06/11/2026

Flynt: The Dog Who Shaped the Trainer I Became

I had grown up around animals and had always been lucky enough to have dogs in my life. Border Collies, in particular, had always been part of our family.

Even when I was younger, I was fascinated by behaviour and training. I often found myself offering advice to friends and family and helping them work through problems with their dogs, usually successfully.

I was that annoying person.

We had lost our family dog several years earlier, and afterwards we helped to socialise puppies for Hearing Dogs. I loved being involved with them, but I still dreamed of having a dog who was truly mine. A dog I could train, understand and love as my own.

With my passion for behaviour and training continuing to grow, I wanted my own sidekick.

I was not looking for an easy dog either. I wanted a challenge. I wanted to help a dog who needed someone willing to put the work in and give them a real chance.

Before I had even found one, I bought a collar and lead and tucked them away in my wardrobe, ready for the dog I hoped would eventually come into my life.

My mum found them.

I did not know it at the time, but apparently that was enough to pull on her heartstrings. She stumbled across Border Collie Rescue and contacted them without telling me.

The following day, she told me she had spoken to Nicki. After hearing about our lifelong experience with Border Collies, the Hearing Dogs puppies, my interest in behaviour and training, and my hope of helping a rescue dog in need, Nicki already had one particular dog in mind.

She invited us to travel to Yorkshire to meet him.

His name was Alfie, or ALF for short.

ALF. Alien Life Form.

Having later read his notes and then lived with him, I could understand why.

He had been found as a stray in Dover at around eighteen months old. The kennels caring for him had been unable to rehome him, and there was a real concern that he would be put to sleep, so Border Collie Rescue stepped in.

From everything we could piece together, I was believed to be his ninth home.

He was only two years old.

Before coming to me, he had moved through kennels, Border Collie Rescue and foster homes. There had been previous attempts to rehome him, but he had been returned. He had also been assessed for work as a police sniffer dog, but while there, he was attacked by a German Shepherd.

This was the dog Nicki had in mind for me.

I had said I wanted a challenge.

I do not think any of us quite realised just how much of one Flynt would be.

The Dog in the Notes

His rescue notes described a dog with no training or manners, an almost non-existent concentration span and an extraordinary reaction to doors.

They said he could jump around seven feet into the air while waiting to be let out of a room.

That was not an exaggeration.

Neither was the screaming.

Every single time Flynt thought he was going out, he would become completely overwhelmed. It could start before we had even reached the door. Getting dressed, putting on a coat or picking up the keys was enough to trigger constant whining, which would build into screaming as he waited to be let out.

His screeches were so loud and distressing that I went around to all my neighbours to explain that he was not being harmed.

He was safe. He was loved. He was in training.

Teaching impulse control at the door became one of the first important parts of our work together. Flynt had to learn that whining, screaming, jumping and throwing himself towards the doorway would not make it open.

We practised waiting calmly and only moving through the door once he had gained some control of himself. In the beginning, something as ordinary as getting dressed and leaving the house could take an enormous amount of time and patience.

He had absolutely no idea how to regulate the anticipation of going out, but slowly he began to understand that calmness, rather than panic, was what allowed the door to open.

Flynt was a very full-on dog.

He would attack people he did not know if they made direct eye contact with him. Children were an absolute no-go, and he was extremely defensive around other dogs.

However, it was not always as simple as Flynt being aggressive.

He was incredibly anxious, neurotic and socially awkward. He did not understand how to communicate with other dogs properly, and he often failed to recognise when another dog was uncomfortable with him.

Sometimes he would approach too intensely or behave in a way that made another dog unsure of him. Because he could not read their body language and adjust his behaviour, they would sometimes react towards him.

Flynt simply did not understand the social rules that appeared to come naturally to other dogs.

In those early years, I told every family member and friend the same thing before they came into the house.

Do not make eye contact with him.

Years later, some of those same people came to visit and I found myself completely confused as to why they were staring up at the ceiling rather than looking at him.

Then I remembered.

That was how life had started with Flynt.

By that point, I no longer had to worry about him meeting new people. He had become so much more relaxed and easy-going that I had almost forgotten just how carefully every interaction once had to be managed.

That moment made me realise just how far he had come.

The Dog Other People Could Not See

One of the hardest parts of living with Flynt was not simply managing his behaviour.

It was how other people viewed him.

Working with a dog that no one else seems to understand is emotionally difficult. People see the barking, the screaming, the lunging or the reaction. They do not always see the fear underneath it. They do not see the work happening behind closed doors or the tiny moments of progress that mean everything.

They did not always see the dog that I saw.

Flynt was a beautiful, affectionate dog. He placed a huge amount of trust in me and overcame obstacles that once seemed impossible.

He was not simply a difficult dog.

He was a frightened dog trying to understand a world that regularly overwhelmed him.

