05/04/2022
Love this post ! I think about this a lot - letting dogs be dogs and do dog stuff - even stopping and let them sniff a blade of grass for the eleventy billionth time !! It’s what they do - it’s how they learn about the environment they are in and who has passed through it !!
Plus it stimulates so tires out their brain !
It’s a win win !
Let dogs be dogs !!!
💕🐶 DOGS! 🐶💕
We are a nation of dog lovers.
It’s why so many of us choose to share our lives with dogs 💕
But, we often don’t always understand them, not really. Our knowledge of dogs comes from seeing older generations of our family with dogs, with watching tv shows about dogs, watching movies and Disney cartoons - as a result we have a really strange mis mash belief about dogs.
I grew up watching Casualty & still enjoy watching A&E, I’ve seen doctors over the years when I feel poorly, I’ve been told about many old family remedies for this and that ailment… does that mean that I understand illness and the human body? 🙈
As a dog trainer it is so important to me that my customers learn to understand their dogs. Really understand them.
To do so often means challenging our life long beliefs. To change how we view some of our dogs behaviours. To reevaluate how we communicate and interact with our dogs.
But when we allow ourselves to let go of old beliefs and misguided knowledge we see our dog’s in a new way. And our relationships with them change and become something far beyond what we may have experienced before.
In a class recently I asked the participants what they had learnt over the previous week. One of the answers made my heart sing 🎶🎵🎶
It summed up in a nutshell why I do this job. Why I love this job. And why I’ll continue to teach the way I do.
“I realised that taking for her a walk isn’t about me and her having to do what I want, or that I should have some authority over her. I started to let her be a dog and thought about the walk from her point of view and what she needed to get of it.”
When we let our dogs be dogs… (and why wouldn’t we when we claim to love dogs?) their lives are so much more fulfilled, rich and meaningful.
And as a result our lives with them are so much more fulfilled, rich and meaningful. 🐶💕
www.loveyourpaws.org.uk
