I’m trying to fix my middle-aged dog’s grumpiness – this is what works
Something curious happens when I take my dog to see Graeme Hall, one of the country’s leading TV canine trainers. While we’re shaking hands, my Border Terrier Missy falls at his feet and squirms (in presumed pleasure) on her back, exposing to him her pink and tender stomach.
Hall stoops to stroke her, and calls her “cute”, filling me with a helpless paternal pride. But at 10 years old, Missy is actually increasingly prone to grumpiness, and is normally not so keen on strangers.
To Hall however, she’s all a-quiver, shamelessly so. In fact, I’m half convinced that were I to give him the lead, she’d happily follow him off into the sunset.
My canine conundrum
For the first eight years of Missy’s life, she was a blissfully easy, calm family pet. She was as chilled out with people as she was with their dogs. Now, having experienced all that life can throw at her – fireworks; lunatic cockapoos; a tediously repetitive diet – she has become, to paraphrase Arctic Monkeys, a mardy bum.
She mostly refuses to walk on lead anymore, but I dare unleash her lest she attack any dog she believes might be preparing to attack her. (This hasn’t happened often, but it has sadly happened enough to make me nervous about setting her free. I know it comes from a place of fear but we can’t have that).
Hall, who has hosted 100 episodes of Channel 5’s Dogs Behaving (Very) Badly, makes his first assessment. “As soon as I meet a dog, I’m sussing them out, can’t help myself,” he explains. “When your dog turned upside down, it revealed to me an element of fawning in her personality. It’s like she wasn’t quite sure of me. I’m a big fella, and she’s likely never seen a man with a cravat, so this was her basically saying: Please love me, I mean no harm. It tells me that she wasn’t born to be a pack leader. She’s just a happy, gentle dog.”
Yes, she was, I say. But not always. Not any more. “Well, she is a terrier,” replies Hall, not unreasonably, “and they can be feisty.” It’s a good point, but then of course it is. The man is an endless reservoir of sage advice and wisdom.
Graeme and Missy getting on like a house on fire
‘You can only fix the dog through the person’
The 60-year-old was not fated to become a dog whisperer. He once wanted to be a fighter pilot, then considered dentistry before ending up at Weetabix, where he worked for 20 years. In his mid-40s, he accepted voluntary redundancy, and it was while taking his two Rottweilers to obedience school that his life took an unlikely turn.
The trainer there asked whether Hall had ever considered training dogs. “I said, ‘Why, am I good?’ And he said, ‘You’re good with people. You can only fix the dog through the person’. That conversation changed my life.”
Hall started his own training club and, in time, television found him – which isn’t surprising, given that he rather stands out in the field: his confident manner, those tweed suits. The cravat, he tells me, “was the producer’s idea, but it suits me, I think.”
The show debuted in 2019 and makes for compelling viewing, not just because the dogs come in so many shapes, sizes and unusual idiosyncrasies, but because the owners do, too. The issues he’s faced include erratic and/or violent behaviour, won’t eat, eats everything. Their humans, meanwhile, tend to react with stress and panic. Hall doesn’t so much treat the dog, then; he treats the owner.
‘She’ll have to give in eventually. And when she does, tell her she’s a good girl,’ says Graeme
This time round he’s facing one particular issue. “Lots of dogs eat dog poo, unfortunately, but this one likes to eat it directly from source,” he grins. “He’s learned to recognise the recently-filled dog poo bags other owners are carrying, so he runs up to swipe them.” While I recoil in horror, Hall laughs. “That’s really quite clever, when you think about it.”
But let’s not think about it, eh? Instead, I steer the conversation back to Missy and how to manage her increasing irascibility in middle age.
While she still loves further-away parks we only have the time to visit at weekends, she’s become far less enamoured with our overly-familiar neighbourhood streets. Every afternoon, our walks are a battle of wills.
If I try to turn right, she’ll opt for left, simply to be difficult. Very often, she’ll stop dead in the middle of the road and give me the dead-eye, requiring pedestrians to walk around us. Who, I ask Hall, will win this ongoing war of attrition?
“It’s likely that she’s a little bored with her routine so the next time she does it, just wait it out. She’ll have to give in eventually. And when she does, tell her she’s a good girl.”
He recommends similar whenever we walk past another dog, and she doesn’t lunge for it. “Think about it. When she lunges at a dog, you tell her off, right? But when she passes one with no incident, you say nothing. Dogs, like humans, respond to praise. So praise her, tell her she’s a good girl. She’ll soon start to respond positively.”
Putting it to the test
In the couple of weeks following our meeting, I started to try and put Hall’s advice to the test.
Fellow walkers observe me offering my dog near constant compliments simply for putting one paw in front of the other. If she seems somewhat bemused by all the plaudits, the tail-wag suggests she likes it, which is reassuring. Encouragement to keep going.
However, something I hadn’t counted on is how she proves a Zen master in her focus and willpower, something I palpably lack. Just yesterday, she decided to stop on the pavement and so ensued a five-minute face-off in the street. Ample time for me to reconsider my life choices. People mistook us for an art installation. Ultimately, I gave in. She won.
Nick is particularly frustrated with Missy sitting down on walks and refusing to move
When I tell Hall about her victory he says: “Be patient”, in a tone that is almost scolding but not quite. At least no other dogs were harmed during this exercise.
But there is a more pressing issue I’m facing at this time of year. Following weeks of fireworks around Halloween and Bonfire Night, I’m already gearing up for New Year’s Eve. Both of us are dreading it. Missy had always been blithely unconcerned with them until quite suddenly, two years ago, she wasn’t. At the sound of the first Catherine wheel, she becomes inconsolable.
Hall, for whom no problem is insurmountable, suggests two options. The first involves exposing her to the sound of fireworks through a speaker, ideally at mealtimes. “Turn the sound up a little more every day, and eventually she’ll no longer react, because she’s happy eating.”
The other, a swifter solution, is to cocoon her somewhere for the duration. “I know of one woman who found that the bathroom was the quietest room in her house. She put a blanket in the bath and sat in there with the dog.”
Pet owners do the strangest things, don’t they? I’m no different. And so this, it seems, is my fate come 31 December. I’ll clamber into the bathtub alongside my increasingly complicated best friend, and hope for the best. There are worse ways to see in the New Year, surely?
One month in, the results, at least so far, feel a little underwhelming. Everything Hall said made total sense, so I think I’d hoped for an overnight transformation. But she still does things like stopping and not moving, and it’s maddening.
However, what I have learned is to be more patient with her when out walking, and to keep praising her more. I’ve ultimately tried to see things more from Missy’s perspective, as it were, and less about me. I’ve brought myself down to her level.
Whether this will work in the long term or not, who knows but, I suppose it’s about the journey, not the destination and this is the mindset I will at least try to maintain in 2026.
The new series of Dogs Behaving (Very) Badly starts on 6 January on Channel 5.
