Training & Behavior

For six weeks I carried a poop bag on our walks and did the opposite of what you'd expect. Most people carry one to clean up. I carried mine to catch my spaniel, Bertie, in the act of eating his own, because Bertie had developed a habit that turned my stomach and embarrassed us both at the park.

Coprophagia, the vet called it, with the calm of someone who has said this to a thousand ashamed owners. She ran bloods, ruled out the obvious deficiencies, and then said the part I didn't want to hear, which was that it was probably behavioural, not dietary, and that chasing him and telling him off was making it worse.

So I stopped chasing. I started following. On lead, close, watching the exact moment his head dropped and his body did that little pre-snatch crouch, and I'd step on the lead, gently, before he could. No word, no fuss. Just a quiet redirection to a treat in my hand, the good stuff, the thing that outranked the thing on the ground.

The week of following taught me more than the vet's sentence had. Bertie didn't do it out of hunger. He did it when he was bored, when the walk had gone quiet and I'd stopped engaging, when he had nothing better to do than revisit his own breakfast. The bag wasn't for cleaning. It was for paying attention.

Once I saw the pattern, the fix was dull and effective. More engagement on walks, a toy tossed before the crouch, a command that meant look at me, not down. I fed him better-timed meals so he wasn't ravenous, and I picked up the moment it landed so there was simply nothing to find. Within the fortnight the habit thinned out, then stopped, then became a thing we used to do, like a bad phase of toddlerhood.

I won't pretend it was a triumph of training. It was a triumph of watching. The spaniel who ate what he shouldn't wasn't broken, he was bored and I was distracted, and the bag in my pocket was less a cleanup tool than a confession that I'd been somewhere else on our walks. Now I'm here, and he's stopped looking down.

The blood results came back normal, which was both a relief and a nuisance, because a deficiency would have been a tidy answer and I'd have had a pill to wave about. Instead the vet handed me the behavioural framing and a leaflet I didn't read, and the real work fell, as it always does, to me and a lead and a dog who didn't know he was the subject of a study.

The treat I used mattered more than I expected. A dry biscuit wasn't enough to outrank a fresh find on the grass. A cube of cheese, which Bertie would follow into traffic, was. I carried it like a secret weapon and produced it the instant his head dropped, and the swap, found-not-eaten for cheese-in-hand, became the new habit faster than the old one had set.

There was an afternoon at the park when an off-lead dog wandered over and Bertie, who'd have scoffed his own before, looked at me instead, because the cheese was already in my palm and the engagement was already happening. I nearly cried, which is ridiculous for a grown man over a spaniel's bowel habits, but six weeks of following with a bag will do that to you, and I let the moment land.

The bag still goes in my pocket, though it's rarely needed now, a talisman more than a tool. Bertie, at two, has outgrown the worst of it, and the walks are walks again, not stakeouts. But I learned something I'd have paid a trainer to tell me, which is that the dog wasn't broken, the routine was, and a bag of poop in my hand was really just my attention, finally where it should have been.

If you've got a dog with this habit and a vet has ruled out the medical, stop chasing and start watching. The answer is almost never in the food bowl. It's in the quiet gaps on the walk, the moments you stopped being interesting, and the ground offered something better than you did. Be interesting. Be there. The bag is just to catch yourself paying attention.

If your dog has this habit and a vet has ruled out the medical, the single most useful thing is to stop seeing it as a disgusting failure and start seeing it as a signal. The signal said Bertie was bored, or anxious, or both, and the fix was engagement, not shame. We got there slowly, the walks became walks again instead of stakeouts, and I'd have paid a trainer good money for that if I'd known the trainer was just me, finally paying attention to the dog in front of me.