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

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      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.

       OUR MUTUAL FRIENDS

       Why respect is the key to a great relationship with dogs

      As most of us know from personal experience, no relationship is ever simple or straightforward. Life, with all its uncertainties, has an unpleasant habit of making sure that difficult times are never far away. For this reason, every relationship needs a few fundamental qualities if it is going to survive all that life has to throw at it.

      It was a man called Jim Moss who made me see that this applies as much to our relationship with our dogs as it does to those with our fellow humans. Thirty years ago, in his own quiet way, Jim taught me that the key to any successful relationship can be summed up in one simple word: respect.

      Jim and his wife Amy were the most devoted couple you could ever have hoped to meet. I met them in the 1970s, when, with my then husband and two young children, I left London for the Lincolnshire village of Firsby. It was a small, tight-knit community and Jim and Amy were among its most popular figures. A retired couple, both were keen gardeners and walkers, but their greatest passion in life was each other.

      You never saw Jim without Amy, or vice versa. They went everywhere together, did everything together. They were also the most polite, kind-hearted people – salt-of-the-earth sorts who’d do anything to help. Everyone thought the world of them.

      Occasionally, I would drop in to see them and have a cup of tea. I remember once the conversation got around to marriage – and the secret of their success. ‘We didn’t try and change each other, did we, love?’ Jim said, matter-of-factly. Amy just smiled at him and said, ‘No, we didn’t, did we?’

      When the village heard the terrible news that Amy had been diagnosed with cancer at the relatively young age of sixty, a real sense of shock passed through us. We were even more shaken when, within a few short weeks, she died.

      The village rallied round Jim, doing the best it could to help him. But, in truth, there was little we could do. In the weeks and months following Amy’s death, it was as if he had disappeared.

      While Amy was alive, he had been a familiar face walking up and down the road, always ready for a chat. Now he suddenly became invisible. He was no longer seen in the shop, the church or the pub. I walked past Jim’s house on an almost daily basis, taking my children, Tony and Ellie, to and from the stop where the school taxi collected and dropped them off. The curtains were always drawn. There was never a sound, even of a radio or television. The only sign that Jim was still living there was the garden. Nobody ever saw him out in the garden, yet its lawns were perfectly manicured, its blooms fit for the Chelsea Flower Show. He must be gardening at night or at crack of dawn, we concluded.

      One afternoon, during the summer holidays, a couple of years after Amy’s death, Ellie arrived home full of beans.

      ‘I’ve been talking to Mr Moss,’ she said.

      I knew that a child can sometimes be a healing influence on people who are nursing a terrible loss. Their innocence is an antidote to the despair. I was quietly pleased that Ellie had made contact with Jim so left her to it.

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