The first time she screamed

The breeder had mentioned it. It was in the paperwork, somewhere between the feeding schedule and the vaccination dates, in the tone people use for things they are legally obliged to say. Tollers are a vocal breed.

I had read that sentence and understood it to mean barking. Every dog barks. I had owned dogs that barked. I signed the paperwork.

What I had not understood is that the Toller scream is not barking, and it is not related to barking, and knowing what a bark sounds like prepares you for it in roughly the way that knowing what rain sounds like prepares you for a fire alarm.

It does not sound like a dog

That is the part that catches everyone. The first time you hear it, your brain does not file it under dog. It sounds closer to a gull, or a child, or a piece of machinery about to fail. It arrives at a pitch that goes straight past your ears and into the base of your skull, and it does not taper off politely. It stops as suddenly as it started, and then the dog looks at you, perfectly content, waiting to see what happens next.

I have watched visitors physically leave the room. I have watched a very calm person put down a mug of tea, mid-sentence, and ask whether something was wrong with her.

Nothing was wrong with her. Something was extremely right with her. That is the whole point.

What it actually is

The scream is not distress and it is not a behavioural problem that somebody failed to train out. It is what happens when a dog bred to work at a very high level of arousal reaches that level while standing in a kitchen with nothing to do about it.

This is a breed developed to spend hours running the shoreline, flashing in and out of cover, keeping ducks curious enough to come within range. The whole job is sustained, contained excitement. You cannot select for that for two centuries and then be surprised when the dog has more drive than its body can hold.

The scream is the overflow. It comes out when the lead comes off the hook, when the car door opens, when a bird lands on the fence, when a particular person walks up the drive. It is anticipation with nowhere to go.

Why I stopped trying to stop it

For a while I did what everyone does. I tried to shush it. I tried waiting it out. I looked up whether it could be trained away, and found a lot of advice written by people who had clearly never stood next to it.

What actually changed things was giving up on silence as the goal. The noise is a symptom of arousal, so the thing to manage is the arousal, not the volume. Lower the pitch of the build-up and the scream mostly does not arrive. Make the exciting thing boring and predictable, keep your own energy flat, and let her wait a beat before anything good happens. It is not a training problem with a training solution. It is a plumbing problem: reduce the pressure and the valve stops going off.

She still screams. Less than she did, and now almost entirely at the things that genuinely warrant it, which as far as she is concerned is a heron.

What I would say to someone about to bring one home

Do not let anybody tell you it is not that bad. It is exactly that bad, for about the first six months, and then it becomes something you barely notice until a visitor puts down their tea.

But it is also the most honest thing about the breed. There is no gap between what a Toller feels and what a Toller expresses. You always know exactly where you stand. After a while, a dog who cannot hide anything from you starts to seem like an unusually good deal.

Just do not sign the paperwork thinking it means barking.