Chasing Hares (NHB Modern Plays)

Product Information

The award was started to find the next generation of political playwrights wanting to explore the big issues that affect our lives today. At a time where questioning the political fabric of society feels particularly important, Theatre Uncut will support and amplify these new plays, examining the political in its widest sense - from the domestic to the global. The first thing to recognise is that this is not going to be easy. You have a dog that is in the ‘difficult’ category, but that means when you succeed it will be all the more enjoyable 🙂 Chasing Hares is a love letter to this movement, to the power of ordinary people working together, collectively, to the power of storytelling to affect change."

I’m afraid you’re trying to run before you can walk. You can’t give your new 3 year old terrier free rein in your big garden and expect her to behave. Even after ten weeks you will have little value for her and she won’t recognise you as someone to be considered as worthy of taking advice from. It’s little wonder she ignores you and does what she wants. And same goes for a short walk along the road by my house where we may encounter cars, I can’t suddenly throw a ball or any toy in that scenario either. She loves toys, but couldn’t care less for treats. Tennis balls are her absolute favourite, followed by tug toys. I stopped playing fetch (balls) with her 18 months ago, as I was worried about her elbows and the constant impact on them You first need to control her whilst you build up a relationship in which she considers your advice worth taking. If that means restricting her to lead walking in the meantime, then so be it. My book Guide & Control will give you some idea of how to do that, and I appreciate that a ball might not tug her rug – so you need to find something that does, as she obviously likes chasing things!

My 4 yr old rescue Brittany [abandoned hunting dog] is SUCH a good, gentle boy, so eager to please, great with all his commands. We walk off lead in a massive woodland or on a huge beach, where his recall is great. We take her to the beach every morning and she is obsessed with chasing birds. We actually didn’t have any issues with this, because the birds are flying over the water and she is never going to catch them, so we thought “hey good exercise!” Secondly, yes, there could be an element of territoriality or even breed specific herding behaviour – growling suggests that she is communicating with the dogs she chases, which is not something you do with prey. Dogs with lower chase drives will comply for a while, but if they are not given the opportunity to express the chase behaviour in some way, the drive to chase will eventually outweigh the value of the biscuit or the pain of the punishment. The second reason owners cannot control dogs in full flight is that there is nothing the dog wants more than what it is doing now. What does a gundog running-in actually mean? It’s a bad habit when a dog decides for itself (without any instruction) that it’s going to go off and hunt, flush and retrieve birds. It tends to be a habit in over-confident dogs that have been allowed to have their own way too often.

Understanding why dogs chase is crucial to controlling them; knowing that they take massive brain-chemical induced enjoyment from it; that they aren’t deliberately disobeying us, but obeying a stronger internal urge; that they can’t actually help it; that they’re fulfilling a hunger inside them, because they were bred like that. Chase” is a motor pattern, or behaviour, that is inherited. Dogs that chase are being internally reinforced just by doing it. They don’t need to be externally reinforced with a biscuit or a kind word, because the behaviour is rewarding in itself. Why they won’t stop The first step therefore is to scan your dog’s environment for anxiety; take out as many challenges as possible and introduce as many emotional improvers as you can. Challenges will include any fears that your dog has, for example noise phobias, separation issues and social concerns. Emotional improvers will include things like chew toys, a dog walker, or Dog Appeasing Pheromone, where appropriate. Reward based obedience training invariably improves relationships and the opportunities for positive interactions.There is a partial answer, but it involves training the dogs extensively one-to-one and heavily differentially reinforcing the preferred behaviour – but even then I’m not sure it would be reliable. To deliver these measures, the Government will be tabling amendments to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill for debate at Lords Report stage in January. You and your dog have incompatible requirements. You want to go for a run and your dog to come with you. Your dog, like most dogs, finds just running for long distances very boring and is going off doing what he enjoys, which is hunting. Hunting is great fun and he can do it without any input from you. You therefore become surplus to requirements, so he doesn’t listen to you. Mr Johnson is a very effusive man with a loud voice; he gesticulates a lot when talking and gets quite excitable. Mrs Johnson is calm and controlled, she does all of the walking and feeding; Mr Johnson plays ball in the garden with the dogs most days.

The story has some too-neat parallels between West Bengal and the UK and it is perhaps too sentimental in its ending, but this is easily forgiven when weighed up against its emotional power and intelligence. Occasionally, your dog won’t chase the first toy, waiting for the second. Don’t reward that with the second toy, but send them on, going with them to find and play with the first one if necessary. You control the game; don’t be manipulated by your dog.Internal reinforcement” is when the brain gives the body a feeling of pleasure. It is similar to the buzz we feel when we score a goal, win a race or achieve that top exam result. I take him to the beach everyday where he can run freely, he loves to chase the waves but never gets too close as he hates water. Each part of the inherited hunting sequence is internally reinforcing. Dogs don’t need a biscuit as a reward for performing it; they do it out of sheer pleasure. In brain chemistry terms they get a buzz of dopamine every time they perform an inherited motor pattern. This is the same reward system abused by people taking Cocaine or Ecstasy, so you can imagine the addictive possibilities! Thank you so much for this useful information. I wonder if all of this applies to my chocolate Labrador. We’ve been working on walking nicely on the lead for a few years. He tends to respond well too, but his major problem are cats (sometimes squirrels and crows, but never to the same extent). He can go from being walking happily next to me to trying to get off his harness (he can’t), pull so much in the attempt to escape and chase cats. This is especially true in our neighbourhood, we live at the end of a quiet Close with a green in the middle, he doesn’t exhibit the same behaviour anywhere else (he just knows there’s cats around). I’m usually very perceptive of his body language but sometimes he does a 360 in a split second and has almost dislocated my thumb several times. My solution has always been to drive him somewhere else for his walks or off lead time, sometimes even at the end of the road we live in and go from there. The way I feel is I can keep working on our lead work, but I feel like I’ll never ever be more interesting than going after a cat.