Taking care of your farm dog: Part 1

Jarred Hodgson, a dog trainer, offers some good advice on how farmers can keep their best friends' tails wagging while helping them to retain their position in the pack.

- Jarred Hodgson

It is fascinating that over the years the dog training industry has learnt, acknowledged, and moved forward. Unfortunately, some trainers want to turn a blind eye to more recent studies and stick to outdated and backward theories. And some, like modern-day parents, have gone to the complete opposite side of the scale, which is possibly just as bad.

Anyone can deduce their own theories from what they have observed, but we won’t know until dogs learn to speak and tell us what the best way of training is. I know we all tend to anthropomorphise our dogs much more than we should, but it’s hard not to see more intelligence in a dog’s eye then they have been given credit for. For example, my male Belgian Malinois is a fantastic dog and well-socialised, but sometimes I swear he just grumbles at people to make them jump. Nevertheless, here is my theory on pack structure and dominance and how we should treat our dogs.

According to the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour, the naturalist Charles Darwin believed that dogs had the mental capacity to have emotions like love, fear, shame, rage and even to dream. He also wrote that dogs had the ability to imitate and reason. These theories, although corrected by modern research, are understandable and many dog owners would tell you their dogs have human-like emotions. Some of Darwin’s theories have also been proved and reinforced by modern theories, such as dogs imitating behaviour. Some believe that confident dogs display submissive behaviour, imitating submission to diffuse a tense meeting. This kind of intelligence isn’t a surprise for dog owners but may seem far-fetched for others.