Happy 1st Gotcha Day: The dog you want vs the dog you need

A happy, confident and calm canine is what I wanted in a rescue dog, but then along came Bruno...

“Sometimes you don’t get the dog you want, you get the dog you need,” is a quote widely attributed to the somewhat controversial US TV dog trainer Cesar Millan. Regardless of what you think of Millan and his training methods (for the record – I hate them), it is an aphorism that chimes with me, as I reflect on the end of my first year as Bruno’s guardian.

Bruno looking fetching in his Gotcha Day neckerchief

Before Bruno arrived, I wanted a dog in the mould of the ones my family owned. From my late teens to my late 30s, my parents have had a succession of happy, sociable and confident rescue labradors, as detailed elsewhere on this blog.

These were all dogs you could take for walks at any time of day without worrying the park might be too busy for them to cope with, and all of them slotted into our busy, family home with next to no difficulty at all.

On meeting someone new, these dogs would greet them with happy curiosity and a tail wag. If you let them off-lead in a park, they would ignore all of the other dogs, do their own thing, and come back as soon as you called them.

Walking them was also a largely relaxing experience, where you could lose yourself in your thoughts as they trotted alongside you.

That’s the kind of dog I wanted, but what I got was Bruno. He’s a Labrador, certainly, but not like any other I’ve encountered before.

Enter Bruno

He arrived in the UK from an overseas dog rescue charity based in Italy after spending the best (or worst) part of the first year of his life in an animal shelter. And was scared and unsure of everything.

Door frames and light fixtures terrified him, and – for the first day or two with me – I seemed to set him on edge too. He barked constantly at the neighbourhood noise and in response to anything he didn’t like the look of in my flat. And for someone who was used to living on their own in relative quiet, it was a real shock to the system.

And when he wasn’t barking, he’d spend his time pacing, pissing and pooping in my lounge because he refused to leave it during his first couple of weeks here.   

It took me three months to desensitise him to wearing a collar and walking him on a lead. And our first walks were eye-opening in terms of how ill-equipped he was to cope with the horrors of the outside world.

Our very first outing to the park took place at 7am and he spotted one solitary person, from about half a mile away, walking along the road running parallel to the park and bolted in the opposite direction, pulling me over in the process. The second day, an off-lead dog ambushed him and he bolted again and ran straight into a tree. This, sadly, failed to knock any sort of sense into him.

Incidentally, that dog’s owner used a recall training technique I’ve never seen anyone employ since whereby he started pelting Bruno and I with tennis balls, while shouting “fetch” to his dog. The reason why I’ve never seen anyone else do that is probably because it didn’t work at all.

Within a few weeks, Bruno’s reactions to seeing people, dogs and people with dogs when out and about shifted from flight to fight. He stopped trying to run away from things he didn’t like, and started barking and lunging in their direction to scare them away instead.

These behaviours meant I was sometimes on the receiving end of a few choice words from whatever passer-by Bruno had decided he didn’t like the look of, which always felt quite shaming and saddening. I also had very sore elbows and shoulders a lot of the time from having to wrestle Bruno back under control during his outbursts.

So, on reflection and in summary: you would have to be mental to actively want and seek out a dog like Bruno. He’s not the dog I wanted, but he’s definitely the dog I needed.

The hermit era

The three months it took me to train Bruno to walk on a lead I now fondly refer to as my “hermit era”. I didn’t really leave the house at all except to pick up supplies (wine, mostly) because Bruno wasn’t toilet trained, wasn’t used to being left alone, and was unable to go on walks yet.

While all these training needs remained works in progress, it was easier to stay at home rather than come back to a panicked pooch.

Also, as far as I was concerned, putting my life on hold for a few months to help Bruno work through his various quirks would be worth it because I’d be getting a decade (or more) of companionship in return.

And while this meant missing out on nights out with my friends, family get-togethers and work trips, this period of doing nothing and having nothing else to focus on but Bruno actually did me the world of good.

There was a couple of life course-changing events that happened to me during the pandemic, including the implosion of a (very) long-term relationship that saw me move back in with my parents for a time.

While the world was still in lockdown, I turned my attention to working out what I needed to do to get my life back on track as quickly as possible.

So, I focused on finding somewhere new to live, I knuckled down harder at work, started to dabble in online dating, and ultimately just focused on moving on and forging ahead.

I thought I was healing from my break-up, but it turns out I was just distracting myself. I had not dealt at all with any of the emotional fallout from that situation or taken any time to grieve it.

And the onset of the hermit era forced me to do that. With nowhere to go and nothing to do except hang out at home with an agoraphobic labrador, I had a lot of time on my hands to think about stuff and what I really wanted the next phase of my life to look like.

It gave me time to make peace with some uncomfortable truths about myself and my future. But having Bruno to focus on also gave me purpose, routine, and companionship - which were all things I was sorely lacking living on my own.

Digging into dog training

I’d break up my working day by doing 5-10 minute training sessions with Bruno here and there. The aim was to work on desensitising him to all the scary neighbourhood coming and goings using counter-conditioning, where you pair something scary with something good to change the dog’s emotional response to the scary thing happening.

In this instance, every time one of my neighbours had the sheer audacity to stand out the front of my building and chat to someone, I would catch Bruno before he had a chance to bark and say “good”. Then give him a treat and, in the process, show him that being calm in the house meant good things happen to him.

As the weeks progressed, I’d hear one of my neighbours talking outside and ready myself to grab the training treats, only to find Bruno wasn’t bothered by them and their chatter anymore and didn’t react. He does still go off occasionally, but usually it’s if they’re being particularly loud. So, really, he’s barking now to keep the peace.

During Bruno’s first few weeks, I also spent a lot of time doing exercises to build my bond with him. Any time he voluntarily gave me eye contact, I would say “nice” and give him a treat. Eye contact is something a lot of fearful, anxious dogs struggle with and Bruno was no different in this regard. So the idea was to teach him that looking at me made good things happen to him.

And day-by-day I started to see little bits of progress, as Bruno became more comfortable in my presence. A huge win during this period was when he started to eat his main meals in front of me, whereas previously he wouldn’t touch the food in his bowl while I was in the same room as him.

In time, we progressed on to little bits of obedience training – all the classics including sit, stay, down – as well as fist bumps, which the first behaviourist I ever had a consult with about Bruno told me was a very silly thing to have taught a dog. This is also why we never booked a follow-up consultation with her. She wasn’t much fun.

Seeing Bruno figure out what I wanted him to do, and then do it on command became addicting because of how rewarding it felt. Yes, we still had lots of work to do, but seeing how quickly he learned things took away a lot of the anxiety I felt about how long it would take for me to help Bruno move through the world with greater ease and more peace.

The process remains ongoing, especially as the focus of his training is now firmly on neutralising his reactions towards the things that scare him, which is going to take a long time.

I’ve learned a lot during our first year together. I’ve read countless dog training manuals, scrolled TikTok for hours looking for advice on how to help nervous dogs, and worked under the care and guidance of a (much more fun) behaviourist and a brilliant dog trainer.

Bruno’s also taught me a lot too. Particularly about the importance of having patience, trusting the training process, and being empathetic. He’s also shown me that the dog I wanted would have been wasted on me. I needed a new challenge and, boy, did I get it in Bruno.