Australian Carol O'Herlihy with her Irish husband Tony and their dogs

Speaker: Justin Ratcliffe (Standard British accent)

In 1989 Sylvia Wilson was working for the RSPCA in Australia and was becoming increasingly concerned about the number of dogs that were being brought in to be destroyed because of behavioural problems such as barking, biting and tearing things up. She went on to develop a system that had almost immediate results in dealing with problem dogs, so she set up Bark Busters. Today Bark Busters is a worldwide organisation dedicated to bridging the gap between dogs and their owners by using “dog Track psychology.” Carol O’Herlihy runs Bark Busters in the UK and explains that a dog psychologist is not the same as a dog trainer:

Carol O’Herlihy (Australian accent):

A dog psychologist is somebody, I think, who bridges the gap between the two different species. It teaches... we teach people how to see what their dog is saying. Dogs never stop talking to you, their body language never stops, they never stop at it, unless they’re asleep. Happy dogs sleep most of the day, but dogs that are boisterous and overactive, they’re trying desperately to tell you something and we show owners how to interpret that properly.

LEADER OF THE PACK
As can be the case with humans, many problems for dogs are the result of the change of status and way of life. Dogs are used to living in packs, where there is a natural hierarchy. This is very different from their new life as part of a human family and it can lead to a lot of confusion between animal and owner:

Carol O’Herlihy:

What happens is, people read a dog’s body language as a human, and dogs read a human body language as dog, and the two are completely different, so you get this miscommunication between the owner and the dog and neither one of them knows what the other one’s doing. So, for instance, when a dog is jumping up and licking at the owner’s mouth whenever they come back, the owner thinks, “He loves me so much he’s kissing me hello,” but the dog is thinking, “Vomit, vomit, you’ve been on a hunt, vomit what you’ve caught on the hunt, I’m hungry!”

THERAPY
When we humans need to see the “head doctor,” we take ourselves to a clinic where we can talk about our problems, but for a dog psychologist there’s no such thing as the “psychologist’s couch.” Problematic dogs are best observed at home:

Carol O’Herlihy:

Well, we ask a few questions on the phone, not a great deal, but (the) most important thing is we go out and we visit the dog in its home because a dog’s very comfortable in its home and it’ll be displaying a lot of body language that tells us how the dog sees itself in a pack situation, where it sees itself, whether it’s the top or the middle or the bottom, and sometimes dogs that are at the top of the pack find it (a) very lonely place and it’s quite scary for them and they actually need to be down further, down in the pack, and with the owners over the dog. So it’s all to do with pack hierarchy because that’s... the only way a dog thinks. A dog that’s shown aggression stands a higher chance of being put to sleep, destroyed, killed, murdered... whatever you like. All animals will bite, but it’s only the dog who takes the big punishment for it.