Tim Dowling: my dog has post-traumatic sheep disorder

Illustration: Selman Hosgor/The GuardianView image in fullscreen Illustration: Selman Hosgor/The GuardianTim Dowling: my dog has post-traumatic sheep disorderThere is nothing woolly about the sheep awareness training a Kent farmer subjects our dog toIt’s another scorching day, maybe the ninth or tenth in a row. Work is impossible – I spend the afternoon wandering the house in search of the coolest place to stand. I’m busy interrupting a faint breeze at the foot of the stairs when my wife rings.

“This is ridiculous,” she says. “I’m standing still.”“Me too,” I say.

“Where are you?”“On the M25,” she says. “In traffic.”

“Where have you been?” I say.“Sheep awareness training,” she says.

“Oh yeah,” I say. “How was it?”“Brilliant,” she says.

“She’s absolutely traumatised. I’ll tell you about it, if we ever get home.”Our old dog, unfailingly obedient and chicken-hearted, never troubled sheep.

At two years old, the new dog has had almost no direct experience of livestock but has never met an animal it did not want to chase: foxes, squirrels, Canada geese. It was hard to imagine a first encounter going well.When my wife heard about a farmer in Kent who would cure your dog of any interest in sheep in an afternoon, she made an appointment.

“Is this because of the thing that happened in the Archers?” I’d said.“No,” she’d said.

“I signed up before all that.”My wife arrives home 90 minutes later, trailing a hint of car air conditioning. The dog comes into the kitchen behind her and immediately flattens itself against the cool floorboards.

“She’s got post traumatic sheep disorder,” my wife says.“What was it like?” I say.

“So he’s a real farmer,” she says. “In farmer’s clothes.”“OK,” I say.

“And you start out in a tiny pen, half the size of this kitchen, with two sheep and the dog on a short lead,” she says. “Predictably, the dog is going nuts.”“Predictably,” I say.

“Barking, straining, trying to get at the sheep. And the farmer has this plastic bottle full of pebbles, which he shakes. And shouts at the same time.

The shouting is important.”“Of course,” I say.“Anyway, within five minutes she’s just sitting there, trying not to make eye contact with the sheep.”

“Then what?” I say.“Then you move to a bigger pen, with more sheep, and you do it again.

By this point she won’t leave my side. And he’s still shaking the bottle whenever she even starts to look at the sheep. She’s hating every minute of it.”

“And that’s it?” I say.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Oh no,” my wife says.

“After that we graduate to an actual field full of sheep, with two collies driving the flock right at us, over and over. By now, she’s completely freaking out and is trying to pretend there are no sheep.”“Huh,” I say.

“The whole thing took half an hour.”“How much?” I say.

“Forty pounds,” she says.The place where we happen to be spending the following weekend is surrounded by fields. On arrival there are no sheep to be seen, but when we get out of the car we can hear distant bleating from both sides of the valley.

As soon as the dog hears the sound, it gets back in the car.“So our dog now has a sheep phobia,” I say. “We’ll have to go back to London.”

“We can’t,” my wife says. “I need to do reinforcement training.”“Here?”

I say, looking at the baked fields.“Where else?” she says.

“First, I need to fill this bottle with pebbles.”Up the hill and along a track we eventually come to a gate. On the other side a flock of black sheep is gathered under a tree.

My wife opens the gate and the dog, now on a long lead, reluctantly steps through.“Really?” I say.

“Come on,” my wife says, heading towards the sheep.The sheep seem larger than I expected, and rather more prepared to stand their ground – only when we’re very close do they give way, resentfully stepping further up the slope to let us pass. The dog, ears tucked back, is giving them as wide a berth as the lead will allow.

“Wow,” I say. “It really works.”One lone sheep has gone downhill instead, separating itself from the rest.

The dog does not see it through the tall grass as she walks toward it. No more than 10 yards separate the two animals when the dog finally senses movement, and looks up. For a brief moment the sheep and the dog regard one another with wary respect.

“Hyah!” my wife screams, slamming down her bottle of pebbles.The dog jumps in terror, and so do I.

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