Graeme Hall helps owners to change so that “naughty” dogs can change

Graeme Hall’s motto is “any dog, any age, any problem.” That doesn’t mean he can necessarily solve your dog’s issue in the 1 day you all spend together for his TV show, Dogs Behaving (Very) Badly. “It doesn't necessarily mean I can fix everything on its own, it means I'll take anything on,” he explains. “When I first started dog training, an awful lot of people would say, ‘This dog got kicked out of dog training. They said it's impossible to train.’ And I said, ‘Well, I'll give it my best.’ With TV, it's very much the case. As soon as you've named your show Dogs Behaving Badly, bet your bottom dollar that the TV producers are gonna find you the worst dogs in the country!”

But to Graeme’s mind, even the worst dogs in the country are potentially all Good Boys and Girls – their dog moms and dads just need a little help and guidance to avoid some common mistakes. Read on as he talks about kissing dogs, language, and his favourite Good Boy…

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Inside Dogs Behaving (Very) Badly

Who was the first dog trainer that you remember seeing on TV as a kid?

“It was Barbara Woodhouse. I didn't even have a dog then, but what was most memorable about her was that she was scary. You would not mess with Barbara Woodhouse. And the second thing was her tweed skirts. Somebody pointed out to me recently that I might have something in common with Barbara Woodhouse. And I was quite apprehensive, but it turned out to be tweed so maybe she left a lasting impression.”

Who was your first dog?

“I didn't have dogs as a child. I remember my dad saying it's too upsetting when they go. I found out later in life that there was a reason for that. When he'd been growing up in a pub, in Selby, North Yorkshire, they had an Alsatian, and the dog got re-homed and taken away from him. That memory was always there. But the first dog I lived with was called Noodle, and he was a poodle. Named by the then 6-year-old daughter of my girlfriend at the time.”

What are we as humans, particularly resistant to learning as dog handlers?

“We are not good at timing. When we get ourselves in a bit of a bad mood with a dog, and we've decided he's been a bad boy this morning, that's it. He's a bad boy for at least this morning, if not the rest of the day. But typically, when the dog’s been a bit naughty, quite often half a minute later, they stopped, and they started to do something better instead. Then we forget to actually say, “Good boy”. We're pretty resistant to letting go of the emotion that bogs us down.”

What do humans like, that makes dogs uncomfortable?

“We think face to face is the way to be. We make eye contact, but dogs don't normally do face to face. Face to face in the animal kingdom is pretty much fighting talk. Dogs would rather have a sniff around the back end. Now we find that a bit embarrassing! And they really don't want to be kissed. I've seen some terrible cases where children have been bitten in the face because they just thought it was okay to go in and treat the dog like a teddy bear that they kiss every day. A hug with an owner, the right kind of dog, the right kind of hug, is okay. What dogs really don't like, though, is being restricted and pinned. And what we think it's a cuddle, a dog thinks it's some sort of pinning down restriction of movement.”

How do you get the dogs used to the camera crew?

“It's particularly difficult when you've got a nervous dog. Since the lockdown, it has become more of a problem because dogs didn't see strangers coming into our houses so much. And there we wade in with not 1 big bloke, but often a couple of other big blokes, and a couple of guys carrying big, weird black machines on their shoulders, and a couple of mic stands. It's just guaranteed to cause a problem. The truth is, there is no magic way to do it. The methods that work for getting a dog used to 1 person coming in, I may use the same with the crew. Occasionally, if a dog is really anxious, I'll put the camera down where they can get a little sniff of it, and pick it back up again. It's just a very, very slow process. Often what's not realised is when we get a good result, in cases like that, we got a good result despite the fact that there was a TV crew in the house as well. But rewarding the right behaviours is always the secret to dog behaviour. Any behaviour that you reward, you're always going to get more of.”

On that note, in the episode with the anxious terrier, you recorded the owner unwittingly reinforcing annoying behaviour 42 times in 1 walk!

“I remember that! With the little counter thing in my pocket. I was a linguist by training, I went to Uni and studied Spanish, so I'm very conscious of language. That was a very visual way of showing it, with the clicker, on the telly. But I'm always mentally counting things like that, like, yeah, good boy. Good boy. Good boy…” This was when the dog was being naughty. And that's the other thing with humans. We say things like, “Come on, good boy,” meaning, “Please be a good boy!” The subtlety of that is lost on a dog because he's just like, “Oh, you definitely said Good Boy while I was barking. In fact, you said Good Boy 38 times while I was barking, so barking must be good, right?”

Do you find it interesting that we can use language as a reinforcer for dogs?

“Absolutely. Yes. I saw a bit of research recently from a university in Hungary. They’ve trained 18 dogs to lie perfectly still in an MRI scanner, without being restrained, without being sedated and they have headphones on. Then they played them the sound of people speaking, normal speech. And they then took the speech and sort of chopped it up on a computer, so it was gobbledygook. And they could see, because they're watching the brains in real time, that actually, the dog's brain is reacting in a very different way to proper language. They recognise real language, and they're probably listening most of the time. As a little side note, I've met a couple of South African people in England, and among them, a couple of Afrikaans, people. So, I do have 1 sentence in Afrikaans, which is “In jou bed” (in your bed!). So yeah, language is fascinating.”

Which of the dogs in those first 3 seasons really challenged your “any dog, any age, any problem?” motto?

"The 1 that just popped into my head was Diego, the Rottweiler cross Ridgeback who was found as a stray in London in bad circumstances. The curious problem was when he got wet, he started to get aggressive. He would run amok and start biting people. I don't think he meant it in a nasty way, he just got bonkers excited. So what we did with that was we just introduced him to water bit by bit by bit. He was a good boy, but that really was 1 of those where you think, “Blimey, I've bitten off more than I can chew here, because he was a powerful dog and super-fast with it”.

Which dog did you wish you could sneak home for yourself?

“I fall in love with virtually everyone. It's a great job. We've had a couple of Great Danes that were just great. Rome was a bit of a goofball, really, he was just hilarious. But he also had a little bit of an edge to him. There's a bit where you see a Great Dane facing up to me in the window of a house. And I just have to hold my ground because there's nothing else you can do. That was Rome because somebody had dared to rock up with a supermarket delivery van outside and he was having none of it. He hadn't ordered it. But basically, he was just a great big galoot, and those are dogs that I love the most.”

Watch Dogs Behaving (Very) Badly Seasons 1-3, Mondays-Fridays at 18:50 on CBS Reality (DStv Channel 132)

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