Many dogs do not like being in the car. 

Whether that is because it has been paired with negative emotional experiences like feeling trapped or confined, whether it has been paired with negative physical experiences like feeling sick or being forced into a car, or whether it has been paired up with an event the dog finds unpleasant like going to a vet or groomer, there are many reasons a dog may quickly learn that cars are unpleasant. Some dogs, on the flip side, are hugely over-aroused on car journeys and need to find a little calm.

Dogs need to have learned from a young age how to find cars pleasurable and have been gradually habituated to long journeys. Sadly for many puppies, their first experience of a journey is traumatic, as they leave their canine family, embark on their first long drive and may experience car sickness. This can set up a pattern for the rest of their life if you don’t address it quickly.  On the other hand, dogs who arrive with us as an adult may already have learned that car journeys are unpleasant or exciting and we may find ourselves needing to remedy this.

If your dog experiences car sickness, please also consult your veterinarian. You will need both medication and to have followed a programme to help your dog overcome their anxiety. If your dog has high levels of generalised anxiety, you may also need to work with a veterinarian and/or behaviourist. Be mindful that some issues like stomach problems, arthritis, joint dysplasia or inner ear problems can also make journeys very unpleasant for your dog. A sound bill of health might not be necessary or even possible, but it’s worthwhile considering how a dog’s physical health may impact on their experience of journeys.

There are five essential steps to changing your dog’s behaviour around cars.

The first is recognising canine body language that is indicative of stress. Remember, aggression, freezing and fear are not the only ways we respond to stress (the fight, flight or freeze responses) and dogs may also react by “fooling around”, seeming more giddy, more exuberant or more silly than normal.

Understanding lip licks, head turns and posture will help, alongside other things such as their ear position and tail position.

For instance, here is one dog showing she’s nervous about a stranger with a camera:

Can you see the bow, the lip lick, the hard eyes? There are all low-level signs that this dog feels fearful around me. She won’t take her eyes off me.

Here you can see that tiny little tongue, the paw lift and a quite still position as she tries to work me out. Still those eyes are on me!

Here we’ve got “joke face” – what looks like a smile, but is an appeasement gesture, the physical backing away as she has moved back into the kennel, the slight head turn and the long, slow blinks.

Looks kind of friendly, but she’s panting and it’s cold, she still has those hard eyes and her ears pricked as she tries to suss me out.

And here, the spread body posture, as she moves out of her literal, physical comfort zone to get a treat, but a little worried brow, a bit of white from her eye, her back legs ready to retreat, her posture low as she comes forward but ready to flee if necessary.

These (and more!) are all signs of ambivalent feelings, fearfulness and appeasement as she tries to make sense of me. You’ll notice some of these around your dog and cars, for sure. They’re tell-tale signs that a dog feels uncomfortable when taken in context, and can tell you that you are pushing your dog a little too far.

Once you’ve understood some of the common body language dogs exhibit to show low levels of ambivalence, anxiety or fear, you should be ready then to check them out with your own dog. What you will need is a partner (or a camera on a stand) to video you and your dog as you approach your car on lead with the door open where you usually put your dog. That might be the rear doors or the back hatch. You don’t need to get in. In fact, you won’t need to get in. If you’re safe, by the way, and your dog is behind closed gates, you can always do this off-lead. Doing so will enable you much more clearly to see how your dog feels about getting in the car. You’ll see exactly where they freeze, exactly where they feel nervous.

The best way to do this would be to go through your usual routine that you’d go through before getting in the car. The open door says very clearly that it is your intention to get in.

The video will enable you to see the distances you’ll be best to work at. This should be long before your dog freezes or starts showing changes in the body language. You can also play it in slow motion and pull stills from it to see all those tiny behaviours you can look for, such as turning their head away or licking lips, or yawning.

What you then have is your own dog’s behaviour profile.

When you can see what your dog is doing and at what distance, you are then ready to start the third step: goal-setting. As with all behaviours, this didn’t start in a second and it won’t be over with a quick fix. So start with a 3 or 6 month goal. Make sure it is realistic. Turning your dog into a dream in the car won’t happen overnight, and neither should you expect your dog to be able to go for a 2 hour car drive if they can’t currently even get in the car.

A realistic 6 month goal for a dog like that might be to go for a 10-minute drive without frequent stress signals.

What you then do is plan back. What does that look like at 5 months? At 4 months? At 3? At 1? At 2 weeks? At 1?

Make yourself a back-planned list of weekly goals. At five months, I might want them to go for a 2 minute drive (remember that it gets easier to do longer durations as you work towards the end of the plan. At four months, I might want them to manage a 20-second drive. At three months, I might expect them to show no stress signals when the engine is turned on and the car rolls 5m forwards. At two months, I might want to see no stress signals between them getting in the car and me getting in. At one month, I might want to see few stress signals and them choosing to get in the car themselves. At a week, I might want to see few stress signals around a car with an open door from 20m away.

That may sound ridiculously slow, but it depends on your dog. Other dogs might do this in 3 months, working up to a journey of an hour by 6 months.

Break down the component parts as well:
Going near the car on their own
Getting in the car on their own
Getting out of the car on their own
Sitting in the car whilst you get in the driver’s seat.
Sitting alone in the car
Settling as you clip them in.
Settling as you close the door.
Settling whilst you turn the ignition.
Settled as the car idles.
Settled as the car rolls in 1st gear.
Settled as you change gears.
Settled on straight roads.
Settled on turns.
Settled on bendy roads.
Settled at high speeds.
Settled on bendy, hilly roads.
Settle over bumpy terrain.

