The blogasphere has been quiet from the point of view of Sonny Dog, excepting you may have noticed I have been prettying it up a bit and as I find my way around the system, boldly added some new pages which I hope readers will find informative, amusing and possibly controversial. I was on the point of threatening to put my article on dog poop in the local village magazine. Hold on there, my partner said. I'm not sure that it will have the impact you want and may put some people's backs up. Do I care I wonder? At least if you are putting people's backs up, you are getting them to talk about it and therefore having some effect. Rather than leaving everything to the status quo which might mean everyone carries on getting annoyed about it but not doing anything about it or, carries on doing it and ignoring their responsibility for it.
Anyway this all prompted a much bigger discussion about how you get to change people's entrenched behaviour. A while back our government became keen on a certain thing called 'nudge theory', this is the concept that rather than changing people by giving them negative consequences, you come up with fun positive ways to 'reward' them for changing their behaviour. Example - in a certain country they had a problem in the public toilets with men (sorry guys) missing the toilet and peeing on the floor. The authorities were getting fed up with all the cleaning up, so came up with an ingenious idea to deal with the problem. What they did was they got someone to paint a fly on the inside of the toilet bowel and gave all incomers the additional challenge of trying to hit that fly when they were having a pee. Result? They reduced the number of incidents of people missing the toilet by 80%, now that's a result, isn't it!!
So this got me to wonder how us dog owners could find similar inventive ways to help people change their behaviour in terms of picking up after their dog. I'd be glad to hear about any ideas that anyone has to deal with it.
The dog training is going really well. Sonny is now SO MUCH BETTER when it comes to encountering his fellow canines. He has reduced his oppositional behaviour to in the main some heavy breathing, which is a massive change from the spitting, snarling whirling dervish of before. The point is I think that we feel more calm and confident about managing these situations, so are probably not transmitting so much anxiety towards him. The new lead works a treat and we know it can both hold him and calm him down.
Recently we encountered a lady in the woods who was having trouble with her dog who very recently had become aggressive to both people and other dogs for reasons unknown. Curiously despite these issues she was allowing the dog to walk off lead, anyway passing over that small detail, I was very interested to watch her and the dog when we encountered them. Her immediate reaction on seeing us was blind panic, she shouted at us to stop and at the dog, who took absolutely no notice of her. It reminded me so much of how I used to be only a few months ago and I really felt for her. In fact we stopped and had a chat which helped the dogs to calm down and I was able to recommend both the wonderful Sally and Suzie to her. It's all about paying it forward, learning from others and passing on what you've learned in the hope that it might help them out in the future. Talk again soon...
