The essence of a Dog Centred Care approach.

Supporting dogs in a more dog centric way needn’t seem a daunting thing. Instead, let's keep it simple - I find just following these three words helps guide us and is a good place to start 🙂

Learn- We start by being humble enough to learn from the dog first ! Molly came to us at 16 weeks and had lots to teach us ! Learning from the dog first means giving them time to tell us their story, for us to look at their physical, emotional and social needs, including how and what they might like to learn. Learning as much as we can about their unique personality.

Support – As we learn more about them, we ensure we support what we have learnt ! When we understand more about their individual care and support needs, we can then support those and play our role as their advocate. This includes being mindful about the situations we put them in, and allowing them the chance to offer feedback through their behavioural responses. Making adaptions to their environment and to our own expectations !

Teach – If we look to teach them anything, we must start by teaching things we feel are likely to be intrinsically valuable to them, based on what we have learnt about their safety and relief needs. Everything we do should be supportive of their perception of safety, and support their ability to process and engage with the world on their terms.

After this, train what you like ! But always try to fall back to 'learn support teach' and make sure the training does not become too human centric - keep that partnership and collaboration going.

This is the mindset shift – the essence of the move from 'task' to 'care'. It is the move away from thinking that somehow the onus is on the dog to learn from us all the time. We need to balance extrinsic motivation with intrinsic relevance, and have some faith that the dog can probably tell us their story better than we can write it for them !

Indeed, I like to see behaviour like painting a picture – I want the dog to be able to paint their picture for me and for me to resist the temptation to keep grabbing the brush and painting it for them ! I especially do not want a dog feeling they can’t paint it at all - which is exactly what punishment does of course.

Thank you to Denise O'Moore at Mighty Dog Graphics, for the amazing graphics that I use in some of my talks when using the painting analogy. Denise does all my artwork and I highly recommend her services x