taken her to several other trainers with no luck, and she was being medicated. When people visited she would shake, wee, and bark incessantly. As soon as Tucker arrived, she saw that no one was taking control. Everyone focused on the little dog, saying “it’s okay sweetie” and giving her treats.

The problem, Tucker believes, is that this communicated to the dog that she was ranked highly in the pack, and she felt anxious because she thought she was in charge. Tucker directed the owner to stay calm, put the dog on the lead behind her, and instruct visitors to ignore her. After a few role plays, Tucker came in and the dog was sitting quietly behind her owner. Later when they were drinking coffee, the dog came and sat next to Tucker on the couch. The pressure was off. The little dog was able to find peace and was taken off the drugs.

Anxiety is not the only problem faced by our coveted companions.

After our failure with Gemma, we searched the classifieds for a puppy that we could raise ourselves. We couldn’t resist an adorably playful, floppy-eared German Shepherd/Labrador cross. We called him Charlie. Labs are used as guide dogs and are easy to train, right? According to the vet, when we had Charlie snipped at two years of age, guide dogs are the carefully selected ones. Labradors are highly excitable, we learned, and it would be several years before he calmed down.

It was impossible. We had to chain him up when people visited because he would bowl them over in his enthusiasm. As it was, he would bark incessantly and virtually choke himself on the chain. One day I found him innocently dragging my little girl, who had wrapped his lead around her wrist, around the backyard. Eventually we had to find a new home when our landlord reneged on our lease. Fortunately, Charlie secured a better fate than Gemma when a loving family with children living on a rural acreage adopted him.

Now I see that Charlie might have thought he was in charge. On top of that, the more agitated we became, the more excited he got.

Embedded in the philosophy of successful trainers is the observation that dogs are nonverbal. They respond to body language and energy. This draws from the phenomenon popularly known as horse whispering. Exuding calm, non-verbal energy is a central tenet of trainers like Tucker and Dan.

After a 20-year hiatus, I decided to try again. Finally owning my own house and working from home, I researched dog breeds and settled on a Golden Retriever—a gentle, loyal companion who would be easy to train. Or so I thought.

Lucie was a gorgeous ball of fluff with innocent brown eyes. She was the first of her litter to come to me when we visited a local breeder, and we gleefully took our new baby home. Through the subsequent hazy weeks of sleep deprivation that reminded me of being a new mum, I discovered she was an exceptionally cheeky, spirited puppy who wanted to chew on everything, including our clothes, feet and fingers.

This time I was saved by the internet. That’s when I found Doggy Dan. Not because he’s a cute, 6-foot-something dog-lover with a tousled mop of curly hair, warm eyes and a charming wide grin; his “powerful yet gentle” dog training approach appealed to me. I’m not sure of his professional dog training accreditations. It seems that after being frustrated with traditional training methods he turned to the best teacher: his dog. And he’s worked with thousands of dogs since. Most of all, his method has worked for me.

I coached myself and my husband (who is the love of my life but arguably harder to train than the dog) in Dan’s key principles of becoming a pack leader. Some of this was straightforward, like controlling the food. But, not all of it was that easy.

Like Tucker and others such as Jan Fennel, the “dog listener,” Dan uses ignoring as part of the training approach that he developed. Try telling skeptical visitors to ignore a cute little puppy for a few minutes before lavishing her with affection. But combined with some calm time outs in the laundry room when all else failed, it’s worked.

At home, Lucie is calm and relaxed, and I am rewarded with a devoted companion who melts my heart every day. She’s no angel. For instance, she has an incredibly honed ability to sniff out food and other less palatable items like horse poo and thinks it’s lots of fun to steal other dogs’ balls. I have to stay several steps ahead of her. But I’ve developed a strong recall so that on our long daily walks along the river or beach she can bound, gallop and swim off-lead with joyous abandon. Little Miss Socialite, Lucie has met hundreds of dogs. Some she frolics with playfully, others she knows are best left alone. Even at 12 months old, I can take her virtually anywhere.

These blessings come from investing considerable time and effort. “It’s like if you wanted to be Miss Bikini 2018 in November but you didn’t have the time to go to the gym,” Tucker says. “If you don’t follow the program, you’re not going to get the results.” You’ll wind up with a dog who is destructive, aggressive, or anxious, and wonder what went wrong.

Like Gemma.

I don’t know where she ended up, but if I had another chance, I’d be a better-trained human for her.

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Main photo courtesy of: Congerdesign

Chihuahua photo courtesy of: Skeeze

Brown Labrador photo courtesy of: Chiemsee2016

Photo of Lucie: courtesy of Natalie Parletta

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Natalie is a freelance science writer based in Adelaide, Australia. Her work has appeared in Cosmos, Ensia, Sydney Morning Herald, Washington Post, New York Times and more. Visit: https://natalieparletta.com.au and follow Natalie on Twitter: NatalieParletta