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:

Don't walk the dog!

I know, the title of this article looks wrong. One of the first things we all know about dogs is that they need to be walked. Every day. Sometimes multiple times a day. By and large, that fact holds true.

Until it doesn't.

As anyone that's read my writings before knows, my area of interest is fearful and reactive dogs. The dogs that are scared of things they may encounter in the outside world and react by trying to create distance from them. Either by running away or by the use of displays of fear aggression in an attempt to make the scary thing itself move away.

The good, the bad and the ugly of behaviour modification

Those of us sharing our lives with reactive dogs have a number of things in common. A love of routes off the beaten path where few people go. The ability to spin through 180 degrees and powerwalk in the opposite direction, chanting ‘Let’s go, this way!’ in a cheery voice despite our stomach plunging to our boots. A neck that turns further than seems biologically possible through much practice at scanning the horizon in all possible directions for triggers appearing. One thing we definitely all want is access to ways in which we can help our dogs’ relationship with the world.

Many of us would love to see our dogs able to do something like this

Behaviour modification sounds scary. To someone that has a sometime love of schlocky horror movies, it conjures up images of haunted mental hospitals and straightjackets, with terrifying things being done with huge syringes. I fully admit to having a thoroughly overactive imagination though! Behaviour modification can be done in harmful ways. To break it down, behaviour modification involves modifying behaviour. Usually when discussing behaviours that guardians want changed, we are looking at behaviours they want to decrease. This leads us to look at how we can affect whether a dog repeats a behaviour or not. I wrote on this in a previous entry which can be found here, with a funky diagram from Foul Mouthed Fido that demonstrates it nicely. The technical explanation in that post goes as follows:

'There's no such thing as a bad dog.' Who's to blame?

Someone must be to blame, right? There must be a fault somewhere for a dog to be snarling and lunging at anything. A lack of training, not enough discipline, just a downright nasty temperament? One of these things has to be true for a dog to be 'reactive' (which is, of course, just another name for aggressive!)

No, I haven't gone rogue or lost the last remaining traces of my sanity. This is something that grinds my gears when I see it - blaming. Blaming the dog or blaming the guardian for some supposed 'thing' that they either have or have not done that has turned the dog into this problem.

I have a number of issues with this concept. I refuse to call Finn's reactivity a problem. It can be an issue, in certain circumstances, and it is something that we, his family, have to think about and consider in just about any situation that might come up, but it is not a problem. Finn has difficulties dealing with certain factors in the world. That is not a problem, it is a particular and special need that he has for our understanding and consideration. Yes, it can make our lives complicated and difficult at times, but that is definitely not Finn's fault. He never asked to live in a world he finds scary. There are things that I didn't get quite right in trying to equip Finn to deal with the world, I acknowledge that fact. There were also things that I had no control over that contributed to his fear and lack of confidence.