Perseverance & Adaptation

When I first brought my dog home more than 10 years ago, she was a pretty wild one. As she was badly abused by her previous owners, she was neurotic and a little violent at times. I suffered from bites, scratches and minor injury for the first few months of my life with her. I didn't know how to control her and so I bought all kinds of books on dog training and tried to undo some of the damage she went through in her previous home.

She was obviously not an easy dog to train. I tried all the methods that the books talked about. And the success rates for discipline was only 10%. She would either try to pounce on other people around or she would try to hide if there was a big group of people walking towards us. My whole apartment was wrecked. She bit off a huge chunk of my sofa so there was sponge foam everywhere when I came home one day. She pulled down my curtains and bit all my nice candles, pictures, shoes, anything you can think of. My nicely decorated living room soon became an empty shell filled only with dog toys. Fleeting thoughts of giving up and sending her to the SPCA came to my mind. But I persevered because I believe every living creature deserves a chance. Over time the success rate for discipline even though did not go very much higher did not deter me. After a couple of years she began to tone down on her boisterous behaviour. She was more calm and steady and realised eventually that I was unlike her previous owners. I can't say that her discipline level went beyond 50% but I still felt it was a great success.

Today, the same dog is older and deaf. She is still a live wire at times, and because she is now deaf, the learned ways of disciplining her has been thrown out of the window. We are now starting all over again with new methods of discipline. She has started to steal food off the kitchen counter, she does things she is not supposed to and all commands have been ignored because she can no longer hear. But my motivation to discipline my dog has always been the same - to be sure that she remains safe and harm free.

This experience with my dog has taught me many lessons on perseverance and adaptation.

We all have different reasons why we succumb to addictions and bad habits because we all have different experiences in life. But what we must do in order to break out of any bad habits/addictions is to persevere. Our life's circumstances may change over time and so adapting our methods to master our addictions must be done wisely. What may work yesterday may not work today. But our motivation should remain the same and that is to be liberated and to claim our mastery of self.

© Shamala Tan

Read full article

Add to: del.icio.us | Digg