Obituaries : Dog Trainer Barbara Woodhouse

Barbara Woodhouse, the indomitable British dog trainer who always insisted that it was pet owners and not the pooches who were hard to teach, died Saturday at a hospital in Buckinghamshire, England. She was 78.

Mrs. Woodhouse never recovered from a stroke she suffered a month ago, family members said. Another stroke in 1984 had left her partially paralyzed on one side of her body.

Mrs. Woodhouse, who was a cross between a drill sergeant and Dr. Doolittle, was catapulted into the limelight when she was 70. That is when her television show, “Training Dogs the Woodhouse Way,” was first shown on the British Broadcasting Corp. in Britain.

The series was so popular that Mrs. Woodhouse, whose training uniform was comfortable shoes, a pleated skirt and pullover sweater, was voted England’s television personality of 1980.

When her offbeat show was exported to public television in the United States and elsewhere around the world, she attracted a loyal following. With the priceless exposure, sales of Mrs. Woodhouse’s books, which she had written about animal training over the years, soared.

“Woodhouse presents her subject earnestly while tolerating--even cultivating--an eccentric image that attracts followers wherever she goes,” a reporter for the London Daily Mail once observed.

At the height of her popularity, Mrs. Woodhouse was receiving 400 letters a day from fans and could not walk out of her house without being bombarded with questions about naughty dogs and pesky puppies. When the show’s theme music signaled the start of the program, dogs reportedly dropped their bones and scurried over to watch.

“Dogs may be man’s best friend, but they worship and adore Barbara Woodhouse,” wrote Gerald Clarke in Time. “Given half a chance, the entire canine species doubtless would slobber and slurp all over her, tails wagging fast enough to cause gale warnings throughout the British Isles.”

Some animal behaviorists scoffed at her methods. She liked to get acquainted with dogs by breathing up their nostrils. She also felt she was linked to animals by telepathy that allowed her to give instructions to them without opening her mouth.

“If you look a dog straight in the face, you can get on its wavelength,” Mrs. Woodhouse once said. “I find that the thing that stops me very often from training a dog is the waves coming from the owner, either of disapproval or of terror, that I might hurt the little dog, which I would never do. It’s the owners you’ve got to indoctrinate.”

Several years ago, she won an entry in the Guiness Book of Records for training more than 17,000 dogs. She boasted that she could train 32 dogs in six hours.

As the daughter of a clergyman, Mrs. Woodhouse got her first dog when she was 2. The puppy bit her on the nose because she squeezed it too hard. She trained dogs as her three children were growing up and made her first dog training film, “Love Me, Love My Dog,” in 1955 using her Great Dane, Juno.

Mrs. Woodhouse, who was married to a retired rheumatologist, Michael, recalled in a Times interview four years ago that she turned to animals because there were no strings attached to their love.

“When I was about 3, I was getting my bath one night and I heard my mother say to the nanny that of the five in our family, ‘Why can’t Barbara be pretty like the rest?’ It turned me to animals. They didn’t care whether I was pretty or not.”