THE OTHER END OF THE LEASH

Hi. I’m Patricia McConnell, a certified applied animal behaviorist and dog trainer who is crazy in love with her dogs. I once wrote, about my soul mate dog, Luke: “I imagine Luke’s death to be as if someone took all the oxygen out of the air and expected me to live without it.” These powerful emotions that I share with so many others are matched by my intellectual curiosity about dog behavior, and the behavior of those of us who love them. Animal behavior and human behavior have always been my passion. Even when I was tiny I wanted to know why the little black ants in my back yard left their nests in a neat pattern of highways, and what Fudge, our family’s delicately-nosed terrier cross, was thinking as she curled up tight against my belly on the carpet. And why did that woman across the street always yell at her dog when he finally came home? It didn’t seem to be helping, but she couldn’t seem to stop…

Although I loved our family dog, during my high school years I lived for the weekends, when I could go to the dude ranch stable down the road and breathe in air from the huge, open nostrils of my favorite gelding, and ride through the mesquite trees along the Arizona Grand Canal, watching the world through the two, pricked bookends of my horses ears. I say “my horses” but I never owned one, just worked my way up to taking tourists out on trail rides, and grooming and feeding many of the stable’s horses. I loved it then, and I love horses still, although I rarely get to work with them now.

After high school I started college, but dropped out because of illness and an early marriage. I eventually recovered from them both, and spent a decade doing jobs just because they were jobs. I was a cashier at a bookstore, an administrative assistant at a non-profit organization fighting for treatment for alcohol and other drug abuse, a production assistant at a television station, a counselor for troubled adolescents, and a go-go dancer. Well, okay, that was just for one night, but who could resist adding it to one’s resume?

At the age of thirty I enrolled as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin to study what I’d always cared most about: animal behavior. I ended up getting a Ph.D. from UW-Madison, not so much because I wanted the degree, but because I wanted to find the answer to a question I’d uncovered as an undergraduate: “Do different kinds of sounds–for example rapidly, repeated notes like “Pup- pup-pup” or long, slow extended ones like “Whoaaaaaa–have inherent effects on the animal who hears them?” In other words, can some types of sounds, without training, speed animals up and others slow them down? (The answer is yes… check out my first few blogs.)

After I got my degree I was determined to apply what I learned about behavior to animals that we live with. Although between undergrad and graduate school I had spent a wonderful two years working with psychologist Chuck Snowdon’s Cotton Top Tamarins, (google them, they are unbearably attractive and interesting), I wanted to work with animals that are an intrinsic part of daily life. Having always loved that animals share our homes, and not wanting to leave my family and live in Africa for years at a time studying primates, I decided to use what I had learned about behavior to help solve the behavioral problems of family owned dogs and cats.

In 1988, not long after I sent in the final version of my dissertation, I took a deep breath, and with Nancy Raffetto, a colleague who had also just gotten her Ph.D. with an emphasis on behavior, began a business as applied animal behaviorists. Dogs Best Friend Ltd. began in 1988 as a service to people who needed help with behavior problems in dogs. We set up shop in the tiny little town of Black Earth, Wisconsin because it was close to our homes and the rent was $100 a month. My first client was Peaches, a Shar Pei with separation anxiety so serious that she turned her pudgy, wrinkled face into hamburger the first time she was left alone.

That was twenty years ago. Since then, the business expanded into one that ran positive-based dog training classes in five different locations, (early on it was clear that many of the problems we were seeing were actually caused by the old-fashioned, punishment-based type of training that was being done in “obedience classes), a busy practice with several animal behavior consultants, a publishing business for booklets that I and colleagues wrote on dog training and behavior problem solving, a busy speech and seminar schedule and a call-in radio show, Calling All Pets, produced by Wisconsin Public Radio. Last year, I sold the training class and consultation business to DBF’s training director, Aimee Moore, and she and the trainers are doing a wonderful job of carrying on the tradition of helping people and dogs with effective and humane methods that are based on the best of current practices.

Now I, along with Denise Swedlund and Andrea Jennings, are carrying on the publishing business. I want to focus on writing and speaking, although I find I can’t help seeing clients on occasion-partly because I love it and partly because it seems important to keep my hand in. I think it’s awfully easy for advice about dog training to be easy to give if it’s theoretical, but an entirely different matter when you’re really living it.

I continue to do the radio show, to write and speak around the country, and to teach “The Biology and Philosophy of Human/Animal Relationships” at UW-Madison once a year. I now live with two dogs, a cat and a flock of sheep on a little farm in southern Wisconsin. Luke is gone now (and yes, it was unbearable; you understand, I know), although I sense him there still when the sun dips below the high hill and the backlit sheep raise their heads, looking for their evening grain. Luke lives on in his nephew, Will, a two-year old Border Collie who I will write about often, as I will Luke’s daughter, 14 and a half year old Lassie, a butter cream of a dog who holds my heart in her paws as her eyes and ears fade. There are pictures below of the animals and my little, fourteen-acre farm in the hills outside of Madison, Wisconsin. The other member of the pack is Jim, my human soul mate, the kind with only two legs. We have been together eight years now, and I simply cannot imagine life without him. Will worships him, Sushi the cat loves cuddling next to him in winter, and Lassie trusts him completely. Me too.

If you’d like to learn more about me and my dogs, past and present, you’ll learn most at this point by reading my two books published by Ballantine, The Other End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs, and For the Love of a Dog: Understanding Emotions in You and Your Best Friend. I write that with hesitation, there is plenty of advertising for those books elsewhere. But because they combine personal stories with discussions about the biology and psychology of people and dogs, they are simply the best way I know to tell you who I am. My hope is to continue those type of writings in this blog: to inform and enrich our relationship with dogs by combining the experience of life with relevant information from science and progressive dog training. I hope you’ll join in the discussion.

Trisha

Me and Will at the top of the hill pasture. Will, as always, looks great. I look like a fat chipmunk. This is why actresses won’t let photographers take pictures of them from underneath.

My dear old Lassie, quiet here, but playful and active at 14 and a half.

Sushi.. two pictures, cuz I can’t figure out how to separate them…..sigh. Oh well, she deserves two pictures for being herded around the house on ocassion by Willie.