Bella's Bull Blunder

There is often a common misconception about dog trainers and their dogs and that is that we rarely make mistakes and our dogs are perfect. 

My dog, Bella, has in the past reacted to dogs walking past our car while she is confined inside. I’ve noted that it is large dogs in particular, as they are naturally more intimidating to her. Her reaction comes because of this confinement; she has no option to move away while in the car, therefore she vocalises in an attempt to remove the other dog instead. 

Over Summer, we went on a trip to Wellington. Just for fun, I decided to set ourselves a little challenge; to get a picture of Bella in front of a landmark at each stop. The challenge went well from Taupo to Waiouru to Taihape… and then we got to Bulls. 

For those that don’t know, Bulls has multiple life sized Bulls throughout the town. I was excited for this one! My human brain made the decision to pull over next to the first Bull I see, but in my haste, my trainer brain didn’t get the opportunity to interrupt this rash decision. 

Bella feels the car stop, sits up, and what is the first thing that takes her attention? 

The giant, animal statue right outside the window staring at her. 

 Boy did I get an earful, literally! This brought my trainer brain back to the forefront, just slightly too late for me to realise how silly a decision that was. After what felt like a very long 30 seconds, Bella realised that the Bull wasn’t moving away. I gave her a moment to process now that she had her thinking brain back (and I had mine!), and then I got her out of the car to investigate. 

We did lots of scatter feeding around it to build her confidence, and only at her pace did we go closer to the statue. Once we were next to it, I realised it had a hanging Christmas bell decoration around its neck. Thankfully for me, I had taught Bella to ‘ring the bell’ at home. We were able to apply this in this scenario, and build her confidence further in close proximity to the Bull. 
(Note: video has no sound)

That was a very valuable lesson for me about human complacency. I knew how Bella felt about being confined with large dogs going past the car, but I also  had a goal to get a picture of Bella with a statue, just like I had done multiple times in the hours prior. My human brain made a poor assumption that this statue was just like every other statue, when really, my trainer brain knows better; a dog doesn’t see it that way. In doing these things, I failed to put Bella’s needs ahead of my wants. 

In this short story but there are lots of things to learn:

• Put yourself in your dog's shoes BEFORE making decisions on their behalf. 
• Be sensitive to your dog's needs, and sensible with the decisions you make.
• Assumptions can be misguided, if you don’t think things through, you may put your dog at risk.
• Don’t blame the dog when you are the one who put them in a bad scenario.
• Think things through first!
• Dogs aren’t robots, and their trainers aren’t perfect either.
• Mistakes happen, but we can still work through them, and most importantly learn from them.

In the end, we practised resilience as a team, and got our photo… but I definitely thought a bit more before stopping at our next photo stop!

Authored by Brooke Rapira
Prime Pups Educator and Dog Sports Instructor