Playing the long game, why real change in our dogs and cats cannot be rushed
- 24 hours ago
- 4 min read
I have grey hair I like, laughter lines I've gained, and a face that moves when I'm happy or worried, or sad, or trying not to laugh at something I should not be. I did not get here quickly, my animal/people career is 30+ years in the making. Every one of those lines is a small receipt for a life lived and while sitting with clients and their traumatised, anxious, reactive animals. I find myself thinking about how rare that kind of patience has become more recently, in almost every direction we look.
The age of quick fixes
Botox and fillers smooth the evidence of thirty, forty years of expression in an afternoon. Weight loss injections promise to undo decades of complicated relationships with food and movement without ever asking what those relationships were about. Get-rich schemes sell the idea that wealth can arrive without the years of graft that usually built it. We doom scroll for the hit of dopamine, a tiny reward loop that costs us almost nothing to access and almost everything to sustain.
And in my own field, we have our own version: shock collars and prong collars. Devices that promise a fast, dramatic change in behaviour, the pulling stops, the barking stops, the lunging stops, right now, today, in front of your eyes, they all come at a price.
What we are actually suppressing
An aversive collar does not teach a dog that the world is safe. It teaches a dog that expressing distress is dangerous. The lunging stops not because the fear has gone, but because the dog has learnt that showing you the fear gets punished. We have not resolved anything. We have silenced the early warning system and left the fear to burn greater underneath.
It's the same principle behind every quick fix on that list above. Filling a line doesn't ask why we've decided that ageing needs disguising. An injection that mute’s appetite doesn't touch the reasons food became complicated in the first place. And doom scrolling doesn't just fail to fix loneliness or boredom or stress — it becomes its own thing to manage, its own small dependency, with its own quiet dread of what happens in the silence when you put the phone down.
That is the story, no building of resilience or confidence, it is a fragile kind of relief that only lasts as long as you keep applying it. Underneath sits a very human, canine, feline fear, ‘what happens when this stops working’, or I stop doing it? Genuine change never has that fear attached, because it was never propping anything up.
Trauma does not have a timetable
I work with dogs and cats who have been through genuine trauma — rescues, redirected aggression, resource guarding, separation anxiety, fears from pain association, generalised anxiety that's rewired how an animal experiences an entire room, home, garden, park, vets, groomers, etc. These animals do not need a faster fix; they need someone willing to play a longer game than the one our culture is currently obsessed with.
That means determination, not the white-knuckle kind, but the steady, unglamorous kind that shows up for the boring repetitions, the desensitisation sessions that look like nothing is happening, the counter-conditioning that takes six weeks before you see the first flicker of change. It is working hard slowly that counts.
Genuine understanding of behaviour, theirs and yours. You cannot out-source this to a device that delivers a correction on your behalf. You have to learn to read what's actually happening. The stress signals, the trigger stacking, the tiny early warning signs most people miss entirely because we've never been taught to look for them. It is also perfectly ok to pause, use management, behaviour change needs time and sometimes doing nothing for moments is ok.
Kindness to your animal, and to yourself, progress with trauma is not linear. There will be relapses that have nothing to do with your competence as an owner or a handler. Beating yourself up over a bad week is just another quick-fix impulse — the urge to punish your way to a faster result, aimed inward this time.
Lighter goals to celebrate the long game gets heavy if every marker of success is huge. So celebrate the small stuff, the first time the dog chose to look at you instead of the trigger, the first time the cat's used the litter tray instead of somewhere else. Humour helps enormously here. So does not taking every single session as a debrief on your worth as an owner.
The essential network to lean on, nobody does this well in isolation, not the person, not the animal. Good behaviourists, understanding friends, family who won't judge you for the day it all went sideways. This work needs witnesses who'll remind you how far you've come when you can only see how far there is to go. And at times we all make mistakes and you will, coordination takes time to learn before it becomes muscle memory.
An expressive face
There's something I think about often in this work, how much genuine connection depends on being able to read expression, on faces, and on bodies, picking up on tonal changes. A dog's ears, a cat's tail, the set of shoulders, the softening around eyes that tells you an animal has actually relaxed rather than simply frozen and shut down. None of that is available to us if we're only interested in the fastest route to compliance. Reading body language properly takes time, attention, and a willingness to sit with what's actually being communicated rather than what we would prefer to see.
And selfishly, I think it's part of why I like my own lines and my own grey hair, most days anyway. They move, they tell the truth, something I’ve never been able to hide, and had a life that's had ups and downs in it. An animal who trusts you enough to let their face soften, their body loosen, their guard drop, that is not a quick fix. That is the actual thing, it cannot be injected, corrected, or scrolled into existence.
It has to be built, patiently, kindly, with people around you who will support you through the hard bits and hopefully with a decent sense of humour to lighten the load. That's the long game, it's slower and it's harder, and it is genuinely the only version of change that lasts.
