CanisLabs ad: Sarah Mitchell

I walk my dog in the cemetery. Not through it, on the way to somewhere. In it. That is the walk. I have been doing it for fourteen months, and until I typed this sentence I had never said it out loud to anybody, including my sister. I found it by accident. I was avoiding the park, avoiding the towpath, avoiding the bit of the estate where the man with the two huskies comes out at half seven. And one afternoon I turned in through the gates because it was the only gate on that road, and there was nobody there. There is never anybody there. That is the whole point. It is quiet, the paths are wide enough that you can see somebody coming from a long way off, and the few people who are there are not looking at you. They have their own reasons for being there and they are not interested in whether my dog is well behaved. That is what my world got narrowed down to. A place where nobody would look at us. Her name is Nessa. She is six, a rough collie cross, and she came from a rescue in Wales when she was two and a half. At home she is the easiest animal I have ever lived with. She sleeps on my feet. She brings me one specific toy when I have been on a call too long. When my mother stayed for a fortnight after her hip, Nessa slept on the landing between our two doors like she had been assigned it. Outside, from about sixty feet, she becomes something I do not recognise. She locks on first. Then the whole body goes forward and she screams — it is not barking, it is a scream — and she spins on the lead until she is choking herself. I have been pulled over twice. Once on a kerb, once on a wet path where I went down properly and lay there for a second deciding whether to cry. I have spent about three thousand pounds trying to fix it. Two trainers. A twelve-week reactivity course where we stood at the back, behind a screen, while the manageable dogs worked closer to the front. Private sessions at ninety pounds each. A head collar she rubbed a bald patch under. Two harnesses. A long line. CBD oil for four months. Calming chews for another five. Bloodwork, twice. Thyroid panel. Both completely normal. Everyone told me the same thing. Be consistent. Manage her environment. Some dogs have a ceiling. I was being consistent. I was walking her twice a day, every day, doing every protocol I had been given, and I had been consistent for three and a half years. And I want to say something about the trainers, because I know how these posts usually go. They were not idiots and they were not robbing me. The things they taught me were sensible and I could see them working in the driveway and in the garden and once, brilliantly, in an empty car park on a Tuesday. None of it survived contact with an actual dog on an actual pavement. The worst part was never the lunging. It was the planning. I know which side of every road has fewer dogs on it. I know which driveways to swing wide of. I know that the woman on the corner lets her spaniel out the front at twenty past eight and that the school run puts three dogs on the green at ten to nine. I have a map in my head of a two-mile radius and it is more detailed than anything I know about my own job. You do not notice your life getting smaller. You notice that you have not been to the market on a Saturday in two years. What eventually got through to me was not another training video. It was a woman in a Facebook group who asked, almost in passing, whether anyone had ever looked at their dog's gut. I nearly scrolled past it. Here is the version I now understand, and I am going to write it the way it was written for me, because nobody had ever put it in front of me like this. There is a nerve that runs from the gut straight up into the brain. Most of the traffic on it goes upward — from the gut to the brain, not the other way round. And the message it carries more than any other is a very simple one. You are safe. You can stand down. Researchers worked out how much that message matters by taking it away. They severed that nerve in laboratory animals and then gave the same gut treatment that had reliably calmed those animals before. The effect vanished completely. Not reduced. Gone. So the gut is not commenting on how a dog feels. It is issuing the instruction. And when it cannot produce what that nerve carries, the brain does not receive a weaker version of the message. It receives nothing at all. At which point a dog is not overreacting to the spaniel on the corner. A dog is living somewhere that nobody has ever told her it is over. That was the sentence that made me sit down on the stairs. And there was a number underneath it that I have not been able to stop thinking about since. In dogs put into a stressful new environment, stress hormone has been measured at three times normal — and it stayed there for three days. Three days, from one single event. Nessa was going up twice on a good day. Three years and she had never once started a walk from nothing. Every walk was starting from a level the last walk had left behind. I was not walking a dog who was getting worse. I was walking a dog who was running a deficit. Because it