Hello and welcome to this webinar today on preventing behavioural problems in puppies and kittens. My name is Hayley Walters, and I've been a veterinary nurse now for over 20 years, and I'm really hoping that I've got some knowledge and some gems of information that I can share with you with your owners and how to prevent behavioural problems in puppies and kittens. We'll get straight to it.

Here are your learning objectives. So number one, by the end of this lecture, hopefully you'll be able to understand what natural dog and cat behaviour actually is. Recognise the communication and body language that often precedes a dog bite.

I'm going to talk about it not being about. Dominance and be able to advise owners on how understanding the behavioural needs and how to provide these at the beginning of their pet's life will lead to cats and dogs well set up to thrive and not just survive in a very human centred world. Now I'm gonna start with a question.

Did you know that in 2009, 131,000 plus cats and just under 130,000 dogs entered UK shelter welfare organisations. Now, when the survey was done, only just over half of organisations actually responded to the questionnaire. So we can probably assume that these numbers were actually much higher in 2009.

This is a shocking statistic, a really sad reflection of how disposables, potentially cats and dogs can be. Now there are lots of reasons why owners might relinquish their pets. For example, it might be that personal circumstances have changed.

Maybe that person has got a new job and there's no time for their pet anymore. Maybe they are moving house, maybe they've got a divorce, and that has upset who's going to care for the animal. Maybe a new baby has come along.

Maybe their landlord has changed or decided pets can't be kept anymore. Maybe there's financial worries and the pet is the first thing that has to go. Perhaps that owner just doesn't have the time anymore to care adequately for that, that pet.

Allergies have potentially developed with new children or new partners. Maybe there are health issues with the animal and the owner can't or won't treat those those health issues for whatever reason. Maybe it's an unwanted litter that spaying could have prevented, but it didn't happen and now all those extra puppies and kittens need to find a home and can't be found a home, and so are placed in shelters.

And sometimes we see really sad reasons like the. Existing dog or the existing cat doesn't get on with the new puppy, and it's the older animal that gets sent to the shelter and the new puppy or kitten that gets to stay. And then there are just really bizarre reasons that have been cited as reasons for relinquishing a pet.

And one of the weirdest ones I read was The dog doesn't match the furniture, or the dog watches me get undressed. Very strange. I mean, just close the door, or get new furniture.

So yes, lots and lots of reasons. And, a descriptive study conducted in 2005 collected all the data of almost 3000 dogs relinquished dogs. Rehoming centres in the UK and the most common reasons for dogs to be relished were problem behaviours and also the need for more attention than the owners could provide.

That's really interesting that it was behavioural problems, behavioural issues with the dog that caused the majority of rehomings to be needed. And out of those behavioural reasons for relinquishment, these were the top 10. At 10, at number 1, the most common reason for a dog to be relinquished was that it had bitten, bitten either a person or another animal.

And then going down the list, we can see that aggression towards people escaping or destructive behaviours inside or outside the home, disobedience, and then problems with other pets, aggression towards animals, apologies, . So the first one was, yeah, aggression towards people. Soils the house and vocalises too much.

Now, what my talk today is hopefully going to cover is preventing all of these problem behaviours that cause relinquishment and address them before they ever need to to start. So the majority of the studies agree that this this is it. Problem behaviour is the cause for relinquishment.

And for cats, it's the same thing. So if you look at a study, done by Cats protection, the behavioural reasons commonly cited by owners when relinquishing the cats was aggressive behaviour towards people or other cats, or house soiling, which included inappropriate toileting and spraying. And again, today's webinar will hopefully cover the the things that we can be telling owners to prevent these behaviours from happening as well.

Now, did you know that the dog was the first animal to be domesticated around 14,000 to 30,000 years ago, and these dogs hung around human settlements and the the relationship was mutually beneficial to dogs and to humans. Dogs would clear up all of our mess and all of our waste and also bark when any predators came into the area. Now the tamest dogs obviously gained the best advantage, they would get the most food.

And then we as humans started to select for calmness, calm behaviours, and dogs that were safest to be around and any useful traits that they had, and we selected for these to create the dog that we now have today. There is no alpha male or female within dogs. There is no top dog.

This is really important that we pass this information on to owners. There is no linear hierarchy. There are some very successful, very charismatic dog behaviourist and trainers calling themselves that on television still today, especially on National Geographic, that are still peddling this misinformation about there being an alpha dog within a pack of dogs or within the family home with humans.

This is absolutely not true. No linear hierarchy, no dog is trying to dominate you. It's not trying to gain top position in the home.

We must let owners know that because it changes everything when we think about how dogs behave and how we're training dogs. Dogs are obligatory social, obligatory social, they cannot help themselves. Most dogs want to be friendly, they want to greet and they want to interact, very different to cats.

Free roaming dogs that you see on the streets of many low income countries will live in small family groups. The pups will stay with their mum for well over a year, maybe up to 18 months, and we think about what we do with puppies, we take them off their mums are just 7 or 8 weeks old, so very, very unnatural what we do with puppies when you think about what they would be doing, on the streets. Their social structure on the streets, these free roaming dogs is very fluid and very situation specific.

And they forage and scavenge independently. There is no hunting with these dogs, and where there are free roaming dogs, there will be humans. You will not find free roaming dogs out with a human settlement because they rely so much on the waste and the rubbish that we produce that they can scavenge from.

