08/06/2026
I watched a clip from Dogs Behaving (Very) Badly recently, and honestly, I was left feeling frustrated and quite angry.
The dog was a German Shepherd who was frantically biting and pulling at the lead, rolling around, almost appearing completely overwhelmed by the experience of being outside. It was difficult to watch, not because the dog was “bad,” but because everything about its behaviour was screaming, “I can’t cope with this environment.”
The solution presented was to fit the dog with a muzzle. Then, once the dog wasn’t biting or pulling, the owner was encouraged to reward that calmer behaviour with food.
To me, this is such a surface-level way of looking at behaviour.
The muzzle may stop the physical act of biting the lead, and the food may momentarily interrupt the behaviour, but neither of those things addresses the emotional state driving it. They don’t create safety. They don’t repair the underlying developmental gap. They don’t help the dog process an environment that it clearly finds overwhelming.
Behaviour is communication. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum. A dog that is obsessively biting the lead isn’t choosing to be difficult any more than a child who compulsively bites their nails, rocks, paces, or engages in repetitive behaviours when they are overwhelmed. Those behaviours emerge because the nervous system cannot cope with what it is experiencing.
Imagine seeing a child who constantly bites their nails through anxiety and deciding the solution is simply to tie their hands behind their back. The behaviour might stop, but the emotion driving it remains exactly where it was. The child is still anxious. They have simply lost their way of expressing it.
The same applies here.
We cannot create emotional safety simply by preventing the outward expression of distress or by rewarding its temporary absence. Mammalian nervous systems are infinitely more complex than that. Safety isn’t something we train into an animal through reinforcement schedules; it emerges through connection, co-regulation and the experience of being emotionally held by another.
From a behavioural perspective, I would be asking questions about attachment, early development, the dog’s emotional systems, its relationship with its owner, and whether it ever truly learned how to regulate itself through connection. What happened before this behaviour emerged? What is this dog trying to tell us?
Lead biting, spinning, frantic pulling, these are often signs of a deeper developmental gap. Somewhere along the line, this dog has not developed the internal safety needed to process the world around it. Covering the symptom does not heal the wound.
This is one of the reasons I think television dog training can be some of the worst advice available. It teaches people to suppress behaviour rather than understand it. It encourages us to focus on what the dog is doing instead of asking what the dog is feeling.
And until we start listening to behaviour as communication, we will continue treating symptoms while missing the suffering underneath them.
