consulting
A Force for Positive Change Anna Bradley discusses advancements in training and behavior over the 20 years she has been practicing, highlighting the positive changes she has seen and their contribution to an improvement in dog welfare
A
lthough I’ve been completely surrounded by animals of all vari eties all my life, I jumped wholeheartedly into the world of train ing and behavior as a career in 2001. In these intervening 20 years there have, thankfully, been seismic shifts in how we view our re lationships with animals, how we treat them, how we interact with them, how we relate to them, and our perceptions of them – over really quite a short space of time. In a lot of respects, there’s still a long way to go, but changes for the better have at least been kickstarted. I have always been surrounded, from my very early days, by what others around me have termed “awkward” animals. At the outset, these were horses who were attributed labels such as “difficult,” “willful,” “belligerent,” and even “bad” or “nasty,” sometimes with a few exple tives thrown in for good measure. But even at the early age of 10 years, I felt empathy towards these animals and knew that something must be causing them to behave in a certain way. I knew they were not worthy of such simplistic tags and that there was a reason for why they did what they did, and when they did it. I went no further in my exploration at that time but I could, at least, distinguish between me wondering why an animal would behave in a certain way and the majority of others who, it seemed, found it appropriate to ascribe a descriptive label and then punish the behavior without bothering to consider a cause. It always upset me to be told to “bully” or “get the better” of a horse, but I wasn’t one to hang the tack up and leave. I liked to spend time hanging out and making friends, long after the horse riding had fin ished. This is where my initial listening and learning took place, although I didn’t know it back then. I have always said that these early experi ences, that included a lot of tears and struggles – but also a lot of just watching at field gates, observing behavior and, above all, listening to and respecting the animals – were the reasons why I got into this pro fession. Those animals were, and still are, my greatest teachers.
Mindset I started my own training and behavior business in 2001. Coming into that from the late 1990s, there was very little talk of dog behavior in the UK media, no TV programs and, of course, social media had not yet been born. Certainly, in my geographical area, traditional aversive and punitive methods were prevalent, including water pistols, scent collars, shock devices, smacking, training discs, dominance methods (nose flick ing, alpha rolls, pinning to the floor), etc. Commonly encountered phrases were things like, “dogs must know their place,” and the owners “must be in charge” etc. Commonly, owners worried that their dogs
There is also a fine balance between riding roughshod over someone’s beliefs and the practical handling they have been instigating for decades, and handling the situation with sensitivity. You can’t simply go charging in and tell someone everything they have done in their 40 years of owning dogs is completely wrong.
© Can Stock Photo / cynoclub
Author Anna Bradley has found a shift in mindset amongst dog owners in the years she has been practicing, with a growing focus on their pets’ mental stimulation and enrichment
were getting “above their station” and required “deranking.” Outdated dominance theory was absolutely everywhere when I first started out. I sometimes felt like ripping out my hair the number of times I heard owners talk about their dogs “being dominant,” often thanks to cer tain individuals who were popularizing the theory at the time. It was very hard, therefore, to try to change people’s mindsets. It was just me at the time, new, untested and someone to be skeptical of. My views were very different. I saw dogs as respected partners in a relation ship. If there was a problem within that dynamic, for instance, if a dog had started to behave aggressively, my thoughts were not immediately to punish but to think what had happened to cause that behavioral change. Nowadays, we think of this as the norm but even just 20 years ago, based on my own experience, things were different. In fact, even now I still battle at times to help some owners understand this. Attitudes and beliefs can be hard to change (see also ‘Words Matter’ on pp. 24‐28). There is also a fine balance between riding roughshod over some one’s beliefs and the practical handling they have been instigating for decades, and handling the situation with sensitivity. You can’t simply go
BARKS from the Guild/September 2021
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