They don't make for life as we know, and there's no cooperative raising of the pups. It is all left to mum. Dogs are usually extremely, compliant with humans, but some aggressive behaviours may be seen, it's rare, but they can be seen, with females after birth or or around their puppies.

So where does the idea of dominance hierarchy come from in dogs? Well, it was a study done in the 1940s on captive and unrelated wolves in a zoo in Switzerland, and it did not look at wolves in the wild, and this was the only study that was done for decades and decades. Now when we look at wolves in the wild, they actually live in family packs.

There's two parents and their pups. There is no innate sense of rank. It is a cooperative and cohesive family unit.

They have to get on because they do hunt together, so there has to be cooperation in this unit. The supposed alphas are what we would call in any other social group, parents. And the offspring naturally follow their parents as you'd expect in any other species.

Nobody has won the role of dominance by fighting. They simply are dominant, for want of a better word, or in charge, the parents are, by the simple fact that they are the parents. Now, as the pups become older, they do not try and overthrow the supposed alpha, as we've been led to believe, these young dogs coming trying to overthrow the old grey wolf.

They simply eventually disperse, they mate, they have their own pups, and therefore they form their own packs and families. Now the wolves that were first studied were unrelated, and they were in an enclosed environment with very limited resources. And we must remember that it's important, apologies, it's important that when we are looking at dog behaviour, that we actually look at dogs and we do not base it on historical work done on a completely different species, just like we wouldn't base human behaviour on chimpanzee studies.

Now these dogs that were, these wolves, sorry, that were living in the zoo had limited resources, as I just mentioned. Now resources really matter. Different individuals find different resources more precious or important than other individuals.

Now, this is a little group of, of, of 3 dogs that I knew very, very well. And as you can see, they're great on the lead together, they're great off the lead. They will share beds, they will share.

Rugs in front of the fire, they will run and they will play together. Absolutely no problems there. So when we think about resources like beds, and the owner, no problem.

When we're looking at food, you can just see that there's food, a bowl of food in the in the bottom left of this picture, there's food left in that bowl. Neither neither of them are fighting over. Neither of them are trying to get to the owner.

They're happy to share a bed, even though another bed is there. So when we're looking at these, these dogs resources, everything is pretty equal until we throw something high value, like a bone into the mix. Now you can see this black dog is is protecting her bone.

She is guarding her bone. This is what we call resource guarding. Now that brown and white dog, we know that they are really good friends and they live together, spend all their time together, but you throw something high value into it like a bone, and we see very different behaviour.

You can just see that the black dog there has got her paw on her bone. She is looking at the brown and white dog and she is growling. You can just see that her, her lips are up and you can just see her teeth in that photo.

Now look at the brown and white dog. She's not trying to get that bone. We can see the whites of her eyes, her ears are down, and she's, look, she is saying, OK, I won't take it.

I will back off. And that's not because the black dog is dominant, is, is the dominant alpha in that group, and it's not because the brown and white dog is the submissive dog at the bottom of the rung of the high. Rocky ladder.

It's just that that bone is really important to that black dog, and the brown and white dog has either learned that if she tries to get it, she won't win, or it's not that important to her, and therefore, it is not worth fighting over. Once the bone is out of the picture, their relationship goes back to the exact same one it was where they shared everything, including each other's beds. So there is no such thing as trying to be top dog, and ethologists have warned against the use of the term dominant to describe individual dogs.

You can't say that dog is dominant. It's not a characteristic. Dominance is an attribute of the usual behaviour between two individuals when they interact or come into competition over a resource or situation in when in which one will always back down rather than fight.

So a lot of previous learning experiences come into these situations. I really want to talk about the ladder of aggression because I think it's an amazing resource that we should be sharing with owners. It's a great tool to show owners how their dog is thinking when they see it perform certain facial expressions, behaviours, or body postures, and not enough owners understand what their dog is doing before it feels that it needs to bite.

So the gestures shown on the lower rungs of the ladder, such as yawning or putting the ears back and raising a paw, mean I'm feeling worried, please don't threaten me, please calm down, please stay away. The gestures on the higher rungs of the ladder in the red areas such as growling, snapping and biting mean stop, leave me alone right now. Now understanding the meaning of these gestures will help the dog to avoid the last resort of aggression.

And so we must be telling owners about the ladder of aggression. We should be having this up in the waiting room. So if we look at the very bottom of the ladder of aggression, we can see that a dog that is ever so slightly anxious will yawn, blink, or lick its nose.

And this is yawning outward of being tired and licking its nose outward of having eaten. And we can often see the whites of the eyes here too. So humans are very strange mammals because we can see the whites of our eyes all the time.

But with dogs and many other mammals, that's not the case, it's a sign of anxiety in our dogs. So these behaviours are displacement behaviours, they're normal behaviours, but we're seeing them at a time when they're feeling anxious. As we creep up the ladder, as it as the anxiety level slightly increases, the dog will turn its head away from the situation or object that is causing the anxiety, and this is what we should be telling owners to look out for, because if they can spot things at this level, we can avoid bites from ever happening.

But next, the dog will turn its whole body away and sit or start lifting its paw like this little chihuahua, this very worried Chihuahua here. And a lot of people don't know about the paw lift. They think it's cute, or they think it's begging or offering to give a paw, but it's not.

It's a low level sign of anxiety. Now, if the situation doesn't improve for the dog, it will try and walk away from it, the object, the child, the vet, or the situation. Now this must always be respected.

