change but the difference in emphasis was fundamental.
I tried to do the same in heel work. I did not approve of the method most people used which involved taking the lead and pulling the dog down. I thought that was wrong. My original way of getting it to lie down was to make the dog sit, then tip the dog gently to one side by taking away its inside leg. Wherever I could, I was always looking for a softer way within the traditional parameters of the work.
As I did so, I was very successful at teaching people how to work with their dogs. Yet the changes I was achieving in softening the approach were so small. The central philosophy remained the same. I was making the dog do it. I always felt I was imposing my will on the dog rather than making it do what I wanted by choice. And I sensed that the dog did not know why it was doing it. The ideas that changed all this began to form themselves at the end of the 1980s.
By that time, my life had changed considerably. I had been divorced and my children were growing up and on the road to university. I myself had studied psychology and behaviourism as part of a degree in literature and social sciences at Humberside University. I had to give up showing dogs because of the divorce. Just as people were beginning to respect me and I was beginning to knock on the door, it was all kicked away: it was very frustrating. I reluctantly had to let some of my dogs go.
Meanwhile, I maintained a pack of six dogs. By the time we moved to a new home in North Lincolnshire in 1984, there was little time for life in the competitive dog world. I was working too hard to support my kids to be able to afford to compete or to breed full time. Apart from my own dogs, my contact with that world was confined to working at the local Jay Gee Animal Sanctuary and writing a pet page for a local newspaper.
My passion for dogs remained as great as ever. The only difference now was that it had to be channelled in a different direction. My interest in psychology and behaviourism had carried on from university. Behaviourism in particular had really become part of the mainstream by now. I had read Pavlov and Freud, B.F. Skinner and all the acknowledged experts in the field and, to be honest, I found a lot that I could agree with. The idea, for instance, that when a dog is jumping up, it is aiming to establish a hierarchy, and is jumping so as to put you in your place. Or the idea that a dog will barge its way in front of you as you walk to a door because it is checking the coast is clear, protecting the den, and believes it is the leader.
I also understood and accepted the idea of what was referred to as ‘separation anxiety’. The behaviourists’ view was that a dog will chew up the furniture or destroy the home because it is separated from its owner and that separation is stressful for the dog. All these things made total sense and offered me a lot. But to me there was something missing. What I kept asking was: why? Where was the dog getting this information from? At the time I wondered whether I was crazy for even asking myself this, but why is a dog so dependent on its owner that it is stressful to be separated? I didn’t know it then, but I was looking at the situation the wrong way around.
It is not an understatement to say that my attitude to dogs – and my life – changed one afternoon in 1990. By this time, I was also working with horses. The previous year, a friend of mine, Wendy Broughton, whose former racehorse, China, I had been riding for some time, had asked me if I was interested in going to see an American cowboy called Monty Roberts. He had been brought over by the Queen to demonstrate his pioneering techniques with horses. Wendy had watched him give a demonstration in which he had brought a previously unsaddled horse to carry saddle, bridle and rider within thirty minutes. It was, on the surface at least, highly impressive but she remained sceptical. ‘He must have worked with the horse before,’ she thought. She was convinced it had been a fluke.
In 1990, however, Wendy had been given the chance to put her mind at rest. She had answered an advert Monty Roberts had placed in Horse & Hound magazine. He was organizing another public demonstration and was asking for two-year-old horses that had never been saddled or ridden before. He had accepted Wendy’s offer to apply his method to her chestnut thoroughbred mare, Ginger Rogers. In truth, Wendy saw it as a challenge rather than an offer. Ginger Rogers was an amazingly headstrong horse. Privately we were convinced Monty Roberts was about to meet his match.
As I travelled to the Wood Green animal sanctuary near St Ives, Cambridgeshire, on a sunny, summer’s afternoon, I tried to keep an open mind, not least because I have immense respect for the Queen’s knowledge of animals, her horses and dogs in particular. I thought if she was giving credence to this fellow then he had to be worth watching.
I suppose when you hear the word ‘cowboy’, you immediately conjure up images of John Wayne, larger-than-life characters in Stetsons and leather chaps, spitting and cursing their way through life. The figure that emerged before the small audience that day could not have been further removed from that cliché. Dressed in a jockey’s flat cap, wearing a neat, navy shirt and beige slacks, he looked more like a country gentleman. And there was nothing brash or loud about him. In fact he was very quiet and self-effacing. But there was undoubtedly something charismatic and unusual about him. Just how unusual, I would soon find out.
There were about fifty of us sitting around the round pen he had set up in the equestrian area. Monty began by making some opening remarks about his method and what he was about to show. The early portents were not good, however. Unknown to Monty, Ginger Rogers was behind him. As he spoke, she started nodding her head slowly, almost sarcastically pretending to agree with him. Everyone burst out laughing.
Of course when Monty turned around, Ginger stopped. The minute he swivelled round to face the audience again she started again. Wendy and I looked at each other knowingly. We were both thinking the same thing I’m sure: he’s taken on too much here. As Monty gathered up a sash and began going through the opening of his routine, we sat back waiting for the fireworks to begin.
Precisely twenty-three-and-a-half minutes later we were ready to eat our words. That was how long it took Monty not just to calm Ginger down but also to have a rider controlling with ease a horse that to our certain knowledge had never been saddled or ridden in its life. Wendy and I sat there in stunned silence. Anyone who saw us that day would have seen disbelief written all over our faces. We remained in a state of shock for a long time afterwards. We talked about it for days and days. Wendy, who had spoken to Monty after his miraculous display, even went on to build a replica of his trademark round pen and started implementing his advice.
For me too it was as if a light had been switched on. There were so many things that struck a chord. Monty’s technique, as the whole world now knows, is to connect – to ‘join up’ in his phrase – with the horse. His time in the round pen is spent establishing a rapport with the horse, in effect communicating in its own language. His method is based on a lifetime working with and most importantly observing the animal in its natural environment. Most impressive of all his method has no place for pain or fear. His view was that if you did not get the animal on your side then anything you did was an act of violation, you were imposing your will on an unwilling being. And the fact that he was succeeding in doing things differently was clear from the way he won the trust of the horse. He placed great store, for instance, on the fact that he could touch the horse on its most vulnerable area, its flanks. That day, as I watched him working in unison with the animal, looking at and listening to what the animal was signalling to him, I thought ‘he’s cracked it’. He had connected with the horse to such an extent that it let him do whatever he liked. And there was no enforcement, no violence, no pressure: the horse was doing it of its own free will. I thought how the heck can I do this with dogs? I was convinced it must be possible given that dogs are fellow hunter-gatherers with whom we have a much greater connection historically. The big question was: HOW?
Chapter 3
I realise
