Is your pet misbehaving? Is it a struggle to walk your dog? Does your dog strain your nerves with incessant barking? Is your cat aggressive or urine-spraying in the house?

These, and many other behavioural problems can make life difficult for a pet owner.

Veterinary surgeon Uwe Gerecke, DrMedVet, MRCVS, offers a specialised behaviour service for dogs and cats in Cornwall.

I believe that behaviour issues seen in dogs and cats do not need to be a struggle for the owners. In the majority of cases, they have developed based on a series of misunderstandings or misconceptions between owners and pets, and can be solved!

Pet dogs and pet cats do not live in their natural habitat. The environment they live in was created by humans and the growing-up pets need a lot of help to learn understand it. However, both dogs and cats only have a certain portfolio of species-specific signals available to communicate, which in some areas does not match that of their human counterparts. This can lead to confusion and insecurity of the pets, and in turn to helplessness and frustration of the owners.

Once such misunderstandings get in the way of animals and humans living together harmonically, adverse behavioural patterns in the pets may develop. They can easily get stuck in such patterns and start to exhibit problems such as aggression, anxiety and phobias, obsessions, inappropriate urination, or issues related to territorial, possessive, or dominance behaviour.

It is my job to find out the reasons for these adverse behaviours, and to show you how they can be changed!