This dog is being very sensible, and it is trying to escape the stressor, doesn't want to escalate to a bite if it can get away. So that's what this dog is doing. We should try our best not to follow them and stress them even more.

If the dog is not allowed to get away, then we'll see the ears go back, and we'll often see, often see gazes averting too, so they're just not making eye contact with anyone. They're looking away, almost wishing themselves out of the situation. Now all this is being done in an attempt to communicate that it is anxious.

In fact, both mammals look pretty anxious in this picture. And now as they get more anxious, we will start to see some very obvious body language changes. They're standing crouched with their tail tucked right under.

You can see that this dog is also showing the whites of her eyes. She's gaze averting and she's got her ears pulled back too. So owners cannot be in any denial that this is a very worried dog, but we push dogs, don't we?

Now, lying down with the leg up is often misinterpreted as I would like a tummy tickle. Only one dog in the slide is asking for a tummy tickle. It's the black and tan one, obviously.

We've got the tongue lolling out, we've got the tail nice and relaxed, the mouth is relaxed, the eyes are relaxed. This dog is, you can almost see it wiggling on its bottom, saying, Please tickle my tummy. The visler above, however, is not asking for a tummy tickle.

This dog is giving off very, very obvious appeasing behaviour. It's the equivalent of you being in a crowded pub and someone staring you down, and you've tried to create distance, you've gaze averted, you've swallowed, you've told your friends that person keeps looking at me and oh no, that person has now come towards you. And it's unlikely you would go straight to punch them.

In the nose, you'd probably hold up your hands, show your palms and say, Oh, I don't want any trouble. Please leave me alone. And that's what this dog is doing.

We can see the ears pulled right back. The eyes are really, really tight. The tail is tucked between the legs, and we've got that poor lift, very stiff and rigid to the body.

This dog is begging you for space. We should not interpret this either as submission. So lots of people believe that when a dog rolls on its back, shows you it's tummy like this, it's saying, OK, you're the boss, you win, I'll do whatever you want.

That's not the case, because this dog, if pushed any further, may feel that he has to resort to biting. So we must not interpret this as submission. It's really old fashioned, term to be using on dogs.

OK, now we're getting into quite dangerous territory as the dog is feeling the need to have to defend itself if if we're not listening to it, rather than give off any more appeasing signs. So here we will start to see the dog stiffen up and stare at you. Some people, this is enough, but for other people, that's not.

We'll still keep pushing these dogs thinking I can either overpower it, or what I need to do is more important than how the dog is actually feeling. So next we have the growl. The dog is now very close to having to finally bite, but it is still communicating with us.

Now, if a dog does growl, we often punish them, don't we? With a, hey, that's enough. But it's telling you how it feels.

It's communicating how it feels. Why take away an early warning system? Why not just take the batteries out of your smoke detector?

I know, I certainly like those Akitas to growl at me before they bite me. So when we are educating owners, advise them to stop doing whatever it is that they are doing that is making the dog so defensive that it has to growl. If a dog is punished every time it growls, it may not bother growling in the future, and it may go straight for the bite.

So remember that the dog is not trying to dominate you, not trying to dominate the situation. It is communicating how it feels. I really appreciate a dog that growls at me.

It's almost like, thank you so much for telling me. Next we have the snap. Very often when a dog snaps, they miss and they meant to miss.

This is your last warning. So often this is enough for us to finally realise that the dog was really anxious and we should have listened sooner. But if we still don't get the message, or we still feel like we've got to overpower this dog, get the job done, move on with the next part of the day, we don't get the message, the dog is left with no choice but to bite us.

So dogs will use all of these signals on us, on other dogs, and even on other species, so confident that we can read them and bless them, we often can't read them properly. Now smaller dogs will often climb up the ladder of aggression much more quickly than bigger dogs, and they'll miss out altogether many of the signals that we usually see just before a snap. Or a bite, like they'll miss out a growl.

Now this is because many of them have learned that there is no point in doing all of these lower level, body language gestures like this chihuahua, who bless him, has gone from a ears back in a poor lift, but very, very quickly went, went up to the growl. It didn't take, it took a second for these two pictures to be taken. Now if a German Shepherd or a Doberman growls, then people will usually back straight off.

I bet none of us are really getting bitten by Rottweilers or Akitas, but we are by the little dogs, because if a chihuahua or a Yorkie growls, then we're often quite amused by it. And don't really take it very seriously. Oh, look at you trying to be all big and brave, but we still carry on and we still approach them because we know that they're small enough as well, and that we can overpower them.

So they've learned that it doesn't work to go through all the signals, and they have to escalate to the top of the ladder immediately. So we need to still respect what they're telling us, despite them only being 2 kg. How they feel matters just as much to them as it does to, say, a 40 kg husky that could, that could cause a lot of damage if it bit you.

OK, natural social structure and behaviour of cats. So, cats were domesticated around 10,000 years ago and actually could revert to their wild state again if necessary. Unlike the dog, who's so dependent on humans, cats happily go back.

We don't need you humans, thank you very much for all the food in the meantime. They are solitary, self-sufficient hunters. They will hunt even if they are not hungry.

They cannot help themselves. Some cats will stop eating the prey that they've just caught in order to hunt the next prey that's just run past them. Their predatory drive is very, very strong, and I'm sure we've all seen this in our pet cats.

