Author: Chris Howles

Moving house with your dog

How to make the transition for them less traumatic

Having recently moved house myself, I thought it might be helpful to share a few things about my own experiences with my dog. It’s a big topic so let’s dive straight in and take a closer look at moving house with your dog. And how we can make the transition for them less traumatic!

The first, most important thing we should always remember is:

Dogs love routine and can be stressed with big changes.

This will be our ‘mantra’. It may seem obvious but it can be easy to overlook. If we always keep our mantra in mind, specific scenarios with a house move can always be made less traumatic for our dogs.

1. Are you moving within the same area?

If you are moving locally, it stands to reason that taking your dog outside to the same places they are currently familiar with will greatly benefit them. Of course you will want to explore the newer areas closer to your new home, but in the early days try and balance this with returning to their older, favourite haunts too. If time permits, try walking your dog around your new neighbourhood before you actually move, to help ease them into their new environment. Or if your walk won’t be changing at all, you are in luck!

2. If you are moving much further away

This was the case with us. Before we put an offer on the new house, we arranged to visit the surrounding area with Woody and went for a long walk. It was really useful to gauge his reaction to the area, and to see if there were any hidden surprises too. In our case, it was a rural area, so the presence and location of livestock was important. As was the wildlife – adders – bad, pheasants – good!

But think about any wildlife impacts on your dog’s wellbeing. If it’s an urban area, are there any differences, such as more traffic or being closer to more people and other dogs? I think you have a sharper awareness of benefits and potential dangers when you are actually on the walk with your dog. So this was an invaluable experience for us. I realise this might not be possible to do, but try to at least to research the area from your dog’s perspective, or ask your vendors about it.

3. Before the move itself

This is the crucial bit! With Woody, it was the weeks leading up to the move that he found more stressful than the move itself. The big day is usually what everyone talks about, but try not to underestimate the emotional upheaval associated with packing boxes. Remember, your dog does not understand what is actually going on, only that all the objects familiar to them are being removed from sight or put in a different place. Their home is changing, no longer a constant, and being eroded. You seem stressed and rushed. Boxes piled high can create a claustrophobic anxiety too.

Remember our mantra, and there are little things you can do to mitigate the added stress:

• Try to keep calm yourself when you are packing. This includes not doing everything too quickly, panicky or involving sudden loud noises. This can be difficult to do, without realising.
• I would advise against shielding your dog from what’s going on by keeping them in a separate room – if they want to be with you, let them. But do encourage them onto their bed or to be in their ‘safe space’, wherever that is.
• When you take short breaks, don’t forget your dog, give them some attention!
• As much as you can, keep boxes away from your dog’s most important spaces: feeding stations and beds especially.
• The things in these spaces should be the very last things to move or pack – literally when you are leaving on the day.

4. On the big day

As you can imagine there is a lot of scope for extreme canine stress: lots of ‘strangers’ invading every possible space in the home, lots of noise and upheaval. It’s really important to start the day with their normal routine: if this means a walk and breakfast, even if it has to be much earlier than normal, then so be it.

There are two paths you can take here: the first is having your dog stay with someone else they are familiar with for a few hours. This might be the ‘lesser of two evils’ if your dog is especially territorial or reactive. If you do this though, it’s important to return them to the (now empty) house before you all set off. Try and make it a positive but low key experience, just for a few minutes. Let them see and sniff every room if that’s what they want to do. Remember your dog is trying to understand a situation completely new to them. Then you are good to go.

The second is more preferable if it’s at all practical: to keep your dog with you. This is because at a time of the greatest emotional upheaval, being separated from you would otherwise add to the stress. The common advice here is to try to keep your dog in their ‘safe space’ for the duration of the physical move. We adapted this as it’s nearly impossible to achieve when the moving team is working throughout the house.

What we did was allow Woody to meet and greet the moving team on arrival (with each of their permission), and with a generous application of treats to maintain the positive experience.

