About two weeks ago, I watched a video on Twitter of an excited dog wagging its tail vigorously as it watched its owner walk into its house. The video’s background music was the overused song popularised by TikTok, ‘Surrender’ by Natalie Taylor with the chorus, ‘🎶Whenever you ready, whenever you ready🎶’.
Many of the video comments expressed a longing to be received with similar excitement by their pets or loved ones whenever they return home from work. Others drew similarities with how their pets received them, and some others just wanted a dog.
I thought the video was cute and the sentiments of the comments delightful. One of the quoted tweets was a sarcastic comment conveying disgust at the video. I was curious. The comment was about romanticising separation anxiety in dogs. There were interesting replies to the comment with people explaining the dangers of separation anxiety and others writing about how they handled it. Here my research began.
My first stop was Google and the topic,’ Separation Anxiety in Dogs’ had many informative articles. My next stop was YouTube, and here I found two channels that I have now subscribed to.
The first channel was Cesar Milan, a man who had been tagged a’ dog whisperer’ and had an extraordinary understanding of dog psychology. His video on separation anxiety in dogs had nearly a million views in less than a year. It was first a lesson on dogs’ natural behaviour in the wild and how these behaviours adapt to domestication. It was the most instructive video covering the topic.
He also had a popular reality tv show on Nat GeoWild spanning nine seasons.
He has, in my opinion, one of the best channels on dog psychology on YouTube. A constant rejoinder of his to the owners of badly behaved dogs was,” There are no bad dogs but bad owners.” and I have learnt a lot about dogs from his channel, more than I had expected.
One of the most interesting things I learnt on Cesar’s channel was about the energies dogs sense from their owners, why some dogs when they sense weak energy from their owners and go into protective mode ignoring their commands.
Some of my takeaways from his channel was to be prepared to have the mental and physical energy to train a dog, the discipline to properly train the dog and be its pack leader and always remember that a dog will act like a dog. Please treat it with respect and always be calm and firm.
The second YouTube channel is Animal Watch, and this channel has a video on almost every dog breed on the planet. Every single video was detailed with the dog breed’s origin, strengths of the dogs and types of owners suitable for the dogs. It was on this channel I learnt about the Belgian Malinois, the super-soldier of dog breeds and the Mexican Hairless dog, a most mesmerising dog breed.
These past two weeks have changed my YouTube timeline with the algorithm recommending more dog training videos. I look forward to learning more about dogs.