Those are just some examples. Most of the time, people know the idea of gradual exposure in small doses, they just have never thought small enough or gradual enough. When you make small, graded, incremental changes at your dog’s pace, you’ll see success. The only thing I ever seem to do with clients is show them how to go more slowly and simply. And when they commit to doing so, they are always successful. The joys of a 100% successful training programme!

In the meantime, you’ll need to suspend all car journeys, I’m afraid. Exposure therapies fail if you suddenly are forced to deal with your fears. For instance, I hate heights as I have vertigo. Gradually getting used to looking out of differently-sized windows over different floors is wonderful, working up to plate-glass walls at the 60th floor, or glass floors etc. What is not fine is if I’m still working around looking out of a small window on the third floor and then you zoom me up to the top of the Burj al Arab. It will destroy my trust in you and send me straight back to the beginning.

The tough thing is that sometimes this is inevitable. Like you’d been working up to a 25-minute drive to the vet’s for the anniversary of your dog’s vaccinations in 6 months’ time, and suddenly your dog rips a dewclaw and needs to go now. If you’re still working at getting in and out of the car, you’ll need to take that on the chin. The good thing is that it rarely takes as long to re-cover the steps that you’ve made as long as you go back to basics again.

But if you interrupt every single gradual stage with a 90-minute car journey through busy, winding lanes, then you’ll not make any progress.

Once you have your weekly goal, break it down backwards into daily tasks. If Week 1’s goal is to feel comfortable 5m from a car with open doors, then Day 6 will be to feel comfortable 10m from a car with open doors. Day 5, 20m away. Day 4 20m away with closed doors. Day 3 20m away with closed doors for 1 minute. Day 2 20m away with closed doors for 30 seconds. Day 1 20m away with closed doors for 15 seconds.

You can then use things your dog finds reinforcing to meet those distance and duration goals. For instance, I could set out our massage rugs and do a brief bit of massage. I could use a game and get gradually closer to the car for longer periods. For me, it’s a no-brainer… it’s food! So I’ll be using scatter feeding, snuffle mats, licki-mats, kongs and so on.

I’ll also be starting to teach behaviours to help dogs choose to get in the car themselves. That may be walking on a ramp. It may be hopping up into my arms so I can lift them if they’re small. It may be learning to hop up onto a bench couch. What I absolutely do not want to do is force, grab, lift or coerce the dog. Now, with an old or invalid big dog, I may need to get them used to me grabbing their front end or back end to hoist them. I have to do this with Flika from time to time. That means I’ll need to get dogs like this used to being helped up and into things. Ideally, though, your aim is that your dog should always get in and out unaided. A dog that makes a choice is a dog who is consenting.

The fifth thing you’ll need to consider is your dog’s general levels of anxiety. If your dog is anxious in many aspect of life, you’ll need to work on bringing those levels down beforehand. That might be with trust-building work, with relationship work, with work on concepts like optimism and confidence, or with changes in diet and handling. Supplements may also help.

For those of you who want further guidance, I’ve written this more detailed mini-book to help you understand the small step-by-step approaches to success, explaining in more detail about how to plan a gradual and systematic programme to help your dog cope better in the car.

Next week: Knowing better and doing better

I’d like you to meet Amigo, if you’ve never met him before.

I adopted him in 2014, and he was part of my life for a very wonderful 4 years. He came in through the pound, I fell in love immediately (he was truly my heart dog) and I adopted him as soon as I could.

In 2017, he had a stroke and the remaining 14 months or so were spent in a fog of canine cognitive dysfunction. He never regained his hearing, and he was rarely truly comfortable after this, particularly at night.

I can’t tell you what a gentle soul he was. He was never a dog’s dog, but the couple of scraps he had never involved teeth.

The last thing I expected was for Amigo, my lovely, gentle, sweet dog, to bite me in the middle of the night.

He was quite often a midnight wanderer and it would disturb the others. They’d grrr-grrrr and Amigo blithely walked all over them, got in their beds when the resident dog was already in it. Once, he was getting himself ready to go and invade Heston’s very quiet spot and I could tell it would be a fight if I didn’t intervene.

But you can’t call a deaf dog who’s disoriented anyway.

So I grabbed his collar.

And he bit my hand.

Not hard, but enough to say, “don’t grab me!”

It was the only time he bit me.

In the past, we’d have perhaps had a more extreme reaction. Indeed, many of my clients whose dogs have bitten think that the dog can’t be trusted, can’t be with children, should be muzzled… and sometimes they’re right. For some, it’s a red line and no matter how hard the contact, the dog is euthanised. For many of my clients, it can often be the one behaviour that drives them to call me.

When I do an diagnostic interview for post-bite behaviour consultations – which makes up about 70% of my work – I want to know the context, the circumstances, the triggers, the consequences and the underlying emotions. Mills and Westgarth (2017) say similar things in Dog Bites: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Each bite will be different, and often driven by different emotions. Other trainers might like to put a label on the bite as this kind of aggression or that kind of aggression, but I’m not such a fan of doing so.

