The Dog Listener: Learning the Language of your Best Friend. Monty Roberts
Monty Roberts
Dogs have played an important part in my life. My wife Pat and our family have had several over the years that were loving companions and important members of our family. It has been another wonderful creature that has dominated my career, however. I have spent my life developing – and often defending – the method I have discovered for communicating with the horse.
The appetite the dog world has for my ideas has been obvious throughout this time. Wherever I may be in the world, there are invariably four times as many dog owners and trainers as there are horse trainers at my demonstrations. Almost to a person, they have strong, positive comments to make about my method.
Given my time all over again, I would relish the challenge of adapting my ideas and taking them into the canine world. As it is though, I have more than enough to keep me occupied, developing and sharing my own discipline. Fortunately, in the last few years, I have become aware of a talented dog trainer who, inspired by my method, has undertaken the task already.
It was with a warm heart that I first learned of the work Jan Fennell has been doing in England. I have been lucky enough to meet her there and she has related much that reminds me of my own earlier experiences. Like me, Jan feels a deep sense of injustice at the way man has sometimes maltreated an animal he claims to call his friend. She also passionately believes that violence has no place in our relationship with animals. Her dream, too, is a world in which all species live in peace.
As with me, Jan has been slow to summon the courage to tell her story. I dragged my feet for years before I wrote my first book, The Man Who Listens to Horses. Jan has been just as careful in waiting to put her ideas into print. She now feels confident in her experience and is ready to share her remarkable work with a wider audience.
As she does so, I wish her and her ideas well. I am sure there will be those who will assail her. If my experience has taught me anything, it is that human nature has an almost limitless capacity for negativity. Each of us should be aware that for every grain of negative within the human community, there is a mountain of positive waiting for us among animals. We should also note that for every negative, however, there are literally hundreds thirsting for a better way to deal with man’s best friends.
I am proud to think that by sticking to my beliefs I have helped make the world a better place for the horse and, hopefully, for people too. I hope this book can achieve the same for another very special creature, the dog.
Monty Roberts, California, March 2000.
I am a great believer in learning from the mistakes we make in life. I should be, I have made more than enough of my own, in my relations with humans as well as dogs. Of all the lessons the latter have taught me, none was as painful as that I received in the winter of 1972. It seems to me fitting that I should begin with the tragedy of Purdey. For reasons that will soon become apparent, her story is inseparable from my own.
At the time I was married and was raising my two young children, my daughter, Ellie, born that February, and Tony, then two-and-a-half. We were living as a family in London but had just decided to move to the countryside, and a small village in Lincolnshire, in the heart of England. Like so many people drawn to the rural life, we were all looking forward to going on long country walks and decided we would like a canine companion to take with us. Rather than buying a new puppy, we thought we’d rescue a dog. We liked the idea of giving a home to an animal that had had a raw deal, so off we trundled to the RSPCA and saw this rather sweet, six-month-old, black and white, cross Border collie-whippet. We took her home, where we decided to call her Purdey.
She was not the first dog in my life. That had been Shane, a magnificent, tricoloured Border collie I had been given by my father when I was a 13-year-old girl growing up in Fulham, west London. I had always loved dogs and, as a little girl, had invented an imaginary one called Lady. I remember my grandmother indulging me by talking to my fictional friend with me. I think I saw dogs then, as I do now, as objects of unquestioning love, total loyalty, qualities that are hard to find in humans. Shane’s arrival in our family had only confirmed my feelings.
I trained Shane with my father, according to the technique Dad had used himself in raising his dogs as a young boy. Dad was a gentle man, but he was also determined the dog was going to do what we said. If Shane did something wrong he got a tap on the nose or a smack on his bottom. But I got a smack on the bottom too and I thought it was OK, particularly as Shane was an extremely smart creature and seemed to understand what we wanted. I can still remember the pride I used to feel at taking him on to Putney Heath and Wimbledon Common on the Number 74 bus. Shane would sit by my side without a lead, behaving impeccably all the time. He was a super dog.
If something works you go along with it, you don’t mend what isn’t broken, as they say. So when we got Purdey I decided to apply the same method as I had with Shane, teaching her the difference between right and wrong with a mixture of love, affection and, where necessary, force.
At first this method seemed to work for Purdey too. She behaved well and fitted easily into the family in London. The problems started when we eventually moved to Lincolnshire that September. Our new home could not have presented a greater contrast to noisy, over-populated London. We lived in a small, isolated village. There were no street lights, the buses ran only twice a week and it was a four-mile hike to the nearest shop. I remember when I was a toddler I had been taken to the seaside for the first time. I took one look at the sea and ran away back up the hill away from it. My expression as a three-year-old was ‘too big enough’ and, if she could have spoken, I’m sure that’s what Purdey would have said about her new home. It seemed like everything was too big enough.
Soon after we arrived, Purdey began to behave in a way that I thought then was odd and not a little bit worrying. She would run off into the countryside, disappear for hours then come back obviously having had a great time somewhere. She was also hyperactive and seemed to be wound up by the slightest thing or sound. She followed me absolutely everywhere I went, which was a nuisance when I had the two small children. I wasn’t happy about her roaming the countryside like this. We all have a responsibility to make sure our dogs don’t cause danger or a nuisance to others. But I decided that I had taken this dog on and I was going to stick with her. I owed it to her to help her settle and that’s what I hoped to do. Events, however, soon overtook me.
The first inkling I got that something was wrong was when a local farmer came to see me. He told me in no uncertain terms that if I did not keep this dog under control he was going to shoot her. I was devastated, of course, but I also saw his point because he had livestock and Purdey was obviously running around and worrying the animals. So we put her in the huge, 200-feet garden we had, slipped a rope on her collar and attached it to the washing line so she could go no farther. But she still ran off whenever she could.
Matters took a turn for the worse one cold winter’s morning just before Christmas. I had come downstairs with the children and was going through our usual start-of-the-day routine. Purdey was frantically charging around as she always did first thing in the morning. I remember Ellie was crawling around on the floor, while Tony was playing the ‘little helper’, sorting out a pile of clothes I had in the sitting room. I went into the kitchen which led directly off the sitting room to collect their drinks when I heard a loud crash. I will never forget what I saw when I looked around. The dog had jumped up at Tony and jettisoned him through one of the panes of a sliding glass door. There was broken glass everywhere. From then on it was as if everything was happening in slow motion. I remember Tony looking at me with this stunned, sort of frozen expression as the blood poured from his little face. I remember rushing to Tony, scooping him up and grabbing a clean terry-towelling nappy from a pile of clothes. My days as a St John’s Ambulance volunteer had taught me to check for shards of broken glass. When I was happy that there were none, I began pressing the nappy on to his face, applying the pressure as hard as I could to stem the flow of blood. I then cradled him in my arms and headed for Ellie who was miraculously sitting still in the middle of this sea of broken glass. I scooped her up under my spare arm and sat there on