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Posted by
julieadmin
on Sunday, October 02 @ 09:29:41 BST
It's Me Or The Dog!
SmudgesMum writes: " For those of you that are following the Channel 4 Series, 'It's Me Or The Dog', I found this interesting interview with Victoria Stilwell, the 'Supernanny' of the Canine World!
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As a nation of pet lovers, the British are famous for adoring their dogs almost as much as their children, but there are associated difficulties. They can chew your furniture, pee on the carpet, carry fleas and ticks, show unnecessary aggression and even bite at times. And the dogs can be troublesome too. But with the advent of shows such as Supernanny, parents can start to control the behaviour of even the most wayward kids. So what recourse for those owners whose dogs are out of control? Where is the modern-day Barbara Woodhouse when we need her the most? Why is there no Supernanny for our troubled canines?
It turns out there is. Meet Victoria Stilwell, an actress-turned-dog-trainer whose expertise has seen her start training schools in both Britain and the United States, and helped her become the behaviourist in Channel 4’s new series It’s Me Or The Dog. Now a successful and exceptionally dedicated practitioner of the canine arts, it seems funny to think that Stilwell only stumbled into her vocation thanks to the capricious nature of acting.
“I trained to be an actor, and that was all I wanted to do. But I was unemployed, so my sister, a veterinary nurse, suggested that I did some dog walking. I took it up out of necessity. I started off walking with one dog a day, and within a month I had about twenty dogs to walk every day – ten in the morning and ten in the afternoon.”
So while most actors were busy waiting tables and dreaming of walk-on parts in The Bill, Stilwell was out on Wimbledon Common. It was here that her life changed, thanks to a chance meeting. “I met this man there, a guy called Ken Cochrane, who was a dog trainer. We got talking, and I became really, really interested in the work he did with dogs. He did things completely differently from the old school of training, using leash jerks and collar jerks and being really dominant towards your dog. In fact, he really seemed to respect and understand animals. He had a real way with them, and I became interested in the way that he trained.”
From there, the fires of curiosity were lit. When she wasn’t working, she developed an incorrigible thirst for knowledge. “I began to read a lot of books and go to seminars by the top behaviourists, who had written extensively about the new style of positive training. Then I started doing a little training myself. To begin with, it was just a hobby. I was going to be an actor. But slowly, I became more interested in dog training than acting.”
Not that acting didn’t have its benefits – not least among them that she met her husband, Van Zeiler, while starring opposite him in the West End production of Buddy. The two now live in New Jersey, USA – where she has started up a dog training school to complement the one she already runs in New York. She says that in this field, too, her thespian skills have helped.
“I have found that my skills as an actor, both physically and vocally, are really useful when communicating with dogs. That background helped me understand the dogs’ body language, and also how my own body language came across, and how it would affect the dog.”
More often than not, Stilwell finds that she is called in to help out dogs who have developed behavioural problems. As with children, the theory goes that there are no intrinsically badly behaved dogs, just bad environments. Her initial job is to figure out what might be upsetting the dog.
“The first thing I look at is the dog’s medical history, to figure out if there’s something there that might be causing problems. Then I go and see the dog, and get clues from its environment. What’s the family like? How does the family relate to the dog? What’s the dog’s day generally like? Is it stimulated and exercised?
“But to figure out what is going on in the mind of a dog is done through observing body language and the vocalisations that it makes. Is it barking a lot? Is it whining a lot, is the whining high-pitched, is it growling, is the growling deep, what are the eyes doing, are they staring or relaxed? From the paws to the tip of the tail, every part of the dog gives clues and signals.”
The signals, and their root causes, vary, but there are issues that arise time and again. “There are dogs that have been severely mistreated, and show aggression towards humans and other dogs. There are dogs that haven’t been properly socialised when they were puppies, and are nervous of other dogs or people. There are dogs that have bitten children, dogs that have witnessed their owners having a fight and then become involved. I’ve seen severe cases of separation anxiety where the dog can’t be left alone, and will try and eat through a door to get outside. And there are people whose dogs bark so much that they’ve ended up being served eviction notices.”
The series will deal with a range of behavioural issues. On the whole, the problems are universal, though Stilwell says she’s noticed some differences between the problems encountered in London and New York. “New York is such a crazy, urban environment, dogs have to be on the lead all the time. I think the only exception is before 9am in Central Park. People in New York are certainly more interactive with their dogs, because they have to be, in such cramped living conditions. With the environment those dogs live in – apartments without gardens and so on – they have many more behaviour problems, and there’s much more leash aggression. Some of them just don’t like being constantly tied to you.”
As with Supernanny, the change in behaviour comes from changing the environment and communication. “It’s exactly the same thing,” agrees Stilwell. “But in some ways it’s even more difficult. You can’t reason with a dog the way you can reason with a child. If a dog pees on the floor, you can’t tell it off – the dog doesn’t understand that you’re telling it off because it peed on the floor. That’s why you have to adapt different measures, and understand how dogs learn. But otherwise, it’s very similar to the theories behind Supernanny.”
Which, it turns out, isn’t that much of a coincidence, as Stilwell reveals. “I was lying in bed one night after putting my daughter to bed, and 10pm on a Monday night, Supernanny came on the television. I loved it, and I realised that I did exactly the same with dogs. It was very similar, treating the family as a whole rather than just the dog as its own entity. So I took down the production company details, and the next day I emailed them saying ‘I’ve got a great idea. I loved Supernanny, what about doing the same thing with dogs?’ They wrote back saying they were already working on something like that, so I sent them a video of me training dogs, and they liked it.”
Her passion for dogs doesn’t begin and end with the training school, either. “Over the last five years, my husband and I have fostered over 40 dogs. We decided to start doing this because, working in various rescue shelters, you see so many dogs that have to be put down. There’s just such an over-population problem. In 1998 alone, for example, about 67,000 dogs and cats went through the rescue system, and of them, 47,000 were euthanised. So we decided I could use my expertise and we could use our home to get some of these animals out of the shelters before they were put down, rehabilitate them, and then find them new owners.”
It must be difficult, forming attachments to so many dogs, and then having to let them go. “Oh it is! There’s video of me crying at the door every time a dog leaves. You get utterly attached to them. But you realise in your heart that the dog is going to a great home, and you’ve saved its life. So the tears are of joy as well as sadness.”
By Benjie Goodhart
Original text from:-
http://www.channel4.com/entertainment/tv/microsites/I/itsmeorthedog/interview.html "
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