Tools to help the Reactive Dog - Desensitisation

It's been an interesting week in the Blue Merle Minion household. After the success of submitting the text of the post 'The Emotional Toll of Reactivity' to Dogs Today as a guest essay I have been running a book promotion this week. This has resulted in 2 days of 'Fight or Fright?' sitting at the number 2 slot on the bestseller list for the 'dog care' category of the UK Kindle store, and number 9 in combined book sales. That's just a little mind-blowing for a debut author with no real reputation in the dog world, and has just reinforced to me that supporting the guardians and handlers of reactive dogs is something that has not received enough attention to this point. Get your requests to purchase signed copies in in an orderly fashion 😂😂😂

Mind. Blown.

For anyone interested, the book is still on offer on the UK and US sites, returning to full list price at 11 p.m. GMT Thursday 28th February for the UK, and 11 p.m. PST on the same day for the US site. For some reason, Amazon seem to think that only the UK and US residents like book offers!

Your experience is NOT my experience!

Apologies for an entry that is rather more abstract and much less dog filled than usual. I shall endeavour to do better next time. Here's a puppy picture to up the canine quota a little!

How can he be 14 now?!

I'm a little quiet at the moment on new article ideas. I've been spending a lot of time writing in a completely unrelated sector and it's been taking up most of my attention. I have been fortunate enough to have had one of my articles accepted and published as a guest essay on the Dogs Today site. I was taking a look at the comments underneath (I know, always read the comments with care!) and one thing stood out to me from a couple of them.

The particular post selected was the emotional toll of reactivity article that I wrote and originally published here in October of last year (and the catalyst behind the creation of Fight or Fright? as well). I'm not going to pick out individual comments, as that would be unfair. Instead, I want to think about the attitude behind those particular kinds of comments.

The style of comments that really stood out to me went along the lines of  'You think that's tough, try what I do!' and 'Well I never did THAT in the same situation!'

One thing I have definitely learned on my travels with a reactive dog is that, while the difficulties and obstacles faced by many reactive dog guardians are the same, no two people (or two dogs) are going to have the same experience. We are all individuals, as are our dogs, and we will all experience the same things differently. In my case, events that happened concerning my reactive dog caused me to end up in tears. I make no judgement on others, whether they have cried over their dogs or not.

I don't like the mentality that makes some people have to point out that they somehow have it worse or more difficult. Just using myself as an example (because I am the ONLY person that I can speak about with total knowledge and understanding) I have found life with my dog difficult at times. He reacts to a lot of things. Not as many now as he did, due to a lot of very hard work, but the 'biggies' of people and dogs are still there. Does that mean someone whose dog is 'only' reactive to other dogs has a less difficult time? Or the person whose dog only reacts to specific breeds? No, because they are not me and I am not them.

We also have to remember that the stress that affects reactive dogs affects us as well and trigger stacking can definitely happen to humans (see the analogy in this post HERE). For these reasons, along with a whole bunch of others, the process of trying to rank experiences and emotional responses of different people - or indeed dogs - is in truth an exercise in futility.

Being judgemental in comparing my experiences to anyone else's helps nobody. It wouldn't help the people that need to know that whatever feelings they are experiencing are absolutely okay and valid. It wouldn't help me in any constructive way at all - seeking to elevate myself at the cost of belittling others doesn't make me better than those people. Instead, it reduces me to a level far below the person I should be trying to be.

Empathy is a powerful thing. Through empathy we can seek to understand ourselves and others, and survive this oftentimes cruel world we live in. Sadly - and particularly online - empathy can be a rare thing to see. Reductivism and sometimes outright cruelty seem to be more the order of the day. Empathy makes us better people, and also better dog guardians. Empathy is, simply speaking, how we should be, taking into account the feelings of others and not ranking them in a system designed to make ourselves feel better.

Attitudes for successful coaching and a birthday

So you're all set to work on a training session with your dog. You've got all the equipment that you need, a good supply of treats of appropriate reward value for what you're going to be working on, you have a safe environment in which to work, and you have your dog. You're good to go, right?

There's one more step that needs to happen before you start working with your dog.  We often tend to concentrate on the mental states of our dogs, making sure they don't get over-stimulated or become bored during training. It's easy to neglect our own thoughts and emotions, or underestimate the effects they might have on the training session and, over time, our bond with our dogs.

Tools to help the reactive dog - Counter Conditioning

Conditioning is a process by which a dog learns to associate something with a stimulus. The most commonly known example is undoubtedly Pavlov and his famously salivating dogs. This is known as classical conditioning. B.F. Skinner took the concept further to develop the four quadrants of operant conditioning (explained in a previous post HERE) which can be summed up loosely as 'actions have consequences' and which dog trainers use every day to work with dogs.

When working with a reactive, fearful dog, we are faced with a dog that is already conditioned to have a fear response to a particular trigger (or possibly more than one). Encountering their trigger closer than they feel comfortable with will result in a number of behaviours and communication attempts designed to let us know that they are scared. These range from the subtle signs such as a lip lick, up to the classic stereotypical depiction of the reactive dog growling, lunging and barking.

Here is an excerpt from my book, 'Fight or Fright? A Reactive Dog Guardian's Handbook' available on Amazon worldwide: