Mitsi

A few days ago, one of our German Shepherds, Mitsi, took her last trip to the vet. We were sad to see her go. This is her story.

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Mitsi came from a dog rescue centre. She had been re-homed three times and each time came back to the centre because of intolerable behaviour. So, despite being a lovely looking German Shepherd with a clear pedigree, she was scheduled to be put down. Mitsi was a fundamentally nervous dog. Her response to any situation that unsettled her was to be aggressive. If she saw another dog, she would immediately go for it. She would also attack people, in particular adult men, and this had already caused a lot of trouble.  I have looked after dogs all my life. Of course I could deal with a dog like Mitsi – all she needed was a stable environment and a firm hand. I was completely wrong.

The first week that a dog is in a new environment is a little honeymoon period. The dog will cautiously explore its surroundings and learn about its social position. Typically, the dog is a bit withdrawn, shy, quiet and generally unobtrusive. I did not know this. I thought everything was going well and that Mitsi had found the safe environment that she could settle down in.

A couple of weeks later she began to assert herself. She started using the upstairs of the house as a toilet, chased my cats away, ate part of the sofa and bit my good friend Pete. She also bit my Dad and dug holes in the garden. Taking her for a walk was a nightmare. If she saw another dog, she went ballistic. Straining on the end of her lead, barking furiously, pulling for all she was worth and not taking a blind bit of notice of anything I said or did. She also went for people, adults and children, so our walks became a furtive and isolated nocturnal affair.

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I needed help. I met with several people. We tried clickers, food treats, command words, gestures and even dropping keys on the floor. These tactics were about as effective as waving a stick at a runaway locomotive. Mitsi could go from zero to redline in the blink of an eye and there was nothing I could do about it. We looked at some training classes. But what Mitsi needed was not training but some sort of behaviour modification. I did not want to teach her tricks I just wanted to be able to take her for a walk and actually enjoy it. Cesar Millan (The Dog Whisperer – TV show in the USA) seemed to have a good approach. I read his books and watched the TV series but could not work out how this could translate this into something that would work with Mitsi. I read many other books. Learnt an awful lot about dogs, aggressive dogs, badly behaved dogs and much more but still could not find something I could really use.

Then a chance encounter led me to meet up with Keith (www.keithdickinson.co.uk). Keith is from Barnsley. He is 100% Yorkshire. Opinionated, stubborn, dour, intolerant, would rather deal with dogs than people, smokes roll-ups, drinks bitter and has a heart of gold. On our first meeting Mitsi set off as usual – barking furiously, pulling furiously, ignoring me completely – and Keith stopped her dead. He did something, waved his arms, said something and my manic dog lay down on the floor, quiet as you like. It was the sort of thing you see on television and do not really believe. I had no idea how he did it. In five seconds, he had done something that I had failed to achieve in months of trying. Brilliant, I thought. Show me how.

I ended up spending several years training with Keith. Weekly classes and guided walk with twenty or more other dogs. A few months in it began to dawn on me that we were not really training the dog at all – it was me that was getting an education. Dogs live in the moment and actually behave in very predicable ways. Any dog, in a given set of circumstances, will react in a similar fashion. Keith had not stopped Mitsi with magic; he had simply talked to her in a way she understood. Similarly, there is no magic ending to this story; Mitsi remained a nervous dog all her life. German Shepherds have a predisposition to nervousness (which can make them good guard dogs) and she had probably been treated appallingly when a puppy. As Keith explained it – we cannot stop her feeling scared but we can change how she responds to this. The key to this is leadership. By being her pack leader, a Cesar Millan expression, she would look to me for guidance rather than reacting on her own. Dog training classes then are really about teaching people how to understand the way a dog sees the world and how to communicate with it. Much of this is quite counter-intuitive to most people, which is why the relationship with their dog is often not what they think it is at all.

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I could fairly quickly get on top of some of the worst behaviour. New people could be introduced to the house without risk of being bitten. Toilet habits were addressed. She stopped damaging the furniture. It took a while, but she eventually even made friends with the cats. Her immediate reaction to seeing another dog always remained aggressive but I could limit this and with a modicum of work overcome it. She made friends with many dogs and got to run free with other dogs in the field. Of course, if I was not there then she would revert to her previous form and this did give rise to several incidents of people being bitten throughout her life (sorry Pete, Malcolm, Liz, Graham, Franca, the Frenchman, the Swede and possibly others).