There were times when I felt as though I constantly had to explain him or defend him. I knew what he was capable of, but I also knew how loving he could be. I saw how hard he tried and how much progress he made, even when other people only noticed what was still going wrong.

That can be one of the loneliest parts of owning a dog with behavioural difficulties.

You love the whole dog, while other people often only see the behaviour.

Learning How Flynt Learned

There have been studies exploring whether dogs can display autism-like traits, although canine autism is not currently a straightforward clinical diagnosis. Many of us who knew Flynt wondered whether he processed the world differently in this way.

We could never know for certain.

What we did know was that Flynt relied heavily on repetition, patterns and familiarity. Once he had made an association or developed a habit, it could be incredibly difficult to change it.

That became one of the biggest lessons he ever taught me.

Border Collie Rescue had already begun doing tremendous work with him before I adopted him.

Mike and Nicki had started teaching him how to settle, respond to simple cues and begin concentrating for longer than a few seconds. His notes included cues such as back, down, off and bed, but he still had an enormous amount to learn.

More importantly, I had to learn how Flynt learned.

Trying to force him into behaving like a typical dog was never going to work. I needed to give him routines that made sense to him and helped him predict what was going to happen.

One of those routines involved carrying a toy.

At first, it was something to redirect his energy towards. Over time, it became a stress reliever, a comfort and eventually a tool he could use to meet new people.

Rather than immediately feeling threatened by someone unfamiliar, Flynt could take them a toy and ask them to play. That gave him a way to interact without the pressure of direct attention or eye contact.

It allowed trust to build gradually.

Surprisingly, he never showed any signs of resource guarding.

In fact, his lack of social awareness meant he would happily walk up and take a toy directly in front of another dog without considering whether that dog might object.

He was not trying to provoke them or challenge them.

It simply did not occur to him to read their body language first.

That was Flynt. Completely absorbed in his own little world.

The Challenge of Keeping Weight on Him

When Flynt arrived at Border Collie Rescue, he was seriously underweight. His notes recorded that he weighed just under 20kg and that maintaining a healthy weight was already proving difficult.

Mike and Nicki had worked hard to improve his condition, but when I brought him home, he was still thin.

Flynt burned through an enormous amount of energy simply by existing in a constant state of nervous anticipation. He rarely seemed able to switch off fully, and food was not particularly important to him.

You could have left a steak dinner or an entire Christmas meal on the floor and he would not have touched it.

I had to find ways to make eating more interesting. We used games and activities and gradually built mealtimes into a routine he could understand.

As time went on, eating beside his cat also helped him become more consistent.

That cat was Smudge.

Flynt watched Smudge grow from a tiny kitten, and the two of them became inseparable.

When Flynt once returned home after having a general anaesthetic at the vets, Smudge curled up beside him and stayed there, comforting him while he recovered.

Their relationship was incredibly special.

It also became part of one of Flynt’s funniest and most complicated quirks.

From Toys, to Smudge, to His Dinner

During Flynt’s early training, I taught him to collect a toy whenever somebody came to the door.

The doorbell would ring, or someone would knock, and Flynt would run to find something to carry in his mouth.

It gave him a job to do and helped him approach visitors in a way that felt safer and more manageable.

When I later moved into my first house, I stopped leaving toys lying around all the time. I wanted Flynt to begin learning how to cope without being completely dependent on having one available.

So when the doorbell rang, he began running to Smudge instead.

He would bark at the cat as though it was his personal responsibility to inform him that somebody was at the door.

Later, Smudge moved to live on my yard with the horses, and Flynt and I moved into a flat. It was not an ideal situation for either of us, but we made the best of it.

There were no toys lying around and there was no cat for Flynt to alert.

So he began running to his dinner.

If somebody knocked on the door, tapped the table or shouted someone’s name, Flynt would suddenly rush over and start eating.

To anyone else, it probably made absolutely no sense.

To me, it showed the chain of associations he had created.

At first, the sound meant he should get a toy.

Then it meant he should go and interact with the cat.

Eventually, it simply meant that he needed to do something with his mouth.

So he ate.

It was an extreme but perfect example of how easily dogs can make associations. Sometimes the connection is so subtle that we do not even notice it forming until the behaviour has become firmly established.

A Memory Like No Other

When we visited my mum, Flynt would still bark if she picked up her handbag.

He would also react if she got a bin bag out of the cupboard. That connection had formed years earlier when my sister was staying with us and had suddenly rushed to the cupboard to get a bag.

Those were not things Flynt regularly encountered in my own home. However, the moment he returned to the house where the association had first formed, the memory came straight back.

One of the best examples of his memory involved a ball behind my television cabinet.

A friend visited, and at some point during that visit Flynt lost a ball behind the cabinet.

After that, he did not bother with it at all.

An entire year passed, and I had completely forgotten it was even there.

Then that same friend came back.

The moment Flynt saw them, he went straight over to the television cabinet and asked for his toy.

I did not even realise it was still behind there.

