How Our Pets Can Lead To Personal Growth

personal growth pets lhasa apso dogs

Pets For Personal Growth

It’s absolutely incredible how pets can often lead to immense personal growth for us. As a dog owner, I feel that my pets have taught me a lot about life including compassion and responsibility over the years.

This month, I completed a very personal project that actually started about 23 years ago. I had moved to Winnipeg with my first two Lhasa Apso dogs Pepper and Max to start a new pharmaceutical sales career. I decided to shoot video of them at home doing normal everyday things like playing, eating, sleeping and even taking a bath. For some reason, this was really the only video footage I ever took of them and today, I am really fortunate that I did.

Back in those days, I was only able to transfer the video cassette footage to VHS so that I could watch the video on TV. Then many years later when computers got better, I was able to transfer the footage to a computer video file. The digital file enabled me to save the footage from any further degradation in picture quality which can happen with VHS tapes over time.

My Dogs As Personal Growth Teachers

Pepper and Max were the first real dependants I ever had and therefore they taught me how to be responsible as well as compassionate, especially during their older years. I wasn’t perfect with them but I was a good enough dog owner to help them live long lives of 15 years each.

But I did make mistakes which I won’t go into here. Learning from my experience with them enabled me to be an even better dog owner today with my current Lhasa Apso dogs Chester and Roxie, stars of my dog obedience training videos.

Bittersweet But Worthwhile Project

As all pet owners know, all pets have unique habits and personalities. With current improved computer video editing programs, I was finally able to edit the original 30 minute video footage of Pepper and Max into something quite nice. The end result was about 26 minutes of enhanced video where I was able to brighten up some previously dark scenes. I also added music and put the scenes in some sort of logical order.

As I was reviewing all the video footage, all of the unique habits of Pepper and Max suddenly came back to me. I certainly had a smile on my face. But at the same time, the video also made me really miss those two guys. Pepper passed away 19 years ago while I lost Max about 13 years ago – so it’s been a very long time since they were with me.

I still miss them dearly which is why this project was bittersweet. My stomach was in knots for the entire weekend I was working on this project. But overall, I’m really glad that I did do this video.

I never want to forget Pepper and Max especially given just how significant they were in my life. They were perhaps two of the greatest teachers in personal growth I ever had. The new video will just help me remember them better.

Of course with my current Lhasa Apsos Chester and Roxie, I’ve already been shooting lots of great video of them as they also continue to take over from Pepper and Max as personal growth coaches for me in many ways.

I decided not to share the full 26 minute video of Pepper and Max with the world since it’s too long anyway. But I did do a shortened version of about 10 minutes below just in case anyone was interested or curious.

Hope you enjoy it if you choose to see it.