Now they're selectively social, and it depends on who the other cat or dog or human is, the availability and the distribution and the predictability of resources, resources being food, water, bed, hiding places, entry and exit points, owners, toys, etc. Female kittens may stay on with their mom after puberty, but males will leave the group. Any group of naturally occurring cats that you see, on the streets or in farms are usually familial, so related to each other and female as well.

They are territorial territorial. They will patrol, survey. And mark their territory with scratching, middening, so poos, and also spraying their territory with urine.

They will work very hard to avoid physical contact or interaction with unknown cats, and they'll often interact from a distance and make a lot of noise as fighting is potentially very costly and dangerous to a cat. So. Lots of the time, there's lots of yowling and gesturing from a distance, lots of tail wagging from a distance.

OK, we all know that socialisation and gentle exposure to novel stimuli may be an important component of preventing behavioural problems in in dogs and also kittens. So dog socialisation, window of opportunity, that precious, precious window is 6 to 13 weeks of age. But in cats, it's much younger, only 2 to 7 weeks of age is your time to get that cat exposed to lots of novel stimuli.

So a well socialised animal is much less likely to feel stressed by novelty and cope with normal daily life in the home environment. So socialisation has a huge impact on an individual's lifelong welfare. So during this window of opportunity, the 6 to 13 weeks for puppies and 2 to 7 weeks for kittens, they are primed to form relationships easily with other animals and people and to learning that certain sights and sounds and experiences are not to be not to be feared, you know, like the Hoover, like a motorbike, like running water, or a loud TV.

Now over the same period, they also learn how to interact with those others using body language and vocalisation. So puppies who are well socialised during this period, e.g., they're living in a family home, they're encountering a wide range of people, animals and situations, are more likely to develop into calm, confident and well-behaved adults.

And I bet lockdown has, exposed to you all, a huge range of really badly socialised puppies. I know that I am seeing it, and I know we've got potentially another 15 years of dealing with these poor poor dogs. So what can we do?

Well, what we need to do is use our second vax appointment or our puppy and kitten health check appointments as cleverly and as sensibly as we can. This is your precious 10 to 15 minutes, more if you can get it to talk. About behaviour because it matters so much that we create these emotionally resilient animals.

As I say, it's a very human centred world, and they've got to adapt to our world. So we need to be teaching owners from the get go what it is that they can be doing. It's controversial.

Please don't waste your time talking about fleas and worms. Give them a leaflet on that. Talk about behaviour because they all have questions for you as well.

It is much easier to train good habits than it is to untrain bad habits. So let's get these animals whilst they're as young as possible. I'm gonna start with kittens.

This is what I would like all veterinary nurses and vets across the UK to be talking to their kitten owners about to create these emotionally resilient animals. We can use a really simple acronym. So, preventing the most common behavioural problems, to the ones I mentioned earlier that gets cats relinquished, can be so covered, it can be covered so easily by remembering this acronym TOLS stands for territory, Opportunity to hunt and play, litter trays and toileting, eating and drinking, scratching area.

Seems so basic, but not addressing these subjects is what is getting cats relinquished for their behavioural problems, not for any of the other problems that I talked about that owners may experience. So we'll start with territory. All cats are territorial.

Unlike dogs, as I said, cats are selectively social, which means they choose very carefully which other cats they allow to get close to them, if any at all. So this is why we often see problems in those multi-cat households. It's not a very natural situation for them at all that we force them to endure.

So all cats are terri territorial, and their territory can be divided into the home range. This is the entire area, the cat roams. It may overlap with other cats.

The territory, this is the area they will actively defend. They think it's theirs, might be your garden, and you already have a cat living in your house, but they think that's their territory, and they'll mark it mid in it, so poo in it, and also scratch, to mark that territory. And then we have the core territory, and this is where all their resources are.

This is their shelter, it's where they eat, sleep, rest, or play, and it's usually the owner's home, and the problems occur. When the territory is under threat. So we need owners to to understand that problems occur when the cats feel it's territory is not safe.

So owners, what can we tell them to do? Well, they should limit the number of people and animals who come to the house. We should be stressing to them that it's really a good idea to consider microchip.

Entry only cat flaps. Can you imagine if you're super territorial and there is a a hole or a cat flap in your territory that any old cat can walk in and out of? Extremely stressful.

So that cat is then coming into the core territory, which is where the cat is supposed to feel its absolute safest, and it can't defend it all the time, or it will try and defend it all the time, and cause real stress problems for the cat. So microchip entry, only cat flaps are a brilliant idea. Owners can also consider the use of pheromone sprays or diffusers to help the cats feel more secure within their core territory as well.

And all the resources in the house need to be a sufficient number of resources for the number of cats living in that household, and they also need to be easily accessible. And this is especially important in the multi-cat households where where that you've got individual cats who do not get on with each other. And there should be enough resources placed in appropriate areas so that each cat can live a solitary a life as necessary.

It can lead a life completely independently of, say, having to go to the kitchen to eat, the living room to sleep, and the hallway to toilet. Everything that it needs should be in one area so it could completely avoid the other cat who perhaps has been given a different room. One cat could have upstairs, one cat could have could have downstairs, but they must have enough resources so they don't have to go into each other's territory to access those resources.

OK, opportunities to hunt and play. So cats are predatory and hunting is very, very natural cat behaviour. So feral cats will hunt, 20 to 30 times a day.