In one famous study, veterinary behaviourist Dr Ilana Reisner found 27 labels in use for aggression, some of which were used to label dogs. Many were based on late 1960s work on aggression in humans. Many behaviourists have tried to categorise aggression with constructs like dominance, possessive aggression, predatory aggression and fear aggression. These terms are quite often meaningless. One term that did not come up in Dr Reisner’s review, though, and yet is frequently used by French veterinarians is irritation. In French, irritation is not emotional irritation like I might have with my brother if he keeps poking me, but physical irritation, like sunburn or itches or pain. I know some people might call this defensive aggression but for me, that’s really not the same.

Now I said before all bites are different, and that’s the principal I work off. But quite a few happen in very similar circumstances. For that reason, I do actually like this term as it describes a number of bites dogs I’ve worked with have presented with. Including Amigo. Often these bites may seem to come “out of the blue” since it may happen really fast but they’re ALWAYS preceded by a grabby human hand in close proximity. By and large, many of the bites vets sustain would probably come into this category. Pound workers are another group of people who may find themselves bitten in such circumstances, especially if the animal is already afraid or trapped. Also dog groomers. Nobody said Fido was willing to have a buzzcut. The purpose of the bite is a cease-and-desist warning to the hand.

But how do we react to such bites? Many of my clients ask me what they should do next time.

What did I do when my Meegie bit me? Was it the end of our relationship? Had he destroyed all my trust in him? What would I do next time?

I told myself there would be no next time.

That’s not to say it was his final warning and it was curtains for Meegie if he bit me again.

It’s to say that I told myself not to grab an old, deaf dog by the collar when it is dark and he is disoriented. I mean I know I’m only human and I was sleep deprived and I trusted Amigo as he’d never bitten me before. But even so.

I said he would never again be put into the position where he would need to bite me. I said sorry and said I’d do better.

I set up x-pens the next day and that was the end of the wandering into other dogs’ beds that had caused me to grab his collar. Sure, the other dogs had more limited roaming too – but for Effel, he stayed always in the same bed. Tilly always slept on my bed. So it really was easy to put pens around Effel’s bed, with open gates, and to block off the corner where Heston sometimes chose to sleep that he couldn’t get out of should Amigo wander into him.

Amigo still wandered, but it never again bothered my other dogs, and he was safe. No collar grabs needed.

I also realised he might not trust me very much any more, so we went back to basics. I did lots of practice grabbing his collar and giving him treats. We played games and had lots of massage sessions.

Now I’m not a dog bite apologist, going around blaming people for dogs biting. I don’t think dogs’ teeth should touch flesh full stop. But it happens. Neither am I screaming about “forcing” dogs to have haircuts and how pinning them down to look at a dewclaw is an abuse of their rights. Needs must, from time to time. I don’t advocate a totally hands-off life, as it’s not possible. Nor do I feel like we should tread on eggshells around our own dogs.

But I do know that I’m the thinking part of the human-canine partnership, and it’s up to me to sort it out, rather than it being up to the dog to tolerate things they find deeply unpleasant.

Yet it still surprises me that we know that so many of those bites are preceded by our grabby, chimpy, monkey hands, and we continue to do it anyway.

As I said, my motto is that the dog will never again be placed in a situation where they needed to use teeth. That’s what I don’t get about some people who are repeatedly bitten in the exact same situation over a number of occasions.

“My God! My dog bit me again!”

“What were you doing?”

“Well, exactly the same thing I was doing last time!”

Insanity: repeating the same behaviour and expecting different results. Newsflash, people. YOU are the one with the super-size neocortex and rational decision-making skills. Not your dog. Don’t expect them to change if you won’t.

For me, the first thing to check out any health issues. I appreciate this will be with another grabby monkey in a turquoise smock. You may need to do some work before you get there, or make really, really sure your vet is not a grabby monkey. None of my vets are, which is why I like them.

Underlying pain is such a huge factor in a sudden dislike of manipulation. I saw one dog a few weeks ago who didn’t like having his neck touched… vet checks are still ongoing, and it may be nothing, but the vet also felt it necessary to shuffle the dog up the line to a veterinary hospital. On Wednesday, one of our shelter dogs was adopted and knowing her history, lifting a 40kg dog into the back of an SUV with a high tailgate was not a risk I was willing to take given her hip dysplasia and arthritis, coupled with a history of not liking being manipulated. And our award for Most Grumbly Dog in the Vets 2019 at the shelter surely should go to ten-year-old Elzo the shih tzu who needs eye-drops twice daily and who needed three people to wrestle him into a headlock to do it. Itchy eyes, bad skin, wobbly legs… recipe for animals who decide they don’t like being touched thank you very much.

But shock can also contribute to this too. Like Amigo. And my non-grabby vet laughed so hard the other week when doing a blood draw from Heston as I was right near his face and as she was about to stick him with a great big syringe, I said “Don’t bite my face!”

She laughed, but she wasn’t at the bitey end of a big, scared dog about to get stuck with a fat syringe.

These issues can arise with grooming too. We had one beautiful Bernese mountain dog with us for months who’d been brought in with chronic ear infections and a dire need for grooming. He said no. Hence the untreated ear infection and the lack of grooming… making everything so much worse.

But it doesn’t have to be like this.

I’m not a fan of wild animals in facilities, but I know there are such things, so if there are, I’d prefer to do things kindly.

What they don’t tell you is that many animals in experimentation are trained to present body parts for blood draws, for cables to be attached or restraints to be applied. Madness. If we take one thing from this, it’s that even in the world of animal testing, they’re not wrestling dogs to the floor and using four people to hold the animal down.

