Читать книгу The Dog Listener: Learning the Language of your Best Friend - Monty Roberts, Jan Fennell - Страница 10

It is hard for me to imagine this now, but there was a time when I could not face the prospect of forming a friendship with another dog. In the awful aftermath of Purdey’s death, I had become deeply disillusioned. At one point I even think I came out with the classic line ‘I will never have another dog in this house’. The reality was, however, that my affection for dogs ran too deep. And, within a year or so of Purdey’s death, a little gun dog was healing the scars left by my tragic loss.

Despite our early setback, my family and I had settled well into country life. It was my husband’s interest in hunting that brought dogs back into our home. One day, in the autumn of 1973, he came back from a rough shoot bemoaning his lack of a good gun dog. He had seen a wounded rabbit slinking its way into the woods to die. ‘If I had a dog that couldn’t have happened,’ he complained with a look that left little room for doubt about what he was thinking.

So it was that on his birthday that September, his first gun dog, a springer spaniel bitch we called Kelpie arrived in the house. He loved the dog as I did. It was the beginning of my lifelong love affair with that beautiful breed.

We were, predictably I suppose, terrified of repeating the experience of Purdey and immediately bought one of the standard text books on gundog training. I have to confess that our first efforts at shaping Kelpie up were far from a roaring success. We wanted to train Kelpie to retrieve, an unnatural act for a springer. Sticking rigidly to the book, we started her off by throwing objects for her to recover and return to us. The book stressed the importance of beginning with something very lightweight. The idea was to teach the dog to be ‘soft mouthed’ with the objects it recovered.

We decided to use one of Ellie’s old bibs, which we tied in a knot. One morning we took Kelpie outdoors, threw the bib into the distance and waited for her to return it to us. We were so thrilled when she bounded off and picked up the bib, but our expressions soon changed as she ran straight past us into the house. I remember my husband looking at me with a blank look: ‘What does the book say we do now?’ he said. At that point I think we all collapsed to the floor with laughter. We made an awful lot of mistakes with Kelpie but we had great fun too. Whenever I feel too full of myself or over-confident about the control I am able to achieve over dogs today, I think back to that moment.

Kelpie was very much my husband’s dog, however. I was so pleased with her and the way she had fitted in so well to our life that soon afterwards I decided to get a dog of my own. I had fallen hopelessly for the spaniel and bought a nine-week-old puppy, a bitch from the show strain of the springer spaniel. I called her Lady after the imaginary dog I’d had as a child.

My interest lay less in hunting than in breeding and showing dogs. So it was that Lady became my introduction to that fascinating world. By the middle of the 1970s, I was travelling with her to shows all over the country. She was a lovely dog and was popular with judges wherever we went. By 1976, Lady had qualified for the most prestigious dog show of all, Cruft’s, in London. The day we travelled down to the famous arena at Olympia was a moment of great pride for me.

I found the world of dog shows rewarding and hugely enjoyable. It was, apart from everything else, a great social network, a way of meeting like-minded people. Two of the closest friends I made were Bert and Gwen Green, a well-known couple in the dog world, whose line of dogs, under the Springfayre affix, were hugely popular. Bert and Gwen knew of my interest in moving on to breeding dogs. It was they who gave me Donna, Lady’s three-year-old grandmother. Donna had all the makings of a good, foundation bitch and helped me start my own breeding line. I had soon bred my first ever litter from her, and kept one of the seven dogs for myself, calling him Chrissy.

Chrissy was a show dog that became a very successful working gun dog. He won a puppy class at the age of eight months and qualified for Cruft’s too. The highlight of my time with him came in October 1977 when I took him to the Show Spaniels Field Day, a prestigious event for gundogs that have qualified for Cruft’s. The competition judged the dogs on their working ability only. I was, as the footballing expression goes, over the moon when Chrissy won the prize for Best English Springer On The Day. I vividly remember the moment the judge handed me the winner’s rosette. ‘Welcome to the elite,’ he told me. After that I truly felt I had arrived in the dog world.

Encouraged by this success, I went on to improve my line through two well-bred bitches and I think I gained a pretty respectable reputation. Throughout this time I was also adding to the family’s collection of dogs. Tragically, Donna died of a tumour in 1979, aged only eight, but in the aftermath I also bought a cocker spaniel for my daughter, named Susie, and bred from her daughter Sandy.

It was, however, Khan, one of the English springer spaniels I had bred, that brought me my greatest success, winning many classes and Best of Breed. He was a wonderful dog with beautiful features, in particular the sort of warm but masculine face that judges were always looking for. In 1983 he qualified for Cruft’s, emulating the feat of six of my previous dogs. To my delight he won his class. Again the memory of receiving the winner’s card fills me with pride.

