Learning from challenges keeps a dog trainer on her toes and grateful for the experiences. photo: AdobeStock
It’s 6 a.m. and you’re already scanning the street from your second-story condo window. Is the neighbor out with his dog yet? Is that someone jogging up the hill? You’ve timed your walk for the quiet hour, you’ve got a pocket full of treats, and you’ve got a Plan B for every block in case another dog comes around the corner. If you share your life with the dog everyone calls “difficult,” you know this routine.
Maybe your dog barks and lunges at other dogs, panics when you leave the house, or just finds the world a lot scarier than other dogs seem to. It’s hard, and some days it’s really hard. Living with a dog who struggles can mean a smaller social life, difficult safety decisions, and a substantial investment of time, money, and energy. I’m not going to tell you to be grateful for that part.
But after more than 25 years of working with dogs and their people, I can tell you the dogs who have taught me the most were rarely the easy ones. Sometimes we don’t even recognize what they’ve taught us until years later, when we’re living with another dog or remembering one who’s gone. So this November, I want to talk about what these dogs give us that we can be grateful for, even when we can’t quite see it at the time.
Looking Inward
Living with a dog who struggles can teach us to get more comfortable with big emotions, including our own frustration, embarrassment, and worry. When we first start out, we don’t always understand what’s going on. We just think, my dog’s a jerk, or my dog is so ill-mannered. Then someone helps us understand the behavior, and it clicks. Our dog isn’t giving us a hard time. They’re having a hard time.
Over the course of my career, my own perspective has changed. Early on, I was much more focused on changing the behavior. Now I’m far more interested in understanding what’s happening for the dog in the first place. What is driving that behavior? What is the dog communicating? What could we change to make things easier? The more you understand, the harder it becomes to look at behavior in terms of good dogs and bad dogs.
But while you’re learning all of that, you’ve still got a dog who needs your help. You start by recognizing the signs of rising stress and arousal, learning when to intervene and when your dog needs some space to recover. You become proactive rather than waiting for everything to fall apart.
These are useful skills to apply to yourself, too. Maybe you start recognizing when you’re getting overwhelmed before you reach your own breaking point. Maybe you notice that you’ve been working too long and would be better off taking a nap, going for a walk, or just having some downtime. We spend so much time learning to recognize what our dogs need that we might get a little better at recognizing what we need, too.
Building Skills
Big changes happen through lots of small steps, something you learn pretty quickly when you’re working with a dog who struggles. Reactivity doesn’t change in a weekend. You practice at distances where your dog can comfortably learn, pay attention to how they’re responding, and make adjustments as you go. With separation anxiety, you might start with tiny departures that last only a second or two, carefully building in more time as your dog becomes more comfortable. Sometimes you move forward; sometimes you need to make things easier again.
You can’t rush learning just because you want to get to the finish line. Breaking a seemingly impossible goal into manageable pieces is a skill that comes in handy well beyond dog training. Whether you’re working out, learning an instrument, or trying something entirely new, small steps are the key to success.
Then there’s a dog’s body language. I grew up living with three dogs and learned to read them intuitively as a small child. Even as a kid, I was known for being really good with dogs. Years later, when I went through formal dog training school, it was interesting to have to put into actual words what I was seeing, instead of just noticing and knowing it the way I always had.
I still encounter that challenge when I’m teaching people. I’ll notice a tiny change in a dog’s expression and know something is about to happen, while everyone else is wondering what I’m talking about. Then I have to stop and explain exactly what I saw. Maybe the dog pulled their nose back slightly, changed the tension around their mouth, or shifted their weight. These changes happen so quickly and subtly that they’re easy to miss.
It’s such a gift to be able to understand what a dog is communicating. Living with a dog who struggles gives you plenty of opportunities to develop that skill because those small signals are often the first sign that your dog needs your guidance.
Reaching Outward
Living with a dog who struggles also lets you learn how to speak up for your dog. No, you can’t pet my dog. No, he doesn’t want to say hi. No, I can’t go out to dinner because I don’t have a sitter for my dog with separation anxiety.
Sometimes it’s easier to advocate for our dogs than it is to advocate for ourselves. But setting boundaries is a skill, and the more you practice, the more comfortable you can become with it. You may discover that you can ask for what you need without providing a lengthy explanation or worrying whether everyone is happy about it. That’s a gift to yourself.
You may also find yourself judging other people less. It’s easy to see a dog having an outburst in public and quietly shame the person on the other end of the leash. They should train that dog. That dog shouldn’t be out. But when you’ve lived with a dog who struggles, you know how little that brief encounter tells you about either of them. You don’t know how far they’ve come, what they’ve already worked through, or how much effort went into getting out the door that morning.
And you might find a community you never knew existed. Some reactive dog guardians organize carefully managed walks where their dogs can practice being around other dogs at comfortable distances. I’ve even heard of separation anxiety groups where people help each other with dog-sitting while they work through training.
These are people who understand why something as simple as an uneventful walk around the block might be worth celebrating. You realize you’re not the only one standing at that window at 6 a.m.
What Noodles Is Teaching Me
As I finish editing this piece, my new rescue dog, Noodles, is practicing settling at my feet. She’s had some pretty strong opinions about sharing resources so being able to relax here with the other dogs in the house is meaningful progress.
In most people’s eyes, she’d definitely be labeled a “difficult” dog. But she’s teaching me something I didn’t expect after all these years.
I’ve worked with serious dog aggression for much of my career, and I’m extremely sensitive to the tiniest changes in body language that might suggest a situation is moving in the wrong direction. Noodles is reactive fairly often, and sometimes she gets pretty vocal about it, but those disagreements don’t turn into physical fights.
It’s not so different from people. Just because you’re annoyed with someone, or even raise your voice, doesn’t mean you’re about to start throwing punches.
Of course, I still pay attention, and I still manage situations when needed. But not every growl or curled lip is the start of something bigger. After spending so much of my career anticipating what might go wrong, Noodles is reminding me to calm the f**k down.
The hard days are real, and it’s okay to want them to get easier. But this November, I’m grateful for every dog who made me rethink what I thought I knew. Especially the “difficult” ones.