Have you ever wondered what is going on inside the mind of your pet? Dr. Wailani Sung knows the answer. She works with animals but her job is really about teaching the humans how to interpret their pets’ behaviors and help them solve their issues.
In the consultation room of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ hospital in San Francisco, two patients, a pet and his owner, are waiting for the doctor.
“Hi, I'm Dr. Sung. We're so interested in finding out more about you and about Tenzin. What do you think handsome? Okay, everybody please have a seat. He's such a handsome boy.”
Whit and their dog Tenzin, a two-year old German Shepherd, wait for Dr. Sung. The walls are covered with brochures, teaching material, and many pet pictures.
“All right, so he sounds like the perfect dog, except, why are we here today?” Sung asks.
Here’s the thing — we are not here for an infection, a vaccine, or any surgery today. Instead, we’ll be talking about pet’s emotions.
But Tenzin the dog won’t sit still.
“Sit." Sung says. "Is that a sit? This doesn’t look like a sit to me.”
Instead, he throws his two front legs on the doctor’s office desk. The big boy is now above her. She laughs and stands up in front of him. And this is when I realize that Sung's blond highlights and black uniform match Tenzin’s fur.
“What I'm trying to do is wait … because he eventually needs to close his mouth in order to swallow ... and when he closes his mouth, he takes deeper breaths through his nose. So that's calming for him ... He’s not very patient.”
In fact, the dog is too excited by the treats in the doctor’s hand.
“If he can't close his mouth, I'm going to wait for that one second he stops panting and I'm going to reward him." Tenzin sits and the doctor gives him a treat. "The reason why I bring that up is that you can help him relax. If he seems overly worked up you can teach him to settle,” she says.
If this is sounding more like a therapy session for pets rather than a standard veterinary consultation, well, that’s because it kind of is.
Sung is one of the nation’s 74 pet psychiatrists, better known as veterinary behaviorists. And her journey started with her first dog.
She explains, “my parents are immigrants from China and they didn’t know about raising a dog ... My dog pulled on leash. He was aggressive. Because we were using punishment before and it didn’t really work. So, as a teenager, I went to the library and started checking books regarding dog training and voilà! A whole new world opened up to me and my dog just blossomed”.
This experience led Sung to pursue an undergraduate degree in Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University. There, she became a research assistant for a leading veterinary behaviorist. And this is where she found her calling.
She earned two doctorates from the University of Georgia, one in Psychology, the other in Veterinary Medicine. In 2017, she started working for the San Francisco SPCA. Her mission? Preventing owners from abandoning or euthanizing their pets.
“Now I can help people understand why their pets do the things they do and help them resolve or manage their behavior issues. I think if people have a better understanding of their pets, we can greatly improve the quality of life for the pet and for the pet owner and that really helps enhance the human-animal bond,” she says.
Sung’s week generally starts with a visit to the sheltered animals. With her behavior team, she evaluates the needs and progress of each one of them until they’re ready to be adopted.
She also offers behavior consultations.
Now, back to Tenzin the dog. Like most human therapists, Sung asks a lot of questions during the session. Her goal is to get a holistic perspective on the pet’s lifestyle and find the roots of their problems.
“So, tell me about his level of anxiety,” she asks.
And then, she catches something.
“There's one dog on our street that he will always bark at and then there's one baby,” says the owner.
“A baby? He sees it and he barks?” Sung asks.
“Yeah! It’s a weird thing! I don’t know if he really hates that baby. I don’t know if it means anything,” Whit answers.
And here is the heart of Sung's work: Help owners understand their pets so they change their perception from “my dog is misbehaving” to “my dog is not ok, he needs my help.”
This approach is based on the belief that fear and anxiety are the roots of pet misbehavior.
So, once Whit learns to read his dog’s body language and realize when he’s uncomfortable, how can he help?
“What we’ll try to do is, every time you see that couple with the baby, something awesome happens," Sung says. "It’s like when every time you get out of your apartment you see your neighbor and he always says something rude to you. And every time I saw him you felt like, huh, this kind of ruined my day. But what if every time you saw them you got $1,000? Your tolerance of what they say to you increases, because it doesn’t matter what they say to you. You see them and start thinking, I’m gonna get $1,000”.
So, first step, change Tenzin’s emotional response towards his source of anxiety.
Step two, redirect Tenzin’s attention. With words like “look,” “touch,” or “find it.” Whit will distract his dog from his trigger and reward him, a lot. Treats and praises are critical to change a behavior.
“With these behaviors we are making sure clients are using positive reinforcement training ... Because think about the words in our life that make us feel happy. For a lot of people it’s like: free, vacations, you win, bonus. For me, my happy words are 'sale and clearance.' But think about the words that make you happy and I want these basic words for the dogs.”
This is called behavior modification therapy and as you probably noticed, it’s not your typical dog training.
Think about it as exercises that teach our pets how to feel better when someone or something gives them anxiety.
And for owners, this method is a change of paradigm. Here the pet is not just seen as a thing bred for us that we need to control and make behave.
“We want a relationship that’s not based on dominance but on mutual respect,” Sung says.
With her approach, Sung pushes to deconstruct old-fashioned myths about animals that people have carried through history.
“That's a really important thing for people to understand because quite often we say, 'no, don’t do that,' and we don’t follow through with what the dog should do. You just need to be consistent and teach the dog what you want the dog to do and not automatically think the dog can read your mind, right? Or automatically assuming the dog knows what “no” means,” she explains.
Let’s call this human training. And why is it important?
The doctor explains. “When you yell at the dog, you try to suppress behavior. The dog might learn to be quiet but that underlying motivation for that behavior never goes away. And sometimes, people do that and then all of a sudden the dog bites someone and they’re like, ‘Oh my god, they didn’t give me any warning.’ Well they didn’t give you a warning because you suppressed their early warning system which is barking and growling. It’s telling you they are uncomfortable. So you need to do something to intervene.’”
Through her work, Dr. Wailani Sung hopes to improve the quality of life for both pets and their owners, and prevent pets from getting mistreated or abandoned.
“I want people to give the animal a chance. I want to help them keep the animal in their life,” Sung says.