Flynt had connected that person with the missing ball and held on to that memory for a whole year.

His ability to remember the smallest details could be incredible, inconvenient and occasionally hilarious.

The Car

Ironically, one of our biggest challenges was not his behaviour towards strangers or his reactivity around dogs.

It was his screaming in the car.

The jangle of the keys could start it.

Pressing the seatbelt buckle when getting out could start it.

Opening the car door could start it.

Every tiny sound told Flynt that something was about to happen, and he could go from relatively calm to completely overwhelmed within seconds.

Did we ever cure it?

No.

But we learned how to make it more manageable.

Limiting his view helped prevent him from becoming so overstimulated by everything happening outside. Later, getting a different car helped too because he did not recognise the sounds in the same way.

The new seatbelt buckle did not carry the same history or immediately trigger the same response.

That might sound like a small thing, but with Flynt, those small changes could make an enormous difference.

Management Is Not Failure

Flynt truly was an extreme case.

Something I often explain to clients now is that we may not always be able to completely cure an unwanted behaviour.

Sometimes genetics, past experiences, emotional responses and years of repeated associations are too deeply established for a behaviour to disappear entirely.

That does not mean training has failed.

We can reduce triggers. We can change the environment. We can teach alternative behaviours and build new routines. We can improve confidence and help a dog recover more quickly when something does overwhelm them.

Most importantly, we can make life safer and more manageable for both the dog and the person living beside them.

Flynt became an incredibly solid and dependable dog, but he was never going to stop being Flynt.

I would not have changed him for the world.

He taught me more about behaviour than any course or textbook ever could. He shaped the way I view dogs, the way I work with my clients and the way I understand the emotional strain of living with a dog whose behaviour can feel overwhelming.

When clients tell me they are exhausted, embarrassed, frustrated or frightened that things will never improve, I understand.

I know what it is like to apologise to neighbours.

I know what it is like to plan your day around what your dog can cope with.

I know how isolating it can feel when other people judge the behaviour without understanding what sits behind it.

I also know how difficult it is to keep going during the stages when nothing seems to be changing.

But I know that progress is possible.

It might not look like the perfectly behaved dog someone imagined they would have. It may involve compromise, management and accepting that certain quirks will always remain.

As the years went on, the frightened, frantic dog described in those early notes became far more settled. He was still unmistakably Flynt, with all his quirks, but life with him no longer revolved around simply preventing the next reaction.

The fear and reactivity no longer controlled our lives in the way they once had.

His extraordinary memory and wonderfully strange quirks, however, never left him.

A dog does not have to be perfect to have a wonderful life.

They do not have to be easy to be deeply loved.

Letting Him Go

Flynt left the biggest hole in my life.

We believed he was around fifteen years old, although because he had originally been found as a stray, we could never know his exact age.

As he grew older, his health began to deteriorate. He developed renal failure and arthritis, and gradually his body could no longer keep up with the dog he still was in his mind.

For a dog like Flynt, not being able to run, jump and throw himself into life was incredibly difficult. His mind was still there. He was still Flynt. But his body was failing him, and keeping him with me for longer would eventually have meant asking him to live with increasing pain, frustration and discomfort.

I had always said that when he could no longer come to the yard with me or enjoy a nice walk, then it would be time. I had grown up believing that our animals would tell us when they were ready.

With Flynt, it was not that simple.

Making the decision to have him put to sleep was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. There was no single perfect moment and no answer that made the decision hurt any less.

In the end, the most important thing was that he did not suffer.

Loving Flynt meant fighting for him throughout his life. It meant learning to understand him when the world often did not. Eventually, it also meant accepting that the kindest thing I could do was let him go peacefully, even though it broke my heart.

Flynt was complicated, intense, anxious, hilarious, incredibly clever and entirely unforgettable.

His quirks did not simply become part of our routine. They enveloped my life.

Even now, certain sounds or small moments can bring back a sudden flash of him.

During my stays in hospital, my mum would call me on Skype. Flynt could hear my voice through the computer but could never quite understand where I was, and before long he associated me with the Skype ringtone itself.

From then on, whenever he heard it, he would bark.

He continued doing that for the rest of his life.

Even now, if I hear that ringtone, Flynt instantly springs to mind and, dare I say, my chest still tightens in anticipation.

The Purpose He Gave Me

I had always wanted to become a dog trainer.

Flynt did not give me that dream, but he reaffirmed it. He made me realise why I needed to do it.

He showed me how lonely it can feel to live with a dog other people do not understand. He showed me how much owners need support without judgement and how important it is to look beyond the behaviour in front of you.

He taught me that progress does not always mean perfection. Sometimes it means helping a dog feel safer, making life more manageable and learning to appreciate every step forward, however small.

Flynt was not simply part of my journey into dog training and behaviour.

He gave that journey its purpose.

Although he is no longer beside me, everything he taught me continues through every dog and owner I am able to help.