It’s not always the owner.
Those of you who’ve been reading for a while know that Doc, my last service dog, had mental issues.
Let me first say that most dogs, 99% of dogs, don’t have mental issues: they have learned behaviors, which can be unlearned. In almost 30 years of dog training and near a thousand dogs, I’ve seen maybe 8 whose issues were mental, instead of learned — and I saw the worst of the worst dogs, so it’s a very biased sample. But other dogs have trauma. A puppy that was neglected or was born during the COVID lockdown or was attacked by another dog? She will likely have issues.
A rescue whose history is unknown, but comes to the owner with extreme behavior? He has issues.
But back to Doc, and what I want to say.
Doc was the best. He also took a lot of management, and was difficult to train due to his mental disorder. At some point (at many points) I would think, “Am I doing something wrong? Am I making this worse? Should I have done x, y, or z, and that would have solved things?” It’s those questions that haunt me.
Recently I visited a friend, and stayed for several days. She has three dogs, and one of them has mental issues similar to Doc’s. All the dogs are really good. The two dogs are stable, happy, healthy dogs. The other is a happy, healthy dog, but due to brain damage when he was a puppy, he’s far from stable. Just like Doc, there’s very little warning before he has an outburst. (Maybe a second, if we’re lucky.) But because it’s just the one dog, and the two other dogs are both so stable, it’s really easy to see that the problem here isn’t how she’s worked with him: it’s him.
Let me say this so very clearly: she’s great with her dogs. She’s worked with multiple trainers, and is able to pick the technique that will work with her and any dog she’s currently working with (and those techniques might be different from dog to dog). Her dogs listen. They adapt. She’s taught them to think through situations. She’s really a heck of an owner. And yet, her mentally damaged dog is still mentally damaged. You can’t change that.
It’s provided me some relief and a reminder that I can’t fix everything. Is there something else I could have done with Doc at some point in his life that might have been better? Sure. That’s always a possibility. Is there something I could have done that would have dramatically changed things? No. I couldn’t fix his brain.
Not everything is caused by the owner. An owner can’t fix everything. This doesn’t mean giving up, but it also helps me remember that I did everything I possibly could with Doc, and there was no way I could ever have made him totally “better.” What I did do was give him the best chance possible to live a full life, even if it was a shorter one than I would have liked, and that’s really all any of us can do.
