Some weeks ago I noticed that my "fun" car had a tyre that was a little flat, not so much that I could not go a short distance very slowly and after all it was only flat at the bottom! I use the "animal wagon" more and as the weather was awful the car wasn't being used so I ignored the problem and got on with my life. 

Then one morning the sun was shining and I wanted to take the car to travel for a meeting but that tyre was still soft, oh darn it. So the car stayed parked up and as a few more weeks went past, the tyre didn't go down much more so I decided I would deal with it later. 

I then planned to go over two hundred miles and the weather was forecast as hot and lovely and I looked at the car again and finally slowly drove to the garage and asked the man there to look at the problem for me. 

After a little investigation the man at the tyre repair shop explained that it was a simple case of a small escape of air at the rim and correcting it would be cheap and easy and true to his word twenty minutes later I was happily driving away, safely. 

As I did so I could not believe just how long I had just left the problem, how long I had known that I could not take a safe journey in the car, how long I had just ignored the situation, knowing, as we all do, that to safely drive any car it is essential that there are four tyres, of equal balance, so why did I just disregard the problem for so long? 

A couple of hours later I received and enquiry from a lady who had small behavioural problems with her dog and it was only when this behaviour had proved embarrassing to her that she thought that she should do something about it. The lady mentioned that she had my book since 2007 and had done "some" of my method and wondered why she was still having problems. 

The lady went on to explain that she had done the gesture eating part and also thanked her dog when it barked after perceiving danger but could not bring herself to delay greeting her dog when reuniting, after she had been out for a couple of hours. She also could not cope with the guilt that she would feel by not taking her dog for a walk while she worked, at home, on getting her dog to stop pulling on its lead. 

As 'Amichien� Bonding' is a simple holistic method based on the four core elements of canine survival, all four areas need to be addressed simultaneously. We can see that for any safe and happy journey of life we have to appreciate that the four areas, Food, Walk (hunt), Perceived danger and Status, just like the four wheels on a car, are of equal importance, so to choose to ignore one or more will prevent real progress. 

So this lady had chosen to "inflate just two tyres on her car", ignoring the other two for over five years and after a little further discussion, she accepted this and finally stopped finding fault with her dog and realised where the fault lay. Now that she is giving equal attention to all four areas of Amichien� Bonding she is on the right track to helping her dog to relax and cooperate with her wishes. 

Jan Fennell

25th July 2012