Zoos also picked up on this trend:

Now I’m not a fan of zoos for many reasons but this did make me think how much easier it would have been to have had my cat do this rather than having to trick him, ball him up in a towel and hope none of my scratches went septic. Can you even do that with a tiger?

And when you can’t, that’s when sedatives come in. But that isn’t a good thing and it can really interfere with your health checks, particularly if the animal has heart problems.

We spend so much time thinking it’s our right as animal guardians to wrestle our “stubborn” companions onto vet tables or at the groomers, or drug them, that I think we get a little trapped in that. It doesn’t cross our tiny minds to teach our dogs the same stuff that animals are taught in zoos or labs. I mean they’re our dogs, right?

But it doesn’t take much to build up a ‘yeah, I’m not such a fan, Sharon, so I’m sitting this one out!’ from your “stubborn” dog when grooming, handling or putting on harnesses even. Certainly when attaching leads or putting on collars, securing in vehicles or lifting dogs up and down. Then we think there’s something wrong with our “aggressive” dog. Trouble is, the bite usually works to stop the irritating thing (you) and that’s NOT a good thing for a dog to learn…. because, as we know, DOGS DO WHAT WORKS. So says Jean Donaldson. And she’s right. Dogs who’ve bitten when a hand approached are likely to do the same again if it stopped the hand doing stuff to them. These bites, by and large, are often bites to the hand. But I’ve seen bites to the face for people who were crowding their dogs.

Dogs are quick to work out what hurts and to find ways to stop it. I caught a moment of this the other week. Lidy, my reprobate malinois, got her lip caught by a dog a few months back. It bled profusely and the skin is still a bit delicate. I was doing a video for a client about how to get her to approach the brush. Things were great through seven trials. Then she just stopped. Stopped looking at the brush, wouldn’t orient towards it.

I was a bit stumped. I let her finish the remnants of the treats thinking we needed to refresh our training, and only then did I see she’d caught her lip on the brush and it was bleeding a little.

She is such an obedient and operant girl – she loves learning. She does practically everything I asked, and she played dumb.

“Bumped brush, brush hurt, won’t look at brush…”

Can you see why a more sensitive dog might quickly build up a link between you and the tools you like to use to hurt them with?

This is worsened by one of the most controversial behaviours in dog training (and most abusive – let’s start from there) that has been sadly popularised by barbaric trainers and by TV programmes. The Alpha Roll. You know, force your dog to submit and pin him to the floor.

This “technique” was dreamed up by the Monks of New Skete (actual monks, not some name for a family of expert dog trainers, just in case you thought they might know about dogs rather than gods) who popularised it, passed it on to Cesar Millan …. and then …. retracted their guidance. They said it was too complex for most people to do and it could backfire. Bless ’em. The general population are just too crap at wrestling dogs into submission. Sure it could backfire. This Alpha Rolling or forced submission is behind so many irritation bites I can’t even begin to tell you.

Forcing dogs into grooming, handling or veterinary care causes such a breakdown of trust that it can be impossible to overcome completely. And yes, you might be able to force the dog once. But woe betide you the next time. It kind of made me laugh to see on one dog’s vet notes that the first time the dog was presented, the vet thought there was a suspicion of hip dysplasia and was able to manipulate the dog. Strangely, yes, strangely, and he’d written that word on the notes, the second time the dog went back, she was too aggressive to be manipulated. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice? Don’t think so.

Some dogs will submit and will seem to tolerate it. I say “seem” and that’s important.

In the late 60s and early 70s, a psychology professor named Martin Seligman did some studies on a concept called learned helplessness. It informed us why people sometimes don’t act to change things when they can, or why they tolerate the intolerable. Dogs are the same. If you’re scoffing about me making anthropomorphic comparisons, you need to know he figured out human motivations using dogs. So no anthropomorphism at all.

First, he “restrained” dogs in what’s known as a Pavlovian hammock. Basically an inescapable mechanism for keeping dogs still.

You may be disgusted and thinking ‘how inhumane!’ but if you use your hands any time to restrain your dog, no matter the circumstances, it’s not much different if you ask me. All shades of grey.

So these dogs he shocked. Because they were restrained, they couldn’t escape it.

He also used some other dogs in a different system: a shuttlebox. This has an electrified floor on one side, and an escape hatch to a no-electrified bit. They were shocked, but they learn to hop over the other side.

What he learned was dogs who’d been subject to shocks they couldn’t escape from in the past would just accept shocks and not seek to escape even if they could.

They basically just shut down completely.

Now, yes, this tells us a lot about resilience and depression and learned helplessness and why battered spouses stay in the relationship and why depressed people don’t seem to help themselves.

But it also tells us that dogs who’ve been restrained and punished may just shut down and give up.

So your pinning a dog may seem to work.

However, I’m not comfortable with that; I mean, I know in emergencies, you do what you need to – and I know I’ve had to do that sometimes, knowing what the repercussions are, just because it was medically necessary. But I’m still not comfortable with it.

I also know that such behaviours, in almost half the times it’s used, come out fighting (and biting).

It may also be that your dog will tolerate it, tolerate it, tolerate it, and then won’t.

So I don’t choose to restrain my dogs because a) if they tolerate it, it may be that they’ve just shut down, and ethically, I can’t disapprove of Seligman shocking dogs in hammocks or slings if I’m hypocritically pinning my dog to do things to them that they find offensive, and b) because one day, my dog might decide to become one of the very, very large number of dogs who become more aggressive when restrained.