explained the thing that had never made sense. Nessa is not stupid and she is not untrained. She knows everything I taught her. It just is not available to her at the moment she needs it, because a brain that has never come out of survival mode does not go and fetch the training first. Training works. It just cannot reach a dog whose system is already full. Then there was the part I did not want to hear, because I had already spent money on it. I had tried a gut supplement. A twenty-four pound tub of probiotic chews, every morning, four months. Absolutely nothing. What I had not understood is that probiotics are live bacteria, and live bacteria have to survive the stomach, reach the gut wall and then settle in and colonise. In a dog who has been running on stress hormones for years, that lining is not in a state where anything settles. It was like inviting people into a house with no floor. They come in, there is nowhere to stand, and they go straight back out again. Postbiotics are different. They are the compounds those bacteria produce, delivered directly. Nothing has to live through the journey, because the work was finished before it started. I found CalmAxis after about a week of reading. Postbiotic metabolites, 500 mg per chew, third-party tested — which mattered to me, because when someone had sent a batch of the popular brands to an independent lab, one came back at a fifth of what its label claimed and another was cut with rice flour. That is when I understood why my four months had done nothing. It was not the wrong idea. It was not the wrong idea at all. There was simply nothing in it. I did not tell anybody I had ordered it. I was tired of announcing things. I have measured the whole thing in cemetery visits, because that is what my week was made of. The first week we went every single day, twice, the way we always had. Nothing was different except that I was watching her like a hawk and finding nothing. Day nine was the first thing, and it was not on a walk at all. It was in the garden, on a Tuesday, and I am not going to describe it beyond saying that I stood there holding a bag and thinking: that has not looked like that in three years. Week three we went to the cemetery six times out of seven. The seventh day I took her up the road instead, and a labrador came past on the far side, and she locked on and then came off it by herself without me doing anything. I stopped walking and stood on the pavement like an idiot. Week five we went to the cemetery three times. Week six was bad. A terrier came out of a gateway with no warning and she went up exactly as she always had, screaming, spinning, and we went back to the cemetery every day for the next eight days and I told myself I had imagined all of it. Week nine I took her to the green on a Saturday at half ten in the morning, and we have not been to the cemetery since except because I like it there. Week six was bad. A terrier came out of a gateway with no warning and she went up exactly as she always had, screaming, spinning. I went home convinced I had imagined the previous three weeks. Week nine: I took her to the green. On a Saturday. At half ten in the morning. I should say one more thing, because it was the reason I had refused medication twice when my vet offered it. A friend of mine had her collie on Trazodone for a year and I watched what it did. The dog was easier and the dog was not there. She stood in the kitchen looking at nothing. My friend used the same word for it that I have since heard from about six other people, and I had decided I would rather have the screaming. Zombie. This is not that. Nothing about Nessa got turned down. She is still ridiculous about the hoover and she still steals socks off the radiator. She is not a different dog. She still has days. She still tells the postman what she thinks of him and she still cannot be trusted around a cyclist who comes past too close. But she comes down now. That is the whole thing. Something happens and then it finishes, instead of stacking on top of the last one. I still go to the cemetery sometimes. It is genuinely a nice walk, and there is a bench near the top where you can see the whole town. The difference is that it is a choice now. If you know every quiet street within a mile of your house — if you have a map in your head that you never asked for — it is not that you have failed at being consistent. → trycanislabs.com/products/calmaxis-chews P.S. Someone in that same group told me there is an actual test for this and I did not believe her. There is. It is called a canine Dysbiosis Index and it is a PCR panel run on a stool sample — your own vet can order it, no referral. Above 2 is significant. Ask for it by name. My vet had never run one and was completely fine about ordering it when I asked. P.P.S. I do not work for CalmAxis. I am forty-one and I walked my dog around gravestones for over a year because it was the only place nobody would look at us. If that is where you have ended up, I promise you there is nothing wrong with your character. Don't buy it on Amazon — counterfeits have been reported and I have no idea what is in those.