Once the first room was cleared, we settled him on his bed in that room with a favourite chew, so he had something he couldn’t resist to concentrate on. The room was ideal because he could see a lot of what was going on, but without being in a high traffic area. We kept the door open: don’t invite anxiety or frustration with a closed door. But if you are on your own, you could consider using a gate or tethering as long as your dog is already used to this. After a quick, cheerful ‘inspection’ when they had gone, that was it!

5. Moving In

This had similar challenges, but remember now there are no familiar (comforting) spaces for your dog. Hopefully the excitement of a new environment will over-ride any underlying stress. Normally, you should arrive at the new place ahead of the moving team. This is the perfect time for your dog to familiarise themselves with their new surroundings:

• Make sure you have their bed and water bowl before you even put the key in the door. These are the first things to put down once inside. Choose a low traffic area for both.
• Allow them to investigate every room and outdoor space if you have one. It’s a good idea to do this on-lead.
• Once the moving team arrives, reverse the same procedure for moving out!

6. Settling In

Remembering our mantra, try and keep their routines the same. In many ways you have a ‘clean slate’ so don’t take your dog’s previous behavioural habits for granted. Keep experiences positive, but don’t be afraid to gently change things if they no longer seem to work in the new environment.

I’m not a fan of putting a number on how long it takes a dog to settle in – every dog is different. In our case, Woody was ‘on holiday’ for two weeks, withdrew into himself for the third week, then seemed to be fine. It’s natural for a dog to feel ‘shock’ after a few weeks. It’s important not to overcompensate during this time and ‘reward’ their anxiety, but gently helping them along by making them comfortable and feeling safe is crucial for a hopefully quick recovery.

If you have had a different experience moving home, or have any questions before you do so, I would love to hear from you!

A Dog’s Set of Needs

Allowing your dog to reach their full potential

It’s an old cliché in dog training, but sometimes we try to run before we can walk. A lot of my recent work has been with puppies and adopted dogs. In both cases it struck me how similar our priorities for these can be. We need to address some basic needs for our dog before we worry about useful-to-have things.

To help myself as much as much as you, I have mapped out a list of priorities. With a nod to Maslow’s Hierarchy, I am calling it a Set of Needs. The first category does sit above all others, but frankly Levels Two and Three that follow are equal in value, to form a set. By addressing each one, it might help you allow your dog to reach their full potential.

Level 1

Level One is about survival. If any one of these are not fulfilled we are in trouble. The Safety aspect can be an overlooked one though. If our dog can escape the confines of their household, even just the once, is not secured in a car, or can lunge on the lead into a road, we need to revisit this urgently!

Level 2A

Level Two A again addresses physical needs once we have Level One covered. And already we have the possibility of training appearing here. Sometimes regular exercise, appropriate to our dog’s breed, health and age is not always possible if there are behaviour constraints or control issues. And sometimes it’s not obvious what amount of exercise is appropriate: it can sometimes be too much in the case of puppies or senior dogs. Long walks are not a given here. But we should strive to do the best we can to get this one right. And keeping their (and our) environment comfortable is not only good for well-being, but obviously important for health.

Level 2B

Level Two B is where a lot of training and behaviour work can apply. But with nurture, this can sometimes get by-passed, especially if we have a busy life. And for well-being, to feel safe is a different beast from being safe. If your dog can truly settle, and even dream, it’s a good sign.

Level 3

Level Three contains just as important elements, although we could say that breed-related fulfilment is sometimes a luxury or even not desirable. Dogs bred to chase prey, for example, is a tricky one, but training aside, those zoomies in the garden can have an important role. And in terms of feeling part of a pack, if you are on your own, this can absolutely be just the two of you.

Finally, the Dignity aspect of this level is really important. As sentient beings, dogs feel pride and satisfaction as well as more primal feelings. Perhaps even empathy. I truly believe that if we use aversion with a dog, even ‘mild’ on the scale such as pulling them down from something, their loss of dignity in those moments hurts them emotionally. It damages their confidence, as well as eroding their trust in us. But we can also passively dent their pride. If they have difficulty negotiating a step or getting down from a car, let’s help them out. Let’s treat them with the respect we expect ourselves!