As I have explained, I met some wonderful, warmhearted people who taught me a great deal. There was no wiser soul than Bert Green. I remember he used to say to me: ‘I doubt you do the breed any good, but don’t do it any harm.’ By that he meant we had a responsibility to be faithful to the principles of the dog breeding fraternity.

To me, breeding dogs came with its own set of responsibilities, particularly as the majority of the small number of dogs I bred were being carefully placed into family homes. My job was to ensure these dogs had temperaments that made them a pleasure to own. So inevitably I had spent a lot of time working on training the dogs, working on what everyone generally referred to as ‘obedience classes’.

It was here that the unease I had long felt about our attitude to dogs really broke through to the surface. The memory of Purdey was a constant cloud at the back of my mind. I was forever asking myself what I had done wrong, wondering whether I had somehow given her the wrong kind of training?

My growing unease was fuelled further by the mistrust I felt about the traditional enforcement methods of training. There was nothing radical or revolutionary about my training techniques then. Far from it, I was as conservative as everyone else in most ways. I would go through the routine of teaching a dog to sit and stay by pushing its bottom on the ground, to come to heel with a jerk on a choke chain, and to follow. And I would instil these disciplines through the time-honoured methods.

Yet as I spent more and more time training, I became aware of a nagging doubt about what I was doing. It was as if a voice at the back of my mind was constantly saying: you are making the dog do this, the dog does not want to do this.

In truth, I had always hated the word ‘obedience’. It carried the same connotation as ‘breaking in’ within the horse world. It simply underlined the reality of the situation, that what I was using was a kind of enforcement, a means of going against the will of the animal. It is, to my mind, like the word ‘obey’ within marriage vows. Why not use words like ‘work alongside’, ‘pull together’, ‘co-operate’? ‘Obey’ is just too emotive for me. But what could I do about it? There were no books about how to do it any other way. And who was I to argue? There are no two ways about it, you have to have your dog under control, you can’t have it just running amok. It is our responsibility as it is with our children to make them socially responsible. I had no real alternative.

Nevertheless, it was at this time that I began trying to make the training process more humane if I possibly could. With this in mind I began introducing a few subtle changes in my technique. The first involved nothing more complex than a simple change of language. As I explained, I was using the traditional methods of enforcement, including the so-called choke chain. As far as I was concerned the name was a misnomer. Used correctly the chain should never choke a dog, it should merely check it. There was no use in using it to jerk dogs back as far as I was concerned. So I tried to soften the terminology so as to soften the attitude of the humans.

In my training, I taught people to use the chain to make a light, clicking noise that the dog would recognise as an anticipatory signal before it moved forward. When it heard the chain, it reacted so as to avoid being choked. So to me and my pupils, they were check chains rather than choke chains. It was a minor change but the difference in emphasis was fundamental.

I tried to do the same in heel work. I did not approve of the method most people used which involved taking the lead and pulling the dog down. I thought that was wrong. My original way of getting it to lie down was to make the dog sit, then tip the dog gently to one side by taking away its inside leg. Wherever I could, I was always looking for a softer way within the traditional parameters of the work.

As I did so, I was very successful at teaching people how to work with their dogs. Yet the changes I was achieving in softening the approach were so small. The central philosophy remained the same. I was making the dog do it. I always felt I was imposing my will on the dog rather than making it do what I wanted by choice. And I sensed that the dog did not know why it was doing it. The ideas that changed all this began to form themselves at the end of the 1980s.

By that time, my life had changed considerably. I had been divorced and my children were growing up and on the road to university. I myself had studied psychology and behaviourism as part of a degree in literature and social sciences at Humberside University. I had to give up showing dogs because of the divorce. Just as people were beginning to respect me and I was beginning to knock on the door, it was all kicked away: it was very frustrating. I reluctantly had to let some of my dogs go.

Meanwhile, I maintained a pack of six dogs. By the time we moved to a new home in North Lincolnshire in 1984, there was little time for life in the competitive dog world. I was working too hard to support my kids to be able to afford to compete or to breed full time. Apart from my own dogs, my contact with that world was confined to working at the local Jay Gee Animal Sanctuary and writing a pet page for a local newspaper.

My passion for dogs remained as great as ever. The only difference now was that it had to be channelled in a different direction. My interest in psychology and behaviourism had carried on from university. Behaviourism in particular had really become part of the mainstream by now. I had read Pavlov and Freud, B.F. Skinner and all the acknowledged experts in the field and, to be honest, I found a lot that I could agree with. The idea, for instance, that when a dog is jumping up, it is aiming to establish a hierarchy, and is jumping so as to put you in your place. Or the idea that a dog will barge its way in front of you as you walk to a door because it is checking the coast is clear, protecting the den, and believes it is the leader.

