The stigma of Mental Health issues is not unique to humans, sadly it filters across to our best friends of the fur kind too. Even with humans people do not understand that a mental issue needs medical attention as much as a broken leg does. The same is with dogs. If our dogs were to get sickly or hurt themselves physically, we would rush them off to a vet but sadly when it comes to a behviour issue ( which is largely due to us humans ) people rarely think to call in someone who can help with said behaviour issue. The first knee jerk reaction is the dog must go. Must go where, is the problem ? For humans there are countless facilities for those who need assistance with their mental health. But for dogs, although there are numerous behavioursts out there that can help the families. Very few families actually choose to go this route.
I cant quite put my finger on it but I think, we are all caught up in our fast world and want everything to be fixed quickly with as little effort as possible. A magic pill would be most peoples first choice. But with dogs there is no magic pill. There is medication that can help but if you do not combine the meds with a behaviour modification programme all you are doing is making your dog a drugged up zombie and that's not what we want. Medication for behavioural issues, should really be just to bring your dog back into their own skin so they are at a level where they can understand what we are teaching them. We need to teach them the desired behaviour. All to often we get caught up in what we don't want our dogs to do. Don't jump, don't mess in the house, don't pull on the lead. We don't think of the desired behaviour we would like our dog to do. In fact a lot of us struggle when we have to think about it. I don't want my dog to jump, well what do you want your dog to do ? I would like my dog to sit and politely greet people is what we would like our dog to do but we don't think that way. I don't know if its a human trait but we do tend to get caught up in the negative rather than the positive because if your dog was to sit and greet people appropriately 99% of the time we forget to praise our dogs for a job well done. Which would be similar to you getting a report card and your parents rewarding you for good school grades the first time and then totally ignoring every good grade from then on. Its not going to motivate you to keep working hard is it? Yet we do this with our dogs all the time. Once we've taught them something we just presume they will be good at this forever. Socialising is a prime example. We all know about the importance of socialising puppies but most people after puppy classes, never socialise their dogs again ? Why do we do this ? If you think of it in human terms, when I was a young kid I was much friendlier before my teenage years. When they came a long I became a lot more moody and intolerant and if I wasn't made to go to school every day. I reckon I would have been pretty happy living in my own little world away from the peer pressure of our teenage years. Yet here we are with our dogs. Straight after puppy school we stop socialising. Our dogs remain in our homes, which not too much contact with the outside world and this has a negative effect on their social skills as they go through puberty and then adult life. We have lost that continuous learning of coping with situations. In fact we have controlled their environment so much. Their coping skills are just about stumped. Yet we expect them to be social butterflies 2 years later when we want to introduce another pet into the family. Most excuses that are used when people are wanting to dump their dog, are not serious issues. They are behaviours that can simply be modified if people would just give their dogs the time.
We need to realise some behaviours we frown upon are normal dog behaviours, its just they are not appropriate in our human world for them to display these behaviours but we never taught our dogs what we wanted them to do. In all my years there have been less than a handful of dogs that needed serious medication for their issues and even those dogs generally have just never learnt to handle situations appropriately or have been badly abused and once we can work with them in a calm state they are extremely forgiving. We have had so many dogs that their owners had given up on, flourish with the right guidance and went on to live happy lives with their new families. We need to realise that working with a dogs mental state is as important as seeking medical advice for and injury or physical illness. Surely we owe mans best friend the time and effort to help them become well balanced. After all it is us that have domesticated them to be a part of our family.