And there we have it. Our Set of Needs! I would be grateful to hear from anyone who feels I have missed out something obvious!

Woody & the Leaf

The small moments that carry meaning

As the year gradually draws to a close and a new one is around the corner, it’s a time for reflection. All those dogs I am fortunate enough to learn from. But this time of year in particular I often think about the dogs who were adopted and given a second (or third) chance in life. Often they are not socialised and certainly have little training. And for some, just the experience of being outside beyond the confines of where they once lived is a new experience. This opportunity, to just experience, and to do this together with them, is a privilege for us. They are special moments. And it reminds me of one I had with years ago with my dog when he was a puppy, and it stayed with me ever since. I will call it Woody and the Leaf.

What brought me full circle to remembering Woody & the Leaf were some of the heart-warming tales of those adopted dogs I worked with this year – though often with heart-breaking beginnings. There was a little mutt who was kept in a crate in an outbuilding without any electricity. So when it was dark and cold….it was dark and cold. He was saved. And the fact that this little chap now celebrates life every day in his new home is a testament not only to the kindness of his human adopters, but also to this fella’s amazing will to survive. And the will to love and be loved. He’s taken to the training too! Sure, some things are going to take a long time, but even if time stood still now, what a happy ending.

Then there was the dog who was a forced breeding ‘machine’ and, as far as we could tell, never, ever, let outside the boundaries of her previous ‘home’. With her rescue came some needed medical care, but now she is okay. More than okay. She is safe and happy. And revelling in life with her new human mum. My training always adapts to these dogs’ histories. We don’t ask for a Sit with her, because of physical issues. As long as she is comfortable, we can still reward her for a good behaviour. She likes a treat! We’ll call her Sophie.

Every day brought a new experience for Sophie, and her new owner relished in this. Once she sent me a video of the first time (we think) Sophie saw a cat. They were in a stationary car at the time, with the cat sitting on a fence looking at them, and her owner captured on video the look of Sophie’s curiosity and wonder. We think! But actually it doesn’t matter what we think. It’s what we feel together. What we experience. On the video her owner started laughing, and Sophie barked once as if to join in.

You see, it’s about the small things. It was a small moment but one that carried huge meaning. Sophie was seeing something for the first time and processing it. We want to keep this being a positive experience, but a natural one too. We won’t want to try too hard. Just to experience the moment, and whatever that brings. Being together. Bonding. Sophie’s look of wonderment…

Of course with young puppies, we have a blank canvas with these moments – almost everything is new. Savour these moments. Do it together. But it can be with a dog of any age, and it doesn’t have to be something new. It’s just that moment when they process something that carries meaning for them. Your dog could be much older and even not seeing or hearing well: It can be about touch or smell too. That moment a warm towel goes around them to dry them off, or an especially riveting scent!

Even if a dog is scared of certain things and reactive, we can still enjoy looking at and processing things, as long as we are both together in our safe bubble, from far enough away. Or, yes, it can just be something they will have heard a thousand times before, but this one time their curiosity is piqued. When we’re training sometimes an owner will ask me what their dog is thinking at that moment. Often there isn’t an answer. “I don’t know” I might say, “but it’s nice just wondering, isn’t it?” Revel in the mystery.

These moments are a privilege for us, and are hard to convey in words and so it is with Woody & the Leaf, but I will try. He was a puppy and we were in the garden on an autumn day. I don’t know, probably waiting for that wee. Naturally, he was distracted with everything around him. It was very quiet but there was a breeze. Then suddenly something broke his concentration. It was a leaf falling from a tree. The breeze was perfectly swaying and buffeting it gently on its slow journey downwards. Woody was tilting his head and watching it. As it touched the ground, he still studied it. Then looked up at the sky. “I know”, I said.

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I would like to wish all my readers and friends a Happy Christmas and best wishes for the New Year!

Can dogs feel empathy?

Can they understand and share our feelings?