Does that mean I’m just some sensitive soul who doesn’t touch my dogs or that I tread on eggshells around them?

Not at all. Just like the guy with the tiger, I know I’ll need to do some stuff to my dog that if my dog had their say, they’d say a loud “no thank you!”. You don’t have to be some kind of sensitive soul who goes through life never handling your dog. That way madness and even neglect lie. But when dogs feel they have a choice, a marvellous thing happens.

First, you don’t put your back out yoinking your dog around.

Second, your dog (because they’re dogs and dogs are great) will perform many amazing things. After all, if they can teach a tiger, you can teach your dog. My whole epiphany about animal care came from watching a walrus opening its mouth on cue. I was quite ashamed that I had to wrestle my dogs to look in their mouth.

Here’s the crucial bit…

When a dog has choice and consents willingly (be very clear about this… it is not coercion or force!) then you find they’re more relaxed, it’s less stressful and you can stop being afraid your dog will bite you.

You ask and they consent.

It really is a request, too.

The requests we make of our dogs also get easier with cold trials and repetition and practice. The more they do it, the more they say, “fine!”

It requires a change in mindset though. I was never a very grabby dog person anyway. Now I rarely grab them (if ever?) but you know, when it does, say for instance, an escaped dog at the shelter, then I know I have work to do to both practise it for next time and to smooth out the ugly fallout from having grabbed them in the first place. You know, most of the time, dogs put up with it. This morning, we had an escapee, and one of our staff had to corner him and then picked him up. But just because we may need to do it and dogs tolerate it doesn’t mean they always will. Also, what we do in emergencies is one thing; what we can plan for is another entirely.

Heston and Lidy both know “open!” to open their mouths without handling. Heston knows “show me your wiener!” which seemed like an impossibly cute trick to teach a 6 week old dog, but turned out to be a stroke of genius when the vet wanted to ogle his undercarriage. By the end of her life, Tilly rattled she had that many pills and drops, but she presented her eyes and ears willingly right up until the end. That was a long way to come for a girl who bit a vet, aged 4. Likewise Elzo, the grumpy shih tzu, who grumbles but comes to get his eyes done by his foster dad and then trots off with a treat. No fingers bitten! Heston knows “up!” to come and stand on the back of a chair for me to check for ticks. He knows “hup!” to get in the car (although he does that with any open door, cars are that much fun).

Teaching dogs “up!” and “on!” and “off!” and “down!” helps cut out so very much of the handling that ends up being classed as resource guarding or handling sensitivity.

Giving them choice about putting muzzles on or harnesses on also sets up dogs to say yes rather than no. This brings up a crucial point about Lidy, my little work-in-progress. Vets are not for her. There is no way by the time her vaccinations are due that I will have got her up to a chin rest whilst other people stick her with pointy objects. But I can make the muzzle a less unpleasant experience for her as we make steps towards cooperative care. And you know what? She may never tolerate vets. That’s fine too. She tolerates the things I need to do to her and that’s the important bit.

As you can see in the following video with the chihuahua, when the dog chooses, it stops the vicious circle of aggression and punishment. Little dogs are far more likely to have been restrained, sadly. One of the best things I ever say to my clients is to imagine how they’d do things if they had a 50kg grumbly big dog. That’s one reason I’m less of a grabber these days. When you’ve had big dogs, you do a lot of this stuff instinctively.

There are literally so many ways you can allow your dog to choose. Refusal isn’t a big deal, telling you that the dog isn’t able to handle it right now. But refusal gets less and less because, guess what, you’re not having to use force in the first place.

Whilst I’m not a fan of the Julius harness used in this video, I am certainly a fan of teaching your dog to consent to harnesses rather than have the damn thing forced on.

Two things that I find really helpful as well are teaching your dog to nose touch to hand and to rest their chin on your hand or lap. Those two behaviours can build up nicely into so many others. Using target sticks like the tiger can also help. I like my hand as I’ve always got that with me though.

The good news is that more and more vets are getting on board with fear free cooperative care, as are groomers.

If only, when I got Mr Basil back in 1997, I’d known you can clicker train cats… how different our relationship would have been. Luckily, through many people who have pioneered cooperative husbandry in companion animals, it has been the saving grace of my relationship with my dogs. That my cat was so terrified of the crate and the car need not have depended on me forcing him to comply or removing his choice.

The best thing about cooperation and choice is that your dog is much more “compliant”. The tough thing is that this doesn’t happen overnight. I do a little a day and repurposing tricks like playing dead, giving a paw or tilting their head can be really great ways to turn something terrible like tummy inspections, blood draws or ear checks into something fun.

The best things you can work on to start you off are nose-to-hand targets, chin rests and getting up and off things themselves. But there are literally so many things you can teach your dog that make vet care and grooming an absolute doddle. Start small and keep it fun, and you’ll keep building up the trust you’ll need to get your dog through the pains of old age.

Next week: how to help dogs with car journeys.

At the beginning of this series of posts, I took you through some ways that we view animals and how their roles are constructed depending on our cultural values.

As with so many cultural constructs, our views shift over time. The traditional way we saw dogs as utility animals, lab animals, clothing, flesh, entertainment or companions changes as we confer new roles on dogs. One of those new roles is the role of “rescue”.

Despite the fact that across the globe, unwanted animals from a variety of species are often construed as pests, that role is changing for stray dogs, largely driven in the West by post-industrial Anglo-Saxon views.

