VICTORIA STILWELL: What I Learned on my European Tour – Part 1

"We started with a few days in Helsinki. I’d never been to Finland before, and didn’t really know what to expect. I knew the sun didn’t set very much in the middle of the summer, but I still wasn’t prepared for the odd sensation of driving away from the airport with our phenomenal hosts at 11pm in broad sunlight. I was brought to Helsinki to do a live show in the lovely Finlandia Hall by an animal communicator named Maiccu Kostiainen of Animals Talk – one of the most dynamic animal people I’ve ever met. Maiccu is a huge proponent of force-free training and is committed to providing her local Finnish people with as much info as she can. The show was great - fortunately, the vast majority of Finns speak fluent English, so I didn’t need an interpreter. I usually demonstrate my training techniques with rescue dogs from whatever area I’m visiting, but in Finland we had the wonderful problem of not being able to find shelter dogs. There were no shelters, as there’s no significant pet overpopulation problem there. I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to be in a place where not only did people ‘get it’, but they also lived it in terms of their legislation, levels of responsibility with their own pets and overall ideas about pet ownership. In the end, we ended up finding some dogs that had been rescued from Spain (the opposite of Finland in terms of animal welfare in general). Another example of how forward thinking the Finns are in terms of animal welfare is that the use of shock collars to train dogs is illegal. How refreshing!"

(lue koko juttu)