I also understood and accepted the idea of what was referred to as ‘separation anxiety’. The behaviourists’ view was that a dog will chew up the furniture or destroy the home because it is separated from its owner and that separation is stressful for the dog. All these things made total sense and offered me a lot. But to me there was something missing. What I kept asking was: why? Where was the dog getting this information from? At the time I wondered whether I was crazy for even asking myself this, but why is a dog so dependent on its owner that it is stressful to be separated? I didn’t know it then, but I was looking at the situation the wrong way around.

It is not an understatement to say that my attitude to dogs – and my life – changed one afternoon in 1990. By this time, I was also working with horses. The previous year, a friend of mine, Wendy Broughton, whose former racehorse, China, I had been riding for some time, had asked me if I was interested in going to see an American cowboy called Monty Roberts. He had been brought over by the Queen to demonstrate his pioneering techniques with horses. Wendy had watched him give a demonstration in which he had brought a previously unsaddled horse to carry saddle, bridle and rider within thirty minutes. It was, on the surface at least, highly impressive but she remained sceptical. ‘He must have worked with the horse before,’ she thought. She was convinced it had been a fluke.

In 1990, however, Wendy had been given the chance to put her mind at rest. She had answered an advert Monty Roberts had placed in Horse & Hound magazine. He was organizing another public demonstration and was asking for two-year-old horses that had never been saddled or ridden before. He had accepted Wendy’s offer to apply his method to her chestnut thoroughbred mare, Ginger Rogers. In truth, Wendy saw it as a challenge rather than an offer. Ginger Rogers was an amazingly headstrong horse. Privately we were convinced Monty Roberts was about to meet his match.

As I travelled to the Wood Green animal sanctuary near St Ives, Cambridgeshire, on a sunny, summer’s afternoon, I tried to keep an open mind, not least because I have immense respect for the Queen’s knowledge of animals, her horses and dogs in particular. I thought if she was giving credence to this fellow then he had to be worth watching.

I suppose when you hear the word ‘cowboy’, you immediately conjure up images of John Wayne, larger-than-life characters in Stetsons and leather chaps, spitting and cursing their way through life. The figure that emerged before the small audience that day could not have been further removed from that cliché. Dressed in a jockey’s flat cap, wearing a neat, navy shirt and beige slacks, he looked more like a country gentleman. And there was nothing brash or loud about him. In fact he was very quiet and self-effacing. But there was undoubtedly something charismatic and unusual about him. Just how unusual, I would soon find out.

There were about fifty of us sitting around the round pen he had set up in the equestrian area. Monty began by making some opening remarks about his method and what he was about to show. The early portents were not good, however. Unknown to Monty, Ginger Rogers was behind him. As he spoke, she started nodding her head slowly, almost sarcastically pretending to agree with him. Everyone burst out laughing.

Of course when Monty turned around, Ginger stopped. The minute he swivelled round to face the audience again she started again. Wendy and I looked at each other knowingly. We were both thinking the same thing I’m sure: he’s taken on too much here. As Monty gathered up a sash and began going through the opening of his routine, we sat back waiting for the fireworks to begin.

Precisely twenty-three-and-a-half minutes later we were ready to eat our words. That was how long it took Monty not just to calm Ginger down but also to have a rider controlling with ease a horse that to our certain knowledge had never been saddled or ridden in its life. Wendy and I sat there in stunned silence. Anyone who saw us that day would have seen disbelief written all over our faces. We remained in a state of shock for a long time afterwards. We talked about it for days and days. Wendy, who had spoken to Monty after his miraculous display, even went on to build a replica of his trademark round pen and started implementing his advice.

For me too it was as if a light had been switched on. There were so many things that struck a chord. Monty’s technique, as the whole world now knows, is to connect – to ‘join up’ in his phrase – with the horse. His time in the round pen is spent establishing a rapport with the horse, in effect communicating in its own language. His method is based on a lifetime working with and most importantly observing the animal in its natural environment. Most impressive of all his method has no place for pain or fear. His view was that if you did not get the animal on your side then anything you did was an act of violation, you were imposing your will on an unwilling being. And the fact that he was succeeding in doing things differently was clear from the way he won the trust of the horse. He placed great store, for instance, on the fact that he could touch the horse on its most vulnerable area, its flanks. That day, as I watched him working in unison with the animal, looking at and listening to what the animal was signalling to him, I thought ‘he’s cracked it’. He had connected with the horse to such an extent that it let him do whatever he liked. And there was no enforcement, no violence, no pressure: the horse was doing it of its own free will. I thought how the heck can I do this with dogs? I was convinced it must be possible given that dogs are fellow hunter-gatherers with whom we have a much greater connection historically. The big question was: HOW?