Not every hunt is successful. It is worth noting that even well fed cats will have, will hunt as the behaviour is so innate. So we can be advising owners of the following, that it's essential that indoor only cats have an outlet for this hunting behaviour.

We have to provide that for them. We can tell owners that toys should be provided, and the owner encouraged to mimic hunting games for their cats. So fishing rods are good.

Tell them that the prey, I used to do this incorrectly, the prey should never run towards the cat. This is not natural prey behaviour. The cat should always be chasing the prey, stalking, you know, sighting it, stalking it, and then leaping on that prey.

A mouse would never, well, it would only be a silly mouse that runs towards the cat. The toys that you use should be rotated so that the cat does not get bored. Often the cat will lose interest as the prey, in quotation marks, it doesn't change shape like a real animal does.

When a real animal has been caught and played with and manipulated and chewed, it changes shape, it falls apart, bits fall off it, and our toys don't do this. So cats can often bore quite quickly of toys. Owners should keep the sessions short.

I think owners have an unrealistic, Theory of how long a hunt should last for. So it should just be a few minutes. So short session and end it if you can, with a puzzle feeder of food, little treatable dispenser or of something tangible that the cat can manipulate and chew, carry, and toss around.

So feathers are not ideal. To end a play session on, it's very frustrating for the cat just to be catching a feather. It, it needs something mouse or bird shaped really.

OK, on to litter trays. There should be sufficient litter trays for the number of cats in the house, 11 per cat plus one extra. We need to be informing owners that 2 litter trays or 7 litter trays side by side will still be viewed as one litter tray by the cat and therefore they need to make sure that they are, there are several trays positioned around the house to reduce the chance of the cat finding somewhere it thinks is appropriate to toilet.

Through fairs and areas near doors or floor length windows are not ideal as the cat may be disturbed or feel overlooked. Access to the litter tray should be easy and stress free, especially in those, in those multi-cat or busy households. They shouldn't have to walk past a gauntlet of children, dogs, and other cats to go to the toilet.

We're definitely going to start seeing problems, if that is the case. I know I'd be choosing somewhere else to to walk past if I had to walk through a scary area. Each time I wanted to go to the toilet.

Now cats originated from the savannahs, so a sandy substrate is often preferred and it needs to be deep enough to allow the cattle, the cat to dig and bury its deposits. Make sure owners are not cleaning the litter trays with strong smelling disinfectants. And I see this so often all the cat's resources plonked together, do not place food and water bowls next to litter trays.

Nobody likes to eat, where they poo, and nobody likes to sleep where the we and poo either. So thoughtful distribution needs to be done by the owners. OK.

E is for eating. Cats are obligate carnivores, and despite current trends, they cannot be vegetarian or vegan. And cats will naturally eat 10 to 20 meals a day.

A little mouse is only about 18 calories, so you can see why they're having to eat so many of those a day. They are solitary eaters, and they do prefer to eat alone, even if socially bonded with another cat. If they could choose, they would be.

Alone. And so often those double dishes we see for two cats to eat out of, or all the all the cat's food bowls all in one area. And yeah, the leads, of course they will.

They're hungry, but they wouldn't choose to eat in this group social restaurant type setting, if they could, if they could avoid it. So cats, like to survey for danger when they're eating. They're vulnerable when they're eating, and they like to keep looking up and checking because they're small enough to be preyed upon, even though they're predators themselves, they are small mammals that do get preyed upon, so they do have to survey when they're eating.

So we shouldn't be advising owners to place their food bowls and their water bowls up against the wall, which we so often do. It should be pulled away from the wall, so they're not, they're not having to check their back, having to look behind them or feel worried that someone's going to sneak up behind them. And the bowls also shouldn't be put in a busy walkthrough area or next to a washing machine that hums and makes lots of noise that perhaps we can't hear, but they certainly can and is off-putting for them.

Cats also do not naturally drink where they eat, so food and water bowls should not be placed together. And that comes from, from wild cats. They don't eat their food near a water source, and they don't drink from where they've they've killed an animal.

So or whether they, but they've placed a dead animal to eat. So, And yes, they're cats and that they, you know, they're many little cute creatures in our houses, but we need to think about these instincts and these behavioural traits that they've had for thousands of years. And now we've stuck them in our house.

We need to be accommodating for these behavioural needs as best we can. And finally, S is for scratching. So scratching is a normal behaviour for cats.

All cats need to scratch for stretching, for nail maintenance, and for territory marking. There are pheromones distributed and from their interdigital glands in their little pores. So ensure that owners are providing a suitable outlet for this behaviour, and it needs to suit the cat, and not the owner.

Scratching is only regarded as a problem behaviour when it is done in an inappropriate place, and the cat will choose where that inappropriate place is. So entry and exit points, and near sleeping areas are good places for scratch posts. Yep, might not fit quite so well in with the owner's idea of where a scratch post should go, but we're trying to accommodate the cat's needs here.

And sofas are such desirable scratching posts for cats. And this is obviously extremely annoying for owners, so we can advise them that tin foil can be used to prevent scratching on, on sofas or on unwanted items, but we need to provide a scratch post pretty close to that area because that's where the cat's chosen needs marking. And so yeah, tin foil to stop that behaviour, but then offer them an alternative place so they can still do that behaviour that they need to do.

