A Dog’s Best Friend: The Secrets that Make Good Dog Owners Great. Jan Fennell

about his behaviour. My mother was very house-proud and wouldn’t have him anywhere near her home. And, slowly but surely, other family members were conveniently forgetting to invite Sis and Fred to family events too.

      ‘It’s not nice for Sis. We should tell her,’ someone said.

      ‘But who? I don’t fancy it,’ someone else responded.

      It was my father who emerged as the unlikely saviour of the day. One weekend, quite out of the blue, Sis, Fred and Freddie turned up on the doorstep of our home in Fulham. I could almost feel my mother’s blood pressure rising as they made their way into her immaculate living room. Immediately, Freddie spotted our sweet jar and dived in, as was his wont. My father could see my mother panicking and wove her away to make a cup of tea. ‘I’ll keep an eye on Freddie, love,’ he said reassuringly.

      Sure enough, within a minute or two Freddie had removed a half-eaten sweet from his mouth. He was about to leave it on a chair when my father moved into action. As Freddie searched for the right spot to deposit the sticky toffee, my father took it off him and promptly deposited it in a nearby bin.

      He chose his words carefully. ‘If you take it out of your mouth, Freddie, it goes in the bin and you can’t have it back,’ he said with a smile. He didn’t want to chastise him – just get his message across.

      Predictably, it didn’t sink in immediately. At the sight of his sweet being thrown away, Freddie burst out crying and ran off to Sis. When my father explained what had happened, she looked a little embarrassed and had no option but to accept what he said. ‘Be a good boy, Freddie, and listen to your Uncle Wal,’ she said.

      It wasn’t long before Freddie was back in the sweet jar. Soon, he was once more reaching to take the sweet out of his mouth. And once more my father moved towards him with his arm outstretched. ‘Is that one going in the bin too, Freddie?’ he asked.

      ‘No,’ Freddie replied before popping the sweet back in his mouth.

      It carried on like this for the hour or so Sis and Fred remained with us, my father spending every minute watching Freddie like a hawk. Each time he went to take a sweet from his mouth my father intercepted him. By the time they were ready to leave the penny had dropped. Freddie was still eating sweets – but he was finishing each one before going on to the next.

      My father thought this was a real triumph. When we next went over to George and Ellen’s a week or so later, he took great pride in proclaiming he had ‘cured Freddie’, then telling the story in great detail.

      ‘He got the message soon enough,’ he said. ‘He saw what would happen if he did the wrong thing.’

      Everyone in the family thought it was the funniest thing ever.

      ‘Why did nobody think of doing that before?’ my Aunt Ellen giggled. ‘It’s so obvious.’

      The only one who wasn’t laughing was Uncle George, whom I remember vividly sitting nodding away to himself.

      ‘You’ve given me an idea there, Wal,’ he said after a while. ‘I might try that with Rex.’

      I don’t think anyone was quite sure what he meant. But it became clear when we next went back to their house. This time it was George who was wearing the triumphant expression.

      ‘I’ve sorted out Rex’s habit of digging up the rose bed,’ he told my father, before going on to explain what had been going on since our last visit.

      My father’s success with Sticky Fingers Freddie had lit a light bulb in George’s head. He decided that Rex needed to learn a similar lesson – and immediately set about providing it.

      George had been sitting in the garden one evening that week when he’d seen Rex digging away in the rose bed once more. Immediately he’d walked over to him, grabbed him by the collar and marched him unceremoniously into the house, where he’d deposited him in the utility room.

      ‘I left him in there to have a think about it for half an hour or so,’ he said.

      Rex had whined a little, but George had ignored it.

      When George opened the utility room door, he found Rex lying there with a sheepish look on his face. Released back into the garden again, he wandered around aimlessly for a while, shooting George the odd glance. A few minutes later, George popped back into the kitchen to talk to Ellen. When he returned he found Rex scratching away in the flower beds again. Without saying a word, he marched over, took Rex by the collar and repeated the operation, this time leaving the dog in the utility room for a few minutes more.

      ‘I didn’t raise my voice to him or get rough at all. I just did it.’

      That had been a couple of weeks ago. Today, as we sat in the garden, Rex was playing with me and the other children as usual. At one stage, the ball he was retrieving ran into the rose beds. He was about to set foot on the soil when he saw George make a move as if to get up. He moved away immediately.

      George was clearly feeling chuffed with himself. But then, late in the afternoon, he noticed Rex digging away again – only this time in the compost heap at the far end of the garden. He got up out of his chair but got no reaction. ‘What am I going to do now?’ he asked Ellen.

      ‘Well, he’s obviously learned something and I’d rather he dug there than in the rose bed,’ she said. ‘Leave him for now.’

      This seemed to please George. George admitted to my father that he didn’t enjoy meting out physical punishment. ‘I didn’t like hurting him,’ he said. As the afternoon wore on Rex came over to lie at George’s feet as usual. ‘We understand each other now, don’t we, mate,’ he said ruffling his coat.

      George and Rex went on to live a long and happy life together. They were close anyway, but afterwards they seemed even greater pals, happier than ever in each other’s company.

      People are not born good dog owners; they need to learn to adapt, to show some thought. Sometimes they also need to admit when they’ve gone wrong. To my mind, what was remarkable about Uncle George was that he admitted he was failing with Rex. Rather than taking it out on the dog, as so many owners of that generation would have done, he applied his mind and came up with another approach.

      Like my father, he was an uneducated man. He had left school at twelve, forced by the economic realities of the time to earn a living to help his family. Yet he’d been smart enough to work this situation out and come up with a successful non-violent solution.

      It was a long time before I fully understood what he’d tapped into. Eventually I came to see that he had been using positive association to get the message across to Rex. But it was only when I fully understood the true, underlying nature of that positive association that the power of that method really struck me.

      Now I understand that as pack-dwelling animals, dogs instinctively see safety in numbers, that they like to work as a member of a team. To be excluded from a pack, as Rex was, is the ultimate punishment to most dogs. In the wild, it can effectively be a death sentence. So to threaten a dog with banishment from a pack, as George had done, is a tool that can produce quite remarkable results.

      It was among the most important lessons I have ever been given. And for that, I will always be grateful to dear old Uncle George.

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