The Dog Listener: Learning the Language of your Best Friend. Monty Roberts
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