PDTE Newsletter July 2020

it, and has a number of problems that
his new person wanted to chat with me
about.
We all know the scenario, she wanted
to do her best but was overwhelmed
and wanted to know about training and
classes and how best to help him. I felt
a bit overwhelmed at this point too and
wanted to point her in the right direction
before she reached the point of no
return. I then had a flash of inspiration.
I have to admit at this point that I am
really a horse person who has also some
knowledge of dogs, so I asked her what
she would do if he were a horse.
She thought for a moment and said: “I
would turn him away”. Bingo! That was
the perfect answer.
Sometimes we horse people buy horses
that are overwhelmed and been pushed
to the limit of their endurance and can’t
cope with the normal world. Well intentioned
and empathetic horse people
will in which case often find a field, turn
them out so they can hopefully relax and
become horses again. It also helps them
to acclimatise to new surroundings and
to begin to build a relationship with new
people without putting extra pressure
on them.
I love this analogy for dogs, it wouldn’t
work for most people that have no
knowledge of horses but it is very fitting
for this poor dog and his new person.
If she can start off without making
demands of him, and help him to have a
life where expectations are removed he
will already be in a better place than at
any other point in his short life. This isn’t
the end of the story, of course but I just
thought it made a nice story.
I have some other thoughts too, one
of which concerns a game that seems
to have been all over social media that
concerns a box with holes in that people
shove into their dogs face and then
proceed to poke sausages (or similar)
through and snatch them away from the
dogs before they can get them. I really
don’t understand why people think their
dogs are supposed to entertain them,
or why they can’t stop to think about
why this might be detrimental for their
dogs. In particular at a time when they
are probably not getting good quality sleep and have had their
routines disturbed because of our current situation. There was
even a post on Facebook that I had to step away from about
a greyhound that was snapping at members of the family
when they plumped themselves down next to him on the sofa
throughout the day. There were the normal comments about
him being territorial and/or dominant and that he should be
removed from the sofa immediately.
When I asked her why family members needed to sit on that
sofa the comment was that was the only sofa they had. I then
asked if there were any other places where he could sleep, to
which the reply was that there was nowhere else. I do wonder
sometimes about the intelligence of people and what they
think constitutes a good life for the dogs that live with them.
My last nugget is about pandiculation. I am sure many people
that do yoga are familiar with this term but it is new to me, and
I love it. It is something that our dogs do naturally when they
stand up after sleeping, and what is so interesting about it, is
that the “stretch” goes throughout the whole body.
It is not a static or enforced stretch which can actually damage
muscles and fascia, such as when we isolate our hamstrings
and force a stretch on them, but far more therapeutic and
useful for the body and more notably something that dogs do
with no input from us.
I have been thinking about how many people advise stretches
for dogs, and I am not at all sure that enforced stretches, which
people are often encouraged to do with their dogs are particularly
good for them. This form of stretching is formed through
natural occurring movement and does not isolate or pinpoint
specific muscles or areas of the body.
This is a good definition that I found in an article:
“Pandiculation is the nervous system’s natural way of waking up
the sensory-motor system and preparing for movement. Humans,
along with all vertebrate animals, tend to automatically pandiculate
when we wake up or when we have been sedentary for a while.
If you’ve ever seen a dog or cat arch their back when they get up
from a nap, or watched a baby stretch their arms and legs as they
wake up, you’ve witnessed the pandicular response”.*
For a very long time I have had the expression ringing in my
head that a colleague used to recite with regularity which was
“we should be known as human doings not human beings”.
Which in my opinion really describes our human “condition”.
I hope the lockdown will have given more people more time to
think about the needs of their dogs and the animals that they
share their lives with, but that remains to be seen. I really do
hope it has helped to enrich dogs lives rather than detract the
quality of the time they have spent with us.
* www.yogauonline.com/yoga-anatomy/more-just-stretching-what-pandiculation
July 2020
PDTE Newsletter
29