In the 1962 film, “The Manchurian Candidate”, one of the leading characters, Raymond Shaw (played by Laurence Harvey) returns from the Korean War, ostensibly as a hero. Behind this facade though, the darker truth is that he has been ‘brainwashed’ and will, when triggered by the sight of a Queen of Diamonds playing card, carry out the assassination of his father. KiKi’s darker behaviours often remind me of this, although we are still unsure of how exactly she has been conditioned by previous experiences and treatment to trigger her actions.

In the days before we collected KiKi we met a family friend who had rescued a Lurcher, “Victor” and had struggled to help him overcome his anxiety around other dogs which often manifested as aggressive behaviour on his part. Her approach involved, in the main, avoidance of close contact. The idea was that when Victor saw another dog approaching, he would be led off in the opposite direction and that by repetition, he would become more confident that his new owner would not lead him into a situation in which he felt fearful or uncomfortable. For Victor this seemed to work, when we met him he greeted us and Leica without a flicker of discomfort, going so far as to give up his bed to her when she spent the afternoon in his company and indeed tagging along with her during her ‘jailbreak’ episode when she escaped the garden in search of us.

When KiKi’s reactions to other dogs made itself apparent a few weeks later, we tried to apply the same process with only limited success. As the time passed we learned to pay much closer attention to the subtleties of her body language and that of the dogs we encountered in order to better understand exactly what the underlying triggers were.