OK, so that's our summary of tolls. Territory, opportunities to hunt and play, litter trays sufficient enough spread around the house, eating and drinking. They're solitary eaters.

They want to survey as they eat and scratching areas. All cats need to scratch. OK, on to puppies now.

So, Again, preventing the most common behavioural problems, the ones I mentioned earlier that gets dogs relinquished or sadly euthanized, can be covered, can be prevented by easily remembering this simple acronym, Creed. So children recall eating alone time and dogs. OK.

So social media is full of photos or videos of people's kids. This took me 10 seconds to find these pictures. People's kids and their dogs supposedly absolutely loving each other's company, but so often we can clearly see that the dog is not having, the best time.

At best it's not having a good time, and at worst is having a hard time coping. Now a really interesting study was done using YouTube videos. It was a retrospective study where people were bitten by dogs, and as the videos, .

Presented this unexplored opportunity to observe dog bites directly, and what they learned, was they found that children were more likely to be bitten on their face because of their size, but bless the dog, the bite would be less severe than the, the bite that was inflicted on an adult. Now, the saddest part of this study is that dog body posture, and some displacement and appeasement behaviours that I talked about in the ladder of aggression, increased approximately 20 seconds before the bite. They didn't just start, they increased.

And so those owners, if they'd known what they were looking for, could have, could have prevented that bite from ever happening. And there's a very sad statistic from the Blue Dog Group, and this is a charity that promotes safe relationships between children and dogs, and it revealed that children are more likely to be bitten by a familiar dog in the family home. And so it's not a savage dog running up to them on the street.

It's a pet dog in their home or someone else's home, and the owners just haven't recognised what that dog was desperately trying to say, before it bit the kid. I find that really sad. So we must be.

Educating owners so that children are protected, because I'm sure we all know of a dog that bit a child, and there was no behaviourist, ever considered, and the dog was euthanized immediately because the owner couldn't risk that dog biting another child. And it really, really frustrates me. OK, so, guaranteed children friendly breeds, well, they don't exist.

If the dog is never exposed to children, then how can it possibly learn? Children seem strange to dogs. They move differently, they smell differently, and they sound differently too.

Children are often unpredictable, and many dogs are anxious around children. Many owners also mistake a dog's tolerance of a child for acceptance. And they're really unaware of the body language and facial expressions that occur when a dog is feeling worried by a child.

A dog's good nature is so often exploited by owners, and when a dog is finally pushed too far for too long and bites, owners may often say that it was out of character or it came from nowhere. And very often that poor dog pays with its life. So This photo shows, a dog that is clearly very worried.

It's got its ears back, it's moving away as much as possible. It's got tense legs, it is also gaze averting, and it is an absolute disaster waiting to happen. This dog cannot even physically escape the child that is worrying him on his own bed.

And so what we must be teaching his owners, and it surprises me how often I have to tell owners this, that they must provide a safe. Treat a sanctuary for their dog that's off limits. It can be a crate, a den, it can be behind the sofa.

It doesn't matter where it is. It must be a place where only the dog is allowed to go. And if that dog is in that den or crate and a child come nears comes near it, and that dog growls, brilliant.

That dog is communicating, do not come in my bed. If I was in my bed and someone kept trying to touch me, poke me, pull me, I'd be saying, back off, please. And that is what the dog is trying to say.

So we must provide that safe retreat for them. When we do have dogs and toddlers that are mixing, and the toddler does want to stroke the child, they should practise on a teddy first, and they should also use the back of their hands so that they cannot grab, the dog's skin or the dog's fur and cause pain to that poor dog. So many of the dog bites that happened in the YouTube, paper happened when people were leaning over the dog, making it feel threatened.

Often like what people do when they're greeting dogs on the streets, or we greet them in the waiting room. So we must be teaching children and also ourselves to squat down when we're dealing with dogs. But when we're teaching children, it should be the rule that they must be sitting before they can stroke the puppy, and that the dog gets to approach them.

So often I see puppies being pulled towards children, and these dogs are putting the brakes on. But we should be letting puppies approach children. If the puppy wants to move away, it can, and it must not be forced to sit still.

The kids can offer treats, special tasty treats that only they give. Start where they can just gently throw them towards the puppy and allow it to approach the child if it wants to, and they can feed from hands, not from fingers. As we know, puppies are a bit, can be a bit snappy.

But this is only if the puppy is gentle, because we don't want the child to be scared of dogs either. They should practise quiet puppy talk, so high pitched screams, we so often see them, they're an absolute no and make it fun for the children to see if they can talk in a quiet voice and move in a non-jerky way so that the puppy comes up to them for treats. So supervision is key.

So simply being in the same room is not enough. Owners must learn to understand the body language a dog usually display displays before biting. Now this picture was taken by my sisters.

Now ex-boyfriend, nothing to do with the dog. And here's the dog, beautiful Great Dane, lying on his sofa, totally relaxed. Now here's my sister, who doesn't really know this dog very well, sitting on his sofa.

Now this picture was taken by the ex-boyfriend because they, everyone thought it was sweet. He was sitting on her knee, but look at his body language, ears pulled right back, whites of the eyes showing, tense face, tail tucked under, legs straight. My sister's having a great time, but this dog is really not happy.

And nobody noticed this when they took the picture. So, supervision is not enough, actually, . So sorry, supervision is key, but understanding what the dog is saying with its body language is of huge importance.