Although some of the stereotypes about dogs persist in relation to disease and behaviour, the very large number of dogs adopted each year shows that people’s views are changing. That so many introduce their dog as a “rescue” suggests this has some social capital. Capital that presidents and prime ministers have been keen to appropriate, if Macron and Johnson are indicators of this change. Perhaps I am cynical in thinking that presidents and prime ministers rehome dogs simply to improve their image, of course. But I don’t think it’s wrong to say that it is “fashionable” to rehome a dog. It’s also part of that culture to keep referring to the dog as a “rescue”, as Graham Norton does here:

Graham Norton isn’t the only celebrity to buy in to the “rescue” moniker. Many celebrities from Ellen DeGeneres and Jennifer Aniston to George Clooney and Kaley Cuoco have dogs they’ve acquired from a shelter. That’s certainly helping the shelter agenda.

It’s so acceptable to use the “rescue” badge, in fact, that people who buy dogs may refer to them as “rescues”, and some pet shops have rebranded themselves as “rescues”. I’m a member of a few breed-specific groups on social media and it’s not that rare at all to see people write that they “adopted” their dog at 8 weeks because the breeder or puppy farm was that awful… I make no comment on that. And I read yesterday of one English kennels rebranding themselves as a rescue centre to get around the newly-introduced “Lucy’s Law” prohibiting the sale of dogs via third parties. Clearly, being a rescue means something.

We know too that the kind of dog we acquire, and where we acquire it from says something about us to people, allowing them to make a quick decision about what type of person we are. Very possibly, some of that warmth dogs evoke is something we benefit from.

But what do our rehomed dogs say about us?

That was something I asked a number of people about through a series of semi-structured interviews that I used for my final dissertation for the International School of Canine Psychology and Behaviour.

What was clear is there are many reasons why people adopt. There are many different types of adopter. This is why it’s not as easy to see “rescue” dogs as some kind of badge of honour. Those multiple reasons for adoption also mean we can’t just see adopters as a homogenous group, say for instance like Liverpool football club fans, at least for that one symbol. In reality, where there may be high levels of similarity between people who buy Christian Louboutin shoes, or between people who go to Led Zeppelin concerts, there’s no single trait that unites adopters.

It’s not, therefore, a case of signalling our virtues, or of showing how compassionate we are. Sure, though, some people do that, and I want to write about that too. I think there’s an underlying narrative for many about creating a different way than buying from a pet shop or breeder, what Donna Haraway might call the process of “autremondialisation”, creating a new paradigm than the current economic model. But I don’t think that is true for all people who acquire or rehome a pet via a shelter.

One reason I think studies about length of stay and adoptability are so contradictory is that unlike so-called pure bred dogs, dogs we rehome are not subject to the same market forces. If we are indeed constructing a new way of thinking about dogs from the moment of acquisition, there’s every reason why our choices don’t conform to economic choices.

But it’s more complicated than that.

Take for instance the fact that small, young female dogs are likely to shoot out of the shelter… why is it that bichons, maltese, lhasa apso, yorkshire terriers and shi tzu aren’t more popular registered breeds? I mean the demand we get is ridiculous, yet they are fairly low down on France’s registered breed popularity lists.

In fact, the most popular registered breeds are all fairly big dogs. Australian shepherds, malinois, staffordshire bull terriers (the smallest of them), GSD and golden retrievers top France’s most popular list. The French bulldog, cavalier and chihuahua come in at 9th, 10th and 11th place though. Yorkshire terriers flag at 13th position, and the little shi tzu at 20th. Clearly there are different market factors at work for the pedigree market and for the market to rehome pedigree dogs. Like in many shelters, the breeds we get are popular ones to buy as puppies that have little “rehome-ability” and are socially stigmatised breeds that are then hard to adopt out into the community. But there’s no accounting for why large breeds are popular as pedigree puppies and are not at all adoptable once they get into a shelter.

One thing is true though: some people certainly rehome dogs in ways that are subject to market factors. They want a young dog, a popular pedigree breed, a female, a well-behaved dog. Research about market factors certainly explains their choices.

For me, that “market” divides into two: those who want a cheap second-hand dog of a type and don’t want to pay for it, or those who like a particular breed and want to source it ethically, if you will. The same way we might want a Michael Kors handbag and buy it from ebay. We might want the “label” without the price tag. On the other hand, we might want a Michael Kors handbag but not support the disposable fashion industry (do people dispose of Michael Kors handbags? Oh to understand THAT world!) so we might have a second-hand one for our conscience.

And shelters need to understand both of these customer bases. We definitely have plenty of “second-hand dog” buyers who are looking for a cheap dog, and we definitely have plenty of people who see rescue as an ethical way of sourcing a product. Both of these motivators are likely to respond to economic factors.

Others, and I find myself among this group, tend to go for certain types of dog, or even breeds, because it speaks to something deep inside of them. One of my interviewees described how she adopted elderly female hounds and it was clear that there were factors at work about this person’s compassion and caring for vulnerable, exploited females who’ve been used up and spat out by the system.

Another spoke of adopting a series of elderly lap dogs, which were not his type at all, and then spoke of his mother’s dementia and how lost she was in a nursing home. He certainly saw the connection between lost dogs who’d been used to a certain way of living, only to find themselves cast adrift by family at the end. Part of caring for elderly lhasa apsos was a way of doing something practical in lieu of caring, which made little difference to his mother. Displacement caring, if you will.

