No, certainly not. Ella is one according to me and many others, fantastic dog. She's crazy happy, love life, love people, loves attention, candy, play and cuddle. She is completely tireless (and, before, when she was younger, in all cases), has a superb nose, she has a sense of humor, is loving, extremely mommy (if it is to be something positive 😀 ) and so on.
About that now if there happens to be someone who thinks otherwise, I can inform you that mine and Ella's life together has not always been a bed of roses. Our relationship is amazing – and it always has been. But our life together has not always been easy to manage. I'll tell you a little about why.
I live with bipolar disease. For those who don't know, is it a mental illness that manifests itself in the form of extreme swings between feeling good and feeling bad. For the sake of simplicity, I greatly understate. In addition to the changes in mood, it also produces very large differences in one's energy level. I'm normally pretty low on my energy; I am quite lazy and comfortable. During a prolonged depression, my energy becomes so low that it can hardly be described.
When you then have a high-energy dog like Ella, isn't it hard to figure out that it very easily becomes a conflict. One of the things I have had to learn through my relationship with Ella is to work on my patience. I have a rather short patience, and when it fails, I get angry easily. Over the years, I have thus learned that Ella does not behave the way she does to fight, but because that's how she is and how she works.
And it’s up to me dealing with it.
I started learning Ella basic commands already on her first day; she learned to sit within like five minutes or so. Since she now happens to be a dog bred for the armed forces, she is very easy to learn. Almost everything I've tried to teach her, she's learned quickly. There are a few things where I have not succeeded, but then we are talking a number of notches higher than everyday obedience and what I have failed to do is get her energy to a level where she can absorb what I wanted her to understand and then do.
What I am trying to highlight and reinforce is the realization that there is a huge difference between training a dog and communicating/handling a dog. I am not talking about either rebuke or correction here, without clean, cut communication.
At home there are mainly a couple of things where I have failed to get her to understand and stop her behavior. One is the barking and excitement when the doorbell rings. The second is her constant rather rough play with the cats – and to top it all off, I have some pretty snarky cats who won't say anything even though their claws are significantly sharper than hers.
Why I have failed?
Because her energy and willingness to behave in a certain way far exceeds my patience and my stubbornness. I am much more stubborn than Ella when it comes to most things, but when the doorbell rings, I know that someone is standing outside and wants in. So I lose my patience and don't want to let the person stand there for any length of time. My mistake, I am aware of that. I don't know if I should be grateful, or be ashamed of, that people who come here and know us know how my dog behaves and stoically endure the first moment inside the door.
The content and the point of it all is that the areas where I can feel that I “failed” are areas where I myself fall short in one way or another. It's not necessarily mine “up” – it just is. Then it's up to me to think about whether it's something I want to fix – how important do I think it is that Ella changes her behavior when the doorbell rings, or around the cats. Obviously not important enough to do anything about it.
I think you have to think about it if you want to use the term “perfect”, actually. No one is perfect. Not me, not my dog. Not you, not your dog. And you don't have to be either. However, it is to our advantage to remember that our dogs are a direct reflection of us. How we read our dogs' behavior probably depends on knowledge and interest.
I have written it before and write it again; dogs are a fantastic path to personal development for those who want to.