You can't just be in the room and say I was around, it's not enough. OK, creed, R is for recall. So one study suggested that dogs are 70% more likely to suffer from behavioural problems if they do not get off lead exercise.

70% gonna suffer from behavioural problems if they do not get off lead exercise. It's a huge amount. Can you imagine your entire life handcuffed to a person?

You're not gonna meet any of your behavioural needs, . And it is going to drive you insane. So we need owners to be teaching recall from a really young age, a young age when they're, when they're a puppy, and they're at that stage where they would still be with their mom, and therefore they would follow their mom.

And so when they're a puppy, is the, is the perfect age to be teaching them to follow their owner and come back to the owner. So all we need to be asking owners to do is make sure that the puppy knows its name, so that you know, so the puppy knows you want their attention. And you choose a word or a whistle as your recall cue that you only use when you want the dog to return to you.

And it should be short. So come, come, whatever it is you want to say, because so often I, I see, and I see vet nurses do this too with a go. Boy, follow me.

What's this? What's this? What's this?

So confusing for them. So, start with a, a recall cue that you only use when you want the dog. And you start in your garden with some high reward treats, and you get your pup's attention using their name, use your recall cue, take a step away from them, and when they return to you, you praise them and reward them with a really tasty treat.

And then you progress. To the garden, using a harness and a long line. So a 10 metre long line, a nice one that's appropriate for that size of dog.

It's like a horse lunging lead rope, but, thinner. And then you let them move away from you before you use the recall cue again. Now, if they ignore you, then you gently guide them back to you with the long line and reward them once they are with you.

That's really important, even if you had to gently pull them into you. And then you gradually increase the distance between you and the dog in the garden, adding some distractions if you can, but you always reward for coming back and you never punish, even if it took a while. You've got to be worth coming back to.

You've got to be exciting and fun and upbeat. And always have delicious treats on you, not just when you're training a puppy, but also later in life, because it is unlikely you will ever be more interesting than a squirrel, but we have to try. So enthusiasm with your recall and recall training is absolutely paramount.

Be worth coming back to. OK. Next we need to look at eating.

E is for eating. So we've had children, recall and now eating. So food gardening can be a major problem with our pet dogs, and unfortunately, it can start before they even arrive at their new owner's home.

So feeding times might have been stressful and competitive and, at the breeder's house with just one large bowl like this picture that we often see, on YouTube videos where the puppies are going round like a clock, like a big daisy spinning round as they all try and eat the food. How utterly stressful. Look at this one poor guy on the right, he's given up.

So using one bowl to feed the entire litter at the same time is not advisable. Some dogs trainers as well still advocate for showing puppies whose boss and advise owners to take the food away from the puppy whilst it is eating, and this can create a food guarding problem that never needed to have developed. So we should be giving owners the following advice.

Calmly drop treats near your puppy while they are eating from their bowl and then you walk away. Calmly, once you've dropped the treats near your dog, whilst they're eating, you don't have to say anything, you just, you just walk away. And then you keep gently, approaching intermittently and adding more treats, to them.

But you must walk away straight after. There's no need to hang around, there's no need to put your hand in the bowl or anything like that. Your dog needs to understand that they will be able to enjoy finishing their meal and having these additional treats without any pressure at all.

And you repeat this whenever your dog is being fed from their bowl. And doing this over and over, your dog will be learning to look forward to your. Coaching them whilst they're eating and that there is no risk that you're coming to take anything away from them, because you're actually coming to make things even better for them.

Hands are forgiving, not for taking away. And that's one of the most important things we can teach owners, especially owners, with children. We don't want them guarding their food and growling at children, children not understanding the growl and then getting bitten.

OK, we're almost done. A is for a long time. So, normally when I give this lecture, in person, I ask for a show of hands of who has met a dog with separation related disorder, with a separation related disorder, and each time 100% of the people in the room put their hands up.

It is a huge problem and a huge reason for relinquishment as well. And between 20 and 40% of dogs. Who are presented to behavioural referral clinics were diagnosed with a separation related disorder.

I wonder if it's even higher now after lockdown and all these little lockdown puppies were bought and the owners were all working from home. It'll be interesting to see. So dogs form very secure attachment type relationships with their humans, and it's different to the attachment that they form with with other dogs.

Remember, we're a substitute mom when we take them at 8 weeks old. They'd have been with their mom for 1218 months. So, the relationship with us is, is quite mother-child relationship.

As, so, yeah, it shares the same relationship as a child, as a child has with its parents. Now, this relationship, although it's lovely and wonderful, and one of the main reasons why we have dogs, it has consequences. And if separation related disorders occur and the owner can't fix it, then the dog is relinquished.

So remember, dogs are social and they're most comfortable within a social setting. It's very distressing for a dog to be separated from its humans if we don't start out right, and we'll see vocalisation, in appetences, house soiling and destruction. And there's reasons for all those different behaviours.

They vocalise because they're calling for you. I'm here and I'm on my own. Can you hear me?

They don't want to eat because they're so stressed. They're house soiling because their fight or flight instinct has kicked in. The adrenaline is running through them because they're on their own, and they empty their bowels and they go to the toilet in case they need to run suddenly, bless their hearts, and destruction.

How stressed and terrified do you have to be to chew a door or a door frame? Awful for them. Pretty stressed.

So, when you think about these little puppies that people take home, they've lived with their mother and their litter mates their whole life. And they're only 8 weeks old. It's only 8 weeks they've lived with their mother and their litter mates.