For me, I know why I find my heart breaking over malinois. Stigmatised as “security” dogs, they work long hours, live lonely lives, are vilified by the media, seen as temperamental and highly-strung “maligators” when in fact they are sweet, obedient dogs who may be a bit gung-ho in the name of loyalty but who end up “retired” and spat out by the system that should have valued their service, their skills and their blind loyalty. I mean I’m a spaniel girl at heart, yet something about the martyrdom of the malinois in France spoke to me. Especially those elderly ones who have given their whole life to being a utility item and then are discarded when they’re inconvenient. For some of us, I’m sure certain types or breeds of dog speak to our deep-seated need to care for ourselves, care for those we love or right a wrong that is equally true of types of people as it is for types of dog.

Other people aren’t fussed about the “label” their dog comes with.

I love these adopters. No matter what their dog looked like, they all described their dogs as gorgeous, handsome or beautiful. Some, in my opinion, were fairly homely and ordinary. One was eye-bogglingly mismatched in terms of proportions and despite having no hair to speak of on their rear end, the owner still described the dog as the most handsome dog they’d ever seen.

These adopters go into adoption with their eyes wide open, knowing they are looking for that individual connection. They see past breed and see the individual dog. For me, these tend to be the adoptions that work out, as the adopters choose a dog that suits their lifestyle. They are often charmed by their dogs and I found that interviewing this type of adopter, they were less likely to comment on behavioural difficulties or problems they’d experienced. I mean everything about their dogs was ace, in their eyes, even if they bit postal workers or waiters’ ankles.

I also found these adopters also had the highest correlation between their own personalities and the dogs they adopted. Because they didn’t come wanting a particular breed or type of dog (although they sometimes adopted breeds or types) and because they were looking for a dog that matched their life the best, those tended to be the dogs that they were highly satisfied with. They may introduce their dog as a “shelter” or “rescue” dog because they know their dog is a great ambassador for adoption, and that is just wonderful. Their need for external validation was low, but they are often keen to support shelters, and thus, for them, “rescue” is not a badge but about ambassadorship. They’re not proud of their own actions, necessarily, but they’re proud of their dog.

A large number of people are also really keen to take on complicated dogs. I love this adoption group lots too. They’re often people involved in volunteering already, but not always. They’re the kind of people who turn up at a shelter explaining they have the right environment for a dog and they have the capacity and motivation to do something about it. These are the adopters who say, “who’ve you got who’s been here a while?” or ask for your oldies, your sick dogs, your maniacs or your miscreants. I would say these are the ones where, when you dig a little deeper, you find them deeply involved in lots of altruistic actions, even having made a career out of it. They’re often in public sector work, from teaching to caring, social work to police work, armed forces or nursing.

The nicest part about talking to people like this is how matter of fact they are. Some are a little unprepared for whatever problems come up, but I never got a sense from talking to these adopters that they were doing it to be noble or to draw attention to themselves. Often, and if you are part of a shelter you’ll know this, these are the dogs who are rehomed and you barely hear from the new family again. They just get on with it. That makes it hard for us to know that things are okay, but what I found for these adopters is that their need for external validation was really low. These adopters may send you private messages because they know you had a long relationship with the dog, but you can see also how much work they’ve put in. They just get on with it.

The best thing about these adopters is that all they need from you when adopting is honesty about your dogs. Both those who choose a dog who matches their temperament (and may or may not be a “problem” dog) and those who take on more challenging companion animals, they aren’t phased by the “imperfections” of the dog.

I think all this has a vital and strong message for shelters.

You WILL have those adopters who want perfect pedigree pets, who are really just after a second-hand dog. They’ll be the ones who can’t tolerate problems and may return them straight away, just like they would with shoes that didn’t fit. And you may have dogs who’d fit their needs. Probably, the dogs you’ll have that’ll fit their needs won’t LOOK right for them, and they may go away empty handed. They’ll crack for a particular physique and return the dog when it doesn’t fit in with their life. But if you have a steady stream of young, small pedigree pups without specific needs, then good for you.

You’ll also have adopters who choose a dog who’s right for them, who may or may not be a breed or type, but who are looking for an adult dog because they want a dog who they can see fits into their lifestyle, even if that’s with a little work.

You’ll have, no doubt, those great adopters who will take on your tough-to-rehome dogs. I never fail to be astonished by (and a lot in love with) those people who fall in love with dogs that I feel are going to be impossible to rehome. These are the dogs I despair of ever finding a home for, and all the adopter wants to do is “something good”. Eyes wide open, purely for the joy of doing it.

The worst thing I think shelters can do is to try and force those tough-to-rehome dogs on people whose temperament and lifestyle doesn’t match the dog’s, or to let dogs go to a home when their temperaments don’t match, but the family have cracked for a particular physique. There is no point, from a shelter perspective, trying to make every dog marketable. That way, you end up with a series of impossible tests to weed out all but the most sociable, most well-adjusted dogs. And then what do you do with the rest?

It’s important for shelters as well to share flaws as well as virtues of their dogs, stopping thinking they’re “unadoptable”. There are lots of people happy to take on the odds and sods in life. Who relish the odds and sods. Who look forward to giving a little something back to a dog.

