From Struggle to Trust: My Dog Training Adventure in Rural Wales

Image: Peaches and Steve explore Wales

I have a confession to make… I had a bit of a struggle recently with my whopping Newfoundland Peaches. We had just moved from the city to rural Wales and the environment for her (and me) had completely changed. I had these grand ideas of going out and exploring Wales with her, skipping down the lanes and across the beaches in doggy bliss. What actually occurred was far from it.

I found that walks were becoming a daily struggle. The new environment brough with it new smells, new sounds and new sights. My generally calm dog had become a 55kg pulling machine and the idea of her even knowing I was on the other end of the lead/long line was rapidly fading away.

I am ashamed to say that I approached this in a classic man way… Even though I knew what needed to be done, I buried my head in the sand for a few weeks and just carried on, foolishly hoping it might just sort itself out. Isn’t it funny how we trainers can, on occasion,  be the worst at following our own advice? I shouldn’t be too harsh on myself. We had just moved house, life was hectic and we were all adjusting to this new life. After a month or so I decided it was time to help Peaches (and myself) start to enjoy our walks more.

Image: Big Welsh sunsets

When I'm facing a training challenge, I dive headfirst into learning EVERYTHING I can. Books, podcasts, you name it – I devour it all! Once I’ve crammed my brain with everything I think I need, then comes the exciting part: putting it all into practice with my dogs.  The joy of creating the plan, tinkering with it, those "aha!" moments, the ups, the downs, the laughter, the bond we build... that's what makes dog training so incredibly rewarding.

I reframed the “issue” into an adventure!  It quickly became about exploring new ideas, experimenting, making mistakes, and celebrating the breakthroughs.  Sometimes I got lost in research, sometimes I was awake at 4am thinking through what I was going to do that day, other times I'm just out there getting my hands dirty (literally!). But through it all, the connection with my drooling bestie and the joy of learning together was key. I won’t go fully into how we approached it here but we changed a lot of things: The environment we found ourselves in was first to change, we then focused on the re-igniting the old skills needed through play and adding in some “fancy pants” new ones. We worked hard on desensitising to the new animals that were abundant around the area (especially sheep and cows) and started to slowly add in the more and more distracting walks focusing, primarily, on using what she wated as reinforcers.

Image: Fun times

And guess what?! things got easier, walks got better. Our relationship started to blossom and I began to feel more in tune with her. I noticed that we were starting to inhabit a relationship feedback loop of sorts. I was watching her more and more, picking up on her behaviour and being able to pre-empt what was going to happen and adjust in the moment. I also noticed how small adjustments of how I moved, or talked would be noticed by her, how she was way more focused on my cues and actively looking for information from me. It honestly felt like the communication lines were not only well and truly open for business but they’d been upgraded to super fibre broadband levels! Better than all that though was an unexpected by product. We had developed  a newer, bigger trust between us.

Image: Let the adventures begin

So that got my brain whirling about what trust is and how this particular training journey had led us to a super charged trust bonanza. So, yet again, I found myself in yet another wormhole of research, but this time on trust.  One morning I stumbled on an article by Susan Friedman and Steve martin (I’ve linked the article in the button below) and part of a particular sentence caught my eye. They described trust between an non-human and human animal as a “level of certainty that an interaction will result in good outcomes”.

Peaches had learnt that everything in the environment predicted great stuff was incoming. All that context, all those cues and all that consistency gave HER the control over HER environment. She was training me! She had access to all the reinforcers at play through her behaviour; the sniffing, the food, the toys, the direction we walk, the places we stop, the things I say. This idea wasn’t new to me, but rather, something magic I’d lost along the way, how an animal can learn to learn through us. A timely and much needed wobble for my silly brain.

This whole experience has served to remind me that dog training is about so much more than just teaching dogs to do stuff to make life easier. It’s even more than just a science… It’s an Art. It's about building a deep connection with your dog, embracing the challenges and unexpected detours. When we do this, when we commit, it will always lead us on an adventure of discovery and growth.