ON A bitingly cold Wednesday afternoon on the outskirts of Edinburgh, sensory overload beckons for my wayward pooch. She skitters across the sawdust as every few minutes a plane roars overhead. She is spooked by the noise of a horsebox clanking along the nearby road. A cock crows nearby. Aural distractions are ten-a-penny.
And then there are the smells. Not just the fragrant tones from the nearby pig farm at Kirkliston, but the more subtle scents of the hundreds of dogs that have come before. As if that wasn't enough, the big old carthorse in the nearby field ambles ov
er to the fence, as Lola my cairn terrier tentatively leans forward to initiate nose-to-muzzle contact.
That's the last tentative movement she makes. A micro-second later she is cartwheeling backwards through the air, tumbling harum scarum in the direction of Nir Shihor. The Israeli dog whisperer has just given an almighty tug on the 10ft long piece of rope attached to her collar, yanking the cord so violently that for one tiny moment my dog seemed stunned into inaction. Yet almost as soon as she feels the tug she comes bouncing towards Nir, tail wagging, ears pricked up.
"See, she won't ignore me again," he says.
He's right, too. Every time she hears him say her name, even if it's in mock sotto voce tones barely audible in the gusting wind, she immediately stops whatever she's doing and bounds over to him. It's hard to believe that this is the recalcitrant Hairy Maclary lookalike who had never hitherto managed to resist the temptation to chase sheep, cats or chickens, who has led me a merry dance over hillsides the length and breadth or the country.
But then Shihor is no ordinary dog-trainer. This is a man who has taught dogs to do the most likely things in the most unlikely circumstances. He prefers not to focus on the work he's done in the security business, but it's the stuff that captures the imagination. His greatest gig was working for Anglo-American's gold mining division in South Africa where money was no object and he travelled to Europe to buy 40 of the best German shepherd dogs he could find before training them up for sentry duty. Or there was the job deep in the jungles of the Philippines, where he pioneered the use of dogs to patrol the remote jungle region around the gold mines of Mindanao when terrorists and bandits were raiding the mines.
Terrorists feature highly on Shihor's CV. He helped train dogs to go out on patrol with the Israeli army in Lebanon, when they were becoming ever more vulnerable to ambush by Hezbollah fighters. The army's relationship with man's best friend continued long after he left his home country, with the Israeli army recently using dogs in Gaza to penetrate the network of tunnels which Hamas fighters used to evade the invaders. "That was way after my involvement ended," adds Shihor.
A Brazilian jui jitsu devotee with an almost zen-like calm, Shihor makes a very unlikely Barbara Woodhouse figure. Yet turning domestic dogs into responsible citizens has been his first love ever since he successfully decided to take his mother's unruly cocker spaniel in hand as an eight year old. Since then he has gone on to train dogs to help disabled people and even trained the dogs of an A-list actor and singer in New York.
Most of all, though, he loves training working dogs. Their motivation and behaviour is the most clear-cut, the most easy to channel. "The thing to understand is that dogs are obsessive animals," he tells me. "The more of a working dog it is, the stronger that obsession. The need to work, to do what they've been bred for, is overwhelming. If you take away the sheep from a collie or the shooting from a gun dog, what does it do with that obsession?"
After spending seven years working in property in Edinburgh after moving north with his Scottish wife Susan, Shihor decided to return to his first true love and set up dogmore.co.uk, a training and dog-sitting service.
It was at this point that I made the mistake of asking Shihor, a trained lawyer and clearly a man who thinks deeply about life, whether there was any great intellectual basis for his approach to dog-training. This was the point at which I learned all about Burrhus Frederic Skinner, the controversial American psychologist whose work has formed the basis of Shihor's doggie career. BF Skinner may be better (if erroneously) known as the man who kept his own daughter in a cage while she was growing up, but he is also a genius whose behavioural theories regarding animals have had a profound affect upon Shihor.
In a nutshell, Skinner had a Pavlovian belief that positive reinforcement is a more powerful tool for establishing or correcting human or animal behaviour than punishment. Breaking each task down into small component parts and reinforcing it is the way to train any animal to do anything, reckoned Skinner. To prove the point, he trained rabbits to pick up coins and put them in piggybanks, and during the Second World War he even trained pigeons to guide missiles at German warships by encasing four of them in a glass missile nose-cone and getting them to peck the inside to guide it towards ships.
All of which is of little use to my scruffy little hound, who is about as interested in tracking down Palestinian terrorists, defending gold mines or bombing German battlecruisers as she is in coming when I call her. Which is where Nir comes in. The long loop of rope gives him control, and he uses it to jolt her into coming back to him. The basic idea is to give her enough discomfort to make her come whenever you call. And it works, too. After three days of continual reinforcement, she trots over whenever I ask. Proof positive that the pleasure and pain principle is alive and well.
