No Bad Dogs The Woodhouse Way

Chapter 1 My CasebookMy casebook is full of dog owners of every description. Oversentimental owners, owners in need themselves of immediate psychiatric help, owners who never should be owners, owners who have problems but who respond immediately to help given and whose lives are thereby changed for the better. There are owners who wish to imprint their ideas on me rather than letting me imprint my ideas on them, owners who come to me when tired of their dogs and wish me to agree that I think their dogs should be put to sleep, and get downright angry when I say the dog can easily be cured of what is wrong and I attempt to do so at once.One lady drove up in a car and said her dog was impossible, fought every dog it met and would do nothing right, and her husband would only have it put to sleep if I said it was untrainable. This was a bullterrier, a breed known for its aggressive attitude toward other dogs, but in this case there was absolutely nothing wrong with the dog at all. I mixed it with other dogs, freed it with other dogs, made it stay in the "down" position for a prolonged period with other dogs, and found it a highly intelligent, highly obedient and loving animal. I refused to comply with the lady's wish for me to write to her husband and say it was untrainable. This story had a happy ending. She took a course and learned to love the dog instead of finding it a bore, but not many cases have such happy endings.The worst cases under the title of "phobias" are those who project their own faults in character makeup onto their dogs. One lady arrived with a tiny poodle and said the dog had a terrible fear of loud noises, hated water, which the owner said was "eerie," and would not get onto a bus or a car without terror in its heart. The moment the owner stepped out of the car with a subdued husband following in the background I knew where the fault lay.I put a choke chain on the dog and walked it down the road to a site where building was going on and huge brick trucks were tipping their loads with a tremendous noise every few minutes. The dog's tail was up, she was sniffing all the exciting country scents in a typical untroubled doggy manner, and the falling bricks and huffs and puffs of compressors, etc., had not the slightest effect on her. The next thing I did was to put dog and owners into my car and drive to a huge lake near us with "still water," which was supposed to be so "eerie" that the dog would be terrified. I let the dog off the lead and raced around with it, throwing sticks for it to retrieve, and then said, "Patty, go into the water and have a drink," which she promptly did, and paddled quite happily until I called her out and told the owner that as far as Patty was concerned there were no phobias in her life; all were in the lady's imagination and she was trying to project her own phobias about noise and eerie water into the dog's mind. On returning to my home the lady remarked to my husband, who is a doctor, that I had saidshewas the nut case. I hoped I had shown her who was to blame. I pointed out that with the proper choke chain, a few good jerks should the dog do anything wrong, and possibly a paddle in the lake with the dog by her, there would be no problem with the dog. All the dog needed was healthful open-air walks, a happy outlook on the owner's part and no ideas that the dog suffered any abnormality of temperament. Two days later my choke chain came back in the mail, so I supposed that anything I had done was to be completely disregarded. I had an idea that the root of the trouble in this case was marital, not animal.Recently a man with a golden retriever drove a long; way to see me. He said the dog refused to come out of the car and pulled terribly to get back into it if ejected forcibly. The dog was terrifically fat, which made the handling of it an almost impossible feat, really needing a strong man to achieve the jerks that theWoodhouse, Barbara is the author of 'No Bad Dogs The Woodhouse Way' with ISBN 9780671541859 and ISBN 0671541854.