The hardest group of adopters for me are the ones who want to adopt as an ethical choice. That’s worse still when they want to make a badge out of the word “rescue”. One issue I have with this is that the owners never let the dog lose its “rescue” or “shelter” tag – if they lost that, then that would lose all the dog’s power as a symbol for them. For these people who may find themselves out of their depth with a truly difficult dog, the word “rescue” can become an excuse for problem behaviours that they don’t have the skill to deal with. For others who want the “rescue” label but end up simply rehoming a dog without any problems, there’s a certain sense that they have to work even harder for the social capital that they wanted their “rescue” dog to gain. That can give false impressions to people who do take on more challenging dogs.

“Oh, my rescue settled in straight away!”

Often, their dog is really just a dog in a second home. It can lead to other people then thinking it’s really easy to adopt certain dogs or certain types of dog. I know I spoke at length about adopting oldies with one participant and we laughed about the whole “oh, old dogs are so easy!” myth. I mean, they can be. Ralf was a dreamboat, as was Tobby. But bloody hell if you’re not prepared for what is essentially being a canine care home… pee, shit, vomit everywhere and dogs that seem to find a second childhood or won’t settle because they’re disoriented in a new home and they’re in pain.

It’s all very well to present adopting an oldie as noble, but it’s going to be profoundly difficult when you realise you’re a burning martyr for a cause you don’t truly understand. One of my poor clients had 7 months of sleepless nights and endless vet visits without so much as a whisper of support from the shelter for a dog who screamed most of the night. Nobility goes right out of the window when you’ve got a senior like that. If you want people to think, “Look how good they are”, you’re going to find that isn’t enough to keep you going at 4am when you’ve got a pensioner who has been pacing for 3 hours. But for many of my lovely friends who’ve taken on seniors, they’re at least prepared for a sleepless night. And you know what? A lot of them spend their nights on the sofa with the dogs, because they know how much they are prepared to adapt.

Of course, most adoptions are not like that, either. Despite the misconception that surrendered dogs or shelter dogs are badly behaved or have baggage (can we stop touting this myth please?) most dogs, in the right environment with people who understand them, settle really quickly.

Neither is it helpful for people to keep using the “rescue” label to talk about their dog when really they’ve just rehomed a very easy family companion. Sadly, because some people who use the “rescue” label are in need of external validation, they often post on social media and mythologise about their dogs’ histories, often inventing trauma narratives for them about how they lived, or making up reasons for current behaviour based on unknown assumptions of abuse or neglect.

I see this sometimes on social media – dogs whose stays are gradually exaggerated or owners who profess miracles have occurred. There are even rescue associations who make a meal out of the neglect and abuse cases, or who are using your anger to feed their ego. These adopters often befriend shelter staff on social media, tagging them in all their public posts, and from my experience, it can be very hard not to interfere with the narrative they create for the dog. For instance, for one dog, his stay went from 3 months to 2 years over a period of weeks as his new family discussed him, and I could see allegations of neglect and abuse alongside lots of mythologising about how bad the shelter must have been.

Luckily, these adopters are few and far between. Sadly, it can go another way and end up as animal collecting, hoarding or even Munchausen’s by proxy.

Even at its most mild, those who continually signal their ethics and virtues by way of public posts about their dogs can also have a detrimental effect on the adoption community too. #AdoptDontShop is one example of this behaviour at its worst. Taking on a dog – any dog, from any source – should be a responsible decision. When “rescue” is used as a label for virtue signalling, a badge of honour, it harms both the dogs and the adopters.

I mean I read this great article about why Adopt Don’t Shop is harmful, and as you can imagine, the comments on social media were eye-popping. Now, I am fully on board with stopping the exploitation of dogs. I think mixing up money with dogs has caused us all kinds of issues related to status, exploitation and oppression, but I think these are issues no different from a number of other issues in our relationships with animals, and unless we’re going to live a kind of wild and free life alongside dogs, and unless we accept that many dogs don’t really fit into an urban, motorised, restricted family life, we’re moving to a world in which we’ll be conservationists of wild dog populations rather than having dogs in homes. I’m not supporting puppy farming if I say that well-adjusted, healthy family dogs have to come from somewhere. I think Adopt Don’t Shop is so conflated by contradictory aims and behaviours that to use “rescue” as a way of guilting people into where they get a dog from is counter-productive and leads to more problems than it solves. I want the right dogs in the right homes, and with the best will in the world, if all dog owners in the west went “rescue”, there’d be a huge deficit of dogs within a year or so. And a very large number of people engaged in making round dogs fit in square peg lives. I don’t want anyone arriving at the shelter having been guilted into adoption. Come, sure, knowing that we no doubt have a dog for you somewhere, but don’t come because Sharon on Facebook made you feel that other ways of acquiring a dog were not ethical.

Ultimately, I think it’s impossible to group people who adopt together as being united by one belief system. There seem to be many reasons why people acquire shelter pets, and to dismiss it as virtue signalling or a kind of cult is to misunderstand human actions completely. But I think this is why, particularly in Northern and Western Europe, we need to step away from studies about adoptability based on economic models, because that isn’t what’s driving a lot of people to adopt. There’s still so much to be learned about our motivations to adopt a dog rather than buy one, but then there’s still a lot to be learned about why we like hanging around with other species full stop.

But for shelters thinking all dogs need to be perfect or trying to run shelters like shoe shops, I think that this runs the risk of misunderstanding the best clients of all: those who choose an individual dog who is right for them, regardless of age, gender, size or fur, and those who adopt because giving something back or putting right wrongs are part of who they are as people.

Next week I’m back to the real dog stuff and I’ll be looking at constraint, consent and choice.