September 3, 2020 – A Zagreb Children's Hospital is preparing to welcome its first canine member of staff – Jupi, a border collie

They are often said to be the most intelligent of all dogs. Used traditionally for herding livestock, border collies can learn a very large number of signals and commands. They are eminently trainable. Now, that intelligence is to be applied to the area of therapy, as one Zagreb children's hospital prepares to welcome its first border collie as a member of the team.

Still only a puppy, Jupi is being prepared for the role by her owner, Iva Zečević, a clinical psychologist at the Psychiatric Hospital for Children and Adolescents. At the moment, Jupi still needs to get her jabs, go for training and pass a therapy dog exam, Iva revealed to Jutarnji List journalist Lada Novak Starčević in a recent interview.


Border collies are very intelligent and eminently trainable. They take their name from the sheep farming lands which are situated on both sides of the Anglo-Scottish border © Yuppy Ermeton

Iva is undertaking the training herself with help from puppy coach Ana Odak and The Croatian Association for the Training of Guide Dogs and Mobility. Iva decided to dedicate herself personally to the task because she knows the Zagreb Children's Hospital where she works would struggle to pay for a fully trained therapy dog. Despite the time and costs involved in the necessary process, Iva has previously seen the positive effects dogs can have on her patients and knows it's a worthwhile undertaking. She is an experienced dog owner and has kept and trained several, although this is the first she has trained as a therapy dog.

Border collies are so clever that they thrive best in households that can give them lots of play and exercise. It is a British breed of dog, taking its name from the sheep farming lands which are situated on both sides of the Anglo-Scottish border. The word collie comes from the old Celtic word for useful.

All of today's purebred border collies can trace an ancestral line back to one dog. Old Hemp lived in Northumberland between 1893 and 1901 and was so skilled in his work with sheep, as well as having exactly the right temperament, that many shepherds used him as a stud for their future working dogs. Old Hemp is believed to have sired as many as 200 puppies to be reared as sheepdogs.

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As Slobodna Dalmacija/Ivica Markovic writes on the 24th of March, 2019, in these turbulent and often strange times in which we live, the best illustrators tend to be the ''black chronicles'' plastered across newspapers in the Croatian media.

There isn't a week that goes by in which Croats aren't shocked by some undesirable scene or another from one or more Croatian cities. The Croatian public was, to name just a few such cases, totally shocked by the beating up of a security guard at a nightclub in Požega, which seems to have been an entirely unprovoked attack by three aggressors in masks. The infamous domestic abuse case of Daruvarac beating his eighteen-year-old girlfriend up in Zadar repulsed the public, the father who threw his four children off the balcony of the family home sent shockwaves through Croatian society, and in Trilj, a teenager of just fourteen years of age killed his mother with a knife.

After such events are continually forced in front of our eyes, we can't help but ask the question: What's happening? What causes such levels of primitive aggression in people? To try to shed some light on the situation and find some answers to these questions, Slobodna Dalmacija talked to doc. Dr. Boran Uglešić, a well-known Croatian psychiatrist from the Clinical Center for Psychiatry at KBC Split.

''Behind every type of aggression there is a frustration in the aggressor. We live in a society that is socio-economically deteriorating, in which generally dissatisfied people live, in a society where there aren't adequate rewards for work, where irresponsibility is more appreciated than responsibility. We live in a system of egoism, selfishness, greed, alienation, malice, envy, jealousy...

Therefore, we can also ask, how can an individual function in such a system? Very often, the reasons for these types of unacceptable behavior are sought after in the consumption of alcohol, narcotics, broken interpersonal relationships, or in some psychopathological elements. Seldom are the possibilities for normal function and fitting in with the rest of society seen,'' Dr. Uglešić claims.

''The development of each person needs to be divided into several phases, each of which brings about or invokes the way in which a person will behave in the future. Much of this lies in home education, or certainly the earliest years of life and the child's upbringing, which affects his later behaviour within society.

In our childhood, we had posters of Mickey Mouse, Bruce Lee, Blondie, or some other people in our rooms, and they were our idols that we wanted to be like. Today, children find some other ''idols'' on social networks who propagate aggression, who are bullies, that is to say, people who are living outside of what are socially acceptable norms. Of course, such learned patterns of behaviour and the very people they identify with provoke aggressive behaviour.

We're all usually a copy of our parents and what we have seen in our homes at the earliest of ages is our pattern of behaviour in later life. It's very important that parents of a young man are seen as values ​​of the system and of life. If someone in his house saw aggression in his earliest youth, and this is happens repeatedly, it's possible that he will, in the future, when he's grown up, repeat that pattern of behaviour,'' says Dr. Uglešić.

So, are the Croats a frustrated nation?

''They are, and that goes for the vast majority of Croatian residents. We live in a frustrating society. That is, we live in a capitalist system that everyone wanted so much, but when that capitalism arrived, most of it was disappointing to many. We live in a consumer's society today, in which we all want to do the same thing.

But we can't all be the same. We can't all drive expensive cars. We don't all have the same standards, we can't all buy expensive and sometimes overpriced items. After all, we don't have all the same system of values. That is precisely the essence of capitalism that we as a nation weren't prepared for. Everyone thought that the promises of a better life would be real, that everything would be beautiful, and then it became obvious that it wasn't that way.

And then "group frustration" happened, of course consisting of those who can't afford all that was promised to them, and there are so many more of them than there are of those who can. There was talk of material abundance, great happiness, unrestricted personal liberty, unlimited progress,'' says Dr. Uglešić.

That lack of abundance, of great happiness, and of unlimited progress in many, has caused the frustration that provokes aggression.

"Therefore, in all this, every person must be careful and responsible, given that everything is offered, but that not everyone can have everything, yet they think they can. Then frustration leads to various types of aggression (verbal, physical). What's decent is no longer thought about, all of that leads to egoism, selfishness, greed, jealousy, envy, aggression...

Unfortunately, in today's Croatia, but also in a large part of the world, it's "normal" to behave in such an unacceptable manner and thus attract attention, and we know that such behaviour in people is causing a fake sense of power, size, strength...'' continues Dr. Uglešić.

He claims that the emergence of social networking has greatly increased the level of aggression in society.

The emergence of social networks appeals to people who support aggressive behaviour and who identify themselves with the perpetrator. An the modern day, aggression comes from all sides, it's unpredictable, uncontrollable, and can't be prevented. So, we have a very common occurrence of aggression in traffic, which does come with an ''older date'' to it, but we also have a recent bout of aggression in healthcare institutions where patients are attacking doctors and nurses, which was almost without precedent before.

The types of people don't refrain from anything, they aren't scared of anyone and they think their behaviour is normal and acceptable. Therefore, in the medical sense of the word, they need help to not repeat violent acts,'' says doc. Dr. Boran Uglešić.

''The problem of increasing violence in Croatia is sometimes the punishment that such people receive. They [punishments] certainly do need to be more drastic and heavier, and they should be an example to all those who might consider being violent or aggressive in the future.

In addition to punishments, which certainly shouldn't be minor, such people should get treatment which focuses on controlling impulses and changing their behavioral patterns over a longer period of time. If a violent person has committed a serious criminal offense, let's say attempted murder, and gets a five-year prison sentence, I think their treatment should be carried out for that entire five year period, while they're in prison, and if possible and if those circumstances require it, such treatment would have to continue even after leaving prison,'' Dr. Uglešić concludes.

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Click here for the original article by Ivica Markovic for Slobodna Dalmacija