Dogs, as we all know, are very good at picking on our emotional temperature. I am sure you can imagine countless examples. If a person is nervous with our dog, our dog can become equally cautious. Or if we are excited, our dog is usually more than happy to join in! If we are ill or hurting, most dog owners will swear their dog is sympathetic to our condition – showing a variety of displacement behaviours. So what’s going on here? Some psychologists and behaviourists maintain this is something called emotional contagion. This implies a dog does respond to our feelings, but without properly understanding them. Simply a good, bad or neutral scale. But can dogs feel empathy ?

Defining Empathy

Defining a term is often easier if we first look at what it isn’t, and we should differentiate it from sympathy. Sympathy is when we do share an emotional connection with someone else’s experience or feeling. But there remains a certain detachment. Empathy is something on a much higher level. It implies an actual understanding of those feelings, and the ability to imagine ourselves in the other being’s emotional skin. It’s much more immersive. It implies the ability to differentiate from self and other. So we are setting the bar quite high, here.

My training is based on an empathic approach – ‘Be Dog’ if you like. To re-imagine ourselves into how a dog truly thinks and feels. So it’s important! But I am curious about the level at which a dog can reciprocate this. Because training is as much about engaging with feelings as it is about auto-responses and simply doing things.

First level biological senses

I got to thinking about this topic from a recent experience. I was laid up with an illness and many of you will recognise my dog’s behaviour with this situation. He stuck by me. He was much closer, more of the time. Now, there are other things going on here. Specifically with illness, there are obviously physical changes in the body.  Where these are not immediately obvious to our appearance, from our dog’s point of view, we are still walking around with a big flag. We smell different! Dogs have even been trained to detect certain illnesses with their nose. (I still marvel at this!) But without question, my dog probably knew I had a lurgy well before I showed physical symptoms.

Was his emotional reaction to be closer to me an empathic one though? Sure, there may be other things going on.

Dad is on the sofa during the day. This is weird, I better stay close. Not sure what’s going on. Or…This is nice. He’s not working, it’s good to hang out together. And so on. But most dog parents will tell you, they know, and there is a lot more going on, because we can feel their emotional connection to us.

The mirror test

Some debunk the idea that dogs can feel empathy and distinguish between self and other by using the mirror as an example. But I think this is too crude, and also inconsistent. Most dogs do not seem to react to their reflection in the mirror. A few do though, either displaying prolonged curiosity, or excitement, or even animosity (a belief there is another dog there, or a frustration at not understanding?). But we can never be certain what’s going on in their mind when they see themselves. We could even argue that the majority response of ‘not interested’ means they know exactly what they are seeing, it’s no big deal. Vanity is certainly a concept alien to dogs!

What does the science say?

There have been many studies about this, and they are divided over whether dogs can feel empathy. Because we never know for sure of course. But so many of these studies do hint at the possibility of dogs feeling empathy. Bond Tests (measuring the degree of attachment a dog has to their parent) demonstrate dogs will act with urgency if they feel their owner is in distress. This is a good starting point: emotional contagion for sure. Can we go to a higher level?

For me, one of the most telling studies was by a pair of psychologists. In this experiment, dogs were observed individually in the presence of their parent and also a stranger. The two humans would take turns with different vocalisations, mimicking different emotional levels, such as talking, singing or crying. When the stranger pretended to cry, most of the dogs showed a concern for them. Approaching them, and even licking or muzzling them.

If we are talking about only emotional contagion, we would expect the dogs to possibly mimic the stranger’s behaviour, but approach their owner instead, for comfort. The fact that most chose to try and comfort the stranger instead, suggests evidence of empathic concern.

Mystery and wonder

Maybe some questions can never be answered. But in one sense, the mystery and wonder of dogs’ complex emotional make-up is what is so meaningful to us, rather than how we define truth or fact. I think the answer to the question is Yes. But whatever we believe, embrace the fact that our dog is probably understanding our emotions more than we sometimes give them credit for!