The other problem with Mitsi was eating. She did not like commercial dog food at all despite being very skinny when I got her. She also had a tendency to eat her own poos, coprophagia. Why would she eat a poo rather than kibble? This really made no sense to me. Keith had the answer to this as well. Commercial dog food is, despite all appearances, a by-product of the human food industry with the primary purpose of reducing waste. The contents of dog food is not based on what a dog wants or needs but actually much more to do with what the food industry has left over. So, for example, kibble contains a minimum of 30% carbohydrate and starch which dogs simply cannot chew properly or digest. Most dog food, tinned, dried or whatever, contains grains and other foodstuff which are completely indigestible to dog. To make the commercial dog food more appealing synthetic colouring and flavour enhancements are added. Much of the kibble passes straight through the dog leading to big, messy poos which are still flavoured with the chemicals.

Dogs are carnivores. Just look at their teeth. Sharp fangs designed to cute and tear. They are seriously meant for killing and eating animals. We are not quite sure when the first dogs were domesticated but somewhere round 15,000 years ago there were no dogs at all, just wolves. This is not so long in evolutionary terms and certainly their digestive system is virtually identical to the modern wolf. Dogs have evolved to eat raw meat and the odd bit of vegetable matter. I tried feeding her on raw chicken, bones and everything, with a few raw vegetables. Uncooked chicken bones are quite soft and easily digested by a dog. Cooked bones are hard, can splinter, are indigestible and dangerous.

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She loved it. She would eat as much as I gave her – for the first time ever. She put on weight, her coat improved and she stopped eating poos. She noticeably became more relaxed and content – as you might expect of a dog that was finally feeling we fed. And she was healthy on a raw diet. Very healthy. Her stomach will have become much more acidic than a kibble dog and this gave her much greater immunity to many pathogens a scavenging dog can encounter. Apart from immunisations, the only time Mitsi saw a vet was her last time.

Training, diet, environment and leadership. She was never going to be perfectly well behaved or good with other dogs but we could at least live together and even enjoy the odd walk. Mostly I kept her muzzled when we were out. Some people do not like muzzles but it meant I could let her off the lead and let her meet other dogs without the danger of things getting nasty.

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Mitsi got involved in pretty much everything Diane and I did. We bought a motorhome so that we could take her on holiday. We travelled the country. We travelled abroad. She went skiing and loved it. I bought her a pulling harness. She loved pulling, took to it immediately. In the summer, she would pull me on my bike and in winter, I would take to skis. All good but I could never quite trust her with other dogs and got to wondering if a companion would help. Dogs are pack animals and generally like being with other dogs. They also tend to be better behaved when in groups. Mitsi was definitely improved. What Cesar calls “the power of the pack”. Anyhow, I quite fancied having another dog.

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Keith introduced me to Vikkas kennels in Lincolnshire. They mostly breed dogs for military, police and protection work. We went down there one afternoon and came away with Cent. Cent is a big boy dog, almost twice the size of Mitsi. He is a thoroughbred GSD with an impeccable pedigree. More importantly, he is calm and well balanced. The introductions were a bit tricky. Mitsi was quite resistant to losing her status as top dog. However, after Cent had asserted himself a few times she started to get the message and eventually they became great friends. For the most part Mitsi was calmed and reassured by Cent’s presence. Occasionally it made things worse when Mitsi felt she absolutely had to have a go at someone or something and Cent would dive in to help her.

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In her later years Mitsi developed Canine Degenerative Myelopathy, a genetic condition that caused progressive weakness in her back legs. This did not stop her going everywhere with us. When we were finally ready to take to the road in Baloo we set up a bed for her behind the driver’s seat. We also got her a harness so we could help her in and out. She was very happy to take on the world from up there. She was sat behind me. She could see everything out of the windows. She could bark at passing dogs from the safety of her vantage point. Like this, she happily travelled right across Europe.

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We were sad to see Mitsi go. It was comforting to reflect on the long journey we had made together. She got a life and I learned more about dogs than I thought possible. Cent is the best dog I have ever known and I feel that I understand dogs well enough now as to be worthy of him. In a sense, this is all because of Mits. So we owe her a lot and we will all miss her.    

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