But that is 100% of their life. Now, the new owner will often book time off work to spend with the new puppy, or like the situation we're in now, they've never gone to work, they've never left the house. But the puppy has never been on his own before, and so when that owner does leave the house, it is distressing beyond belief.

The dog's world has fallen apart. So we want to set these puppies up for a success and teach the dog it's OK to be alone from a puppy. So we want to reward the puppy for being calm and relaxed on its bed.

This is the behaviour we want to be seeing from dogs. We basically ask dogs to do almost nothing for 90% of the time. But we'd never reward that, that lovely calm, relaxed behaviour on the bed, so we should be chucking treats when they're on the bed.

That's the behaviour I want. Here's your reward for it. Want to teach owners to move away from the puppy very gradually, progressing to when they're on the bed, progressing to just a few metres to leaving the room, to leaving the house.

And we do it super gradually, and if the puppy follows, then we've maybe pushed them a bit too far too quickly. We want to play the flitting game. This is where you move from room A to room B.

And if your puppy does follow you, you don't give it any attention whatsoever. You're not even speaking to them, you're not making eye contact. And what we want that puppy to learn is, you are really boring, boring to follow in the house.

There's nothing in it for me if I follow you. You don't pay me any attention. I'm gonna stay on my bed because all the good things happen on the bed.

So whilst we're doing these, Little training sessions. We're leaving the puppy something delicious and time consuming to eat. So Kongs stuffed with, cheese spread or peanut butter or chunks of chicken or or just the dog's meal, whatever it is, it's got to be heavy, so difficult to pick up and carry from room to room, and it's got to be delicious and it's got to be time consuming, so that the puppy is focused on that.

And then good things are happening when you leave the room. And we get these owners to build up the time left alone in very small stages, so it doesn't notice. And you start by just leaving the room, to, to, to gradually, leaving the house.

And you shouldn't be building up the time. So it's 5 minutes, 6 minutes, 8 minutes, 10 minutes, because we don't want that puppy to always think it's going to be longer and longer. Sometimes it might be 10 minutes, sometimes it might be 2 minutes.

You can go backwards as well. We don't want them to, we don't want to always be pushing them and to be expecting the time to be longer. And the final one is dogs.

The younger the puppy, the easier it will be to socialise them. We need these dogs to be mixing with other dogs at an early age, and as puppies get older, they become more cautious when faced with new experiences. Now the early weeks are when most puppies.

Will approach anything or anybody willingly and without fear. And by about 12 weeks of age, anything not yet encountered is likely to be approached with caution. And I know we'll have all seen these puppies that are just terrified of so many things, and all they need to be doing is clinging to their owner to feel safe, and terrified of other dogs cause they didn't meet other dogs.

So we need to prevent this, with careful socialisation. So meeting other dogs must be a positive experience. So carefully introduced to a variety of adult dogs as well as other puppies, but they must be safe dogs that are friendly around puppies, as a bad experience is often so much worse than none at all.

That's really important to remember. I'm sure we've all, again, all met those dogs that on the first walk or the 3rd walk out, they were attacked by another dog, and now they're fearful of all of the dogs. And they're not just fearful, but they're on the offence.

So they're barking and shouting at other dogs, Stay away from me, stay away from me, and you look like you've got a savage dog on the end of the lead. What you've really got is a dog that's terrified, and, and asking everyone to stay away from it, disaster. So lovely socialisation with lots of different dogs as early on as possible.

You've got to monitor the playing, obviously with the other dogs carefully. We don't want anyone getting upset, and there must be intervention if your puppy starts to annoy the other dog, or the other dog gets too rough. We want to keep this session short and sweet and positive, .

And this is a side note, we do not let them sort it out between themselves. If it's getting too rough, if the puppy's getting too annoying for the older dog, we do not let that older dog sort it out. Gone are the days when we let dogs sort it out between themselves, or let the puppy learn a lesson in how to behave nicely by allowing the poor thing to be bitten by the other dog it was pestering.

It's not only stressful and unfair on the other dog, but it's dangerous, and it may have long lasting negative emotional consequences for that puppy. We wouldn't expect children to have to resort to fighting in situations that were becoming fraught. We would expect a parent to step to step in, so monitor these sessions very closely.

OK, so that's, that's creed. Children recall eating alone time and dogs, and you can just whip through this in a consultation. It might be that they're doing 3 out of 5 absolutely brilliantly, so you focus on the 2 that they need help with.

I cannot recommend these videos enough. This should be promoted to all owners. They're bite-sized videos that explain things so clearly.

Just get the owners to Google dogs trust puppy or dog training videos, and these beautiful bite size videos will come up, and they will learn so much from them. So we need to ask ourselves, do we want to be the fence at the top of the cliff when it comes to teaching owners how to train their puppies and, look after their cats really well, or are we going to be the ambulance at the bottom? And so often we are the ambulance at the bottom.

We're mopping up all the disasters that have happened, or we're seeing them sent off to rehoming centres, or we're still, we're euthanizing them. So let's be the fence at the top of the cliff. OK, to summarise, owners must provide an outlet for natural dog and cat behaviour.

Understanding dog communication is key to preventing bites. Advise owners on how to understand the behavioural needs and how to provide them for their kittens and puppies. And remember tolls and creed, because you might just save a life.

Thank you very much for listening.