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