Paws for thought

How surfaces affect dog behaviour

It took me a while to realise that there was a common thread running through training two different dogs I am currently working with. And this involved the very nature of the ground they stand on. It then got me thinking about the different textures and temperatures of the ground. Literally, how surfaces affect dog behaviour.

Two dogs, two opposite behaviours

Let’s call them Dog A and B! Dog A enjoys a back garden in their family home. He will happily chase a ball there and sniff around the borders and plant beds, or generally hang out with his humans. Doing all the things a dog might normally do. But he will never toilet there, only on a proper walk further away from the house. He will toilet on the pavement or the grass in the park, he’s not fussy there. But never in their back garden. You can imagine this presents an issue for his humans.

As it does for Dog B, who has the exact opposite behaviour: he will only toilet in his back garden. Never, ever on a walk, no matter how long the walk is, and whatever the terrain. No matter how much he interacts with nature on the walk. As soon as everyone returns from the walk, he will go straight out in the back garden and do his business. So what’s going on here?

Can surfaces really affect dog behaviour?

In both of these cases, I think it does. Because in both cases, the surface of the back garden was the same, and we eliminated other potential causal variables as far as we could. Both gardens had artificial grass. My theory is that they have learned an association with the very surface of those areas, rather than the area itself. The result is two completely opposite behaviours, but that share this one commonality.

I’m not going to debate the pros and cons of artificial grass here. (Though I will say if you are considering it as an option, your dog will thank you for sticking with the real thing.) But my point would be the same for some dogs who have a ‘neurosis’ about hard flooring. To illustrate my point about surfaces, let’s first briefly consider the importance of a dog’s point of contact with the world: their paws.

Dog paw anatomy

We will leave aside the mysterious dew claw and carpal pads which are higher up the limb, and for which no-one for sure knows their original purpose. Apart from being sticky-outy things that are prone to injury! Then we have the claws (for digging and gripping) and of course the main pads, known as digital pads. These pads are made of extra thick skin, because they are subject to a huge amount of load-bearing and wear-and-tear. Despite this, they are extremely sensitive. Apart from allowing the dog to regulate their body temperature (that and their mouths alone), they transmit signals about the surface the dog is standing on. Far more so than our human feet.

So a dog’s pads are an important door through which the world is explored and learned. Dogs can build cognitive associations very quickly based on touch and feel. We tend to focus on their aural and visual triggers – seeing and hearing things that cause a reaction in a dog’s behaviour. The touch aspect is often over-looked. It’s why I often address touch sensitivity when tackling a dog’s behaviour problem that may seem completely unrelated. In essence, dogs can form very powerful associations with the type of ground they stand on.

So what was going on with dog A and B?

Dog A was adopted as an adult so we don’t know about their early toilet training. But it appears they may never have come into contact with plastic grass before. To a dog, this surface is much closer to carpets and rugs than to real grass. It does not smell or feel like grass, but smells and feels of artificial fibres or maybe cleaning products, much like our carpets and rugs. Clearly this dog thought going to the loo in the garden was akin to doing it in the house. So they would only perform their rituals out in the park.

Dog B was raised correctly as a puppy – to toilet outside. They were praised when they did this. I think this dog made a strong association with the feel of the ground, not the context of ‘being outside’. When their paws felt the plastic grass, and they went to the loo, they were praised. Boom, there it is. Quite logical when you think about it.

Both dogs were thinking in a logical way, and trying to do the right behaviour. But it goes to show, this can sometimes have undesired or odd results!

The difference that surface can make

The implications for training other things are significant. When we think about distractions for our dogs, we always think of sight and sound. But the surface you are training or interacting on will also have an effect. Some more so in others. But if a dog is fine with doing a Sit in the living room but not in the kitchen, sometimes it can be because they have a different association with what their paws are telling them. And if you are outside, is the ground hot or cold, rough or smooth? And so on.

A surface won’t cause a behaviour (“the pavement makes him reactive”!) but it can seal the early learning of a behaviour by locking in an association. So surfaces do indeed affect behaviour and mood. Maybe we wouldn’t be so different either if we didn’t wear shoes!