Hint: Do not choke, shock or punish your dog’s barking, growling, or lunging in any way shape or form. You will only make things worse by confirming for your dog that whatever it is she’s afraid of will indeed cause her harm in the form of your so-called “correction.” Do not correct your dog. Correct your understanding of your dog’s experience.
Hiding: If I can't see you, you're not there.
Fearful, shy dogs, of which Sadie is one, are often reactive, meaning they react behaviorally (freezing, barking, growling, lunging, hiding, cowering, for example) to the things that trigger the emotion of fear. Actually, all dogs are afraid of some things, as well they should be. So are we. Fear of novel and unusual phenomenon is good. It can save our lives. But, fearful, shy dogs like fearful people tend to react more often to more things than, well, regular people and dogs.
Dogs brains and our brains function pretty much the same when fear is aroused. Our amygdala goes into overdrive and our thinking brain recedes into the background. We don’t act, we react. Typically we freeze, if only for an instant. Then we flee from what’s scaring us or we try to make it flee from us. You know the old saw, the best defense is a good offense.
Lots of things trigger Sadie’s fear response. Let’s take one example–a person seeming to suddenly come out of nowhere on a trail in hazy light in which they appear as a featureless silhouette. Sometime they’re wearing a back pack or using walking sticks which only makes their outline look even scarier. I’ve learned from experience, unfortunately, that Sadie will freeze for an instant and then run barking towards the figure as if to say, “GO AWAY!” Patricia McConnell refers to this as an active defense reflex. The responses of hikers on the receiving end of Sadie’s deep-chested barks have ranged from startling and stopping in their tracks to just walking by and and saying “Hi” as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened.
In any case, I don’t want Sadie to feel afraid, and I also don’t want her behavior to scare people. What to do? Well, the traditional answer is to do a classical counterconditioning protocol which is a fancy way of saying ‘change Sadie’s emotional response from fear to, if not joy, at least equanimity to an approaching stranger.‘
Doing this would have required finding a string of people that Sadie didn’t know, or people she did know but dressed up as people that she didn’t, to act as decoys. They would appear out of nowhere on various trails around town at a distance far enough so that Sadie could see them but not close enough so that she would react. I would feed her an extra special goodie at just that moment. Soon approaching figures would predict good things happening, a special treat, and that would in turn change her emotional state to something positive rather than fear.
We didn’t do that.
Clicking and treating the behavior you want to interrupt is not the intuitively obvious thing to do. (After all, we typically click to ‘mark’ the behavior we do want and then follow-up with a positive reinforcer, usually, but not always, food.) But, that’s what I did.
So what behavior did I click and treat that I didn’t want Sadie to do? Freezing and staring at the oncoming figure. Remember, that’s the behavior that immediately preceded barking.
Here’s what I did under the guidance of Gigi, our trainer. I let Sadie look at the person for two seconds, not more. Then I clicked. Because Sadie is clicker savvy and she knows a goodie, a positive reinforcer, follows the click, she would look back at me and come to me for her extra special cheese. By the time the person caught up to us I had Sadie sitting at the side of the trail either gobbling up goodies as the person walked towards us (classical counter-conditioning) or performing other learned behaviors on cue, including ‘look’ at the person passing by, for which she was reinforced. I described some of these behaviors in a previous post, “Magic Touch for Fearful Dogs.” Leslie McDevitt discusses the ‘look‘ cue in her book, Control Unleashed.
Sadie caught on quickly. When she saw a stranger in the distance she started looking back at me almost immediately. I clicked her head-turns and she bounced back for her treat.
I’m always watching the trail ahead. On rare occasions I see someone before Sadie does and I call her to me. More often, though, Ms. S. sees someone before I do and comes running to me all on her own steam. I LOVE that! I positively reinforce her for those stellar performances!
Sometimes, like earlier today, a person seemingly appears out of thin air which catches us both by surprise. Sadie slipped in a couple of barks but we managed to abort her running towards the man and his dog who had stopped and politely moved off the trail.
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My pup Ozzy used to be very reactive to other dogs. He would get so excited and forget how big he is, and would scare the other dogs. It took him a while, but he now knows how to greet politely. 🙂
Awesome! Progress is a wonderful thing 😉
Rusty has fearful moments but only when we’re home. When we’re out walking, hiking around people or dogs he doesn’t know he has no problems. It only happens when we’re at home. I’m going to have to try something similar to this and see if it works.
Good luck. Perhaps Rusty feels like he need to guard the house whereas when he’s out and about that pressure is off.
That is entirely possible, he does pretty well with people coming over as long as they ignore him for the first 10-15 minutes. If they do that then he’s fine the rest of the time they’re here.
Great post. I think it’s very important to help people find ways to train (or re-train) their dogs in ways that don’t necessarily require a lot of decoys or other elaborate set-ups. As effective as those can be, a lot of people just don’t have the time or patience to do that.
Thanks Susan. I have really struggled with the decoy thing. I’ve thought about going to campus (University of Colorado at Boulder) and paying students a few bucks to be decoys and to ‘behave just as I instruct you to behave’. Never done it. I did persuade a friend who Sadie doesn’t know to “stare at Sadie and walk right at her” so we could practice some CC. Sadie is a smart cookie. I think she knew it was a set up and had no reaction at all. So, even when I’ve tried using a decoy, it didn’t work out so well, or at least not as I had intended. One good thing, despite Sadie’s continuing–though lessening–reactivity, is that I’m less freaked out about it. I’m better able to stay centered and that helps.
I am so glad you wrote about this! I had been kicking myself (not easy to do!) about leaving out Leslie McDevitt’s ‘look at that’ protocol in my post. It is incredibly effective in changing emotional and behavioral responses. I think of the clicker as a little remote control that brings my dog back to me, not what clicker trainers would tell you do with a clicker. Novice, clicking owners often do this inadvertently when they discover that the ‘click’ can be very effective cue for a recall, rather than a marker for the behavior. Can make a trainer cringe.
I have also conditioned my dog’s name to work in the same way since the first thing I usually do when I see my little reactive cocker freeze up is call her name. A marker word ‘yes’ does the same thing. She’s improved in the year I’ve had her and now I get a kick out of her ‘bark! spin around for treat’ behavior when she sees new dogs. We’ll see if we can lose even that bark as we continue to work on it, but it sure beats her past behavior of ‘bark and pounce on their face’.
It’s a great example of how the ‘chain of feel good’ starts right away with a cue when dogs are trained using positive reinforcement techniques.
When Gigi first suggested giving look a ‘try’ she referred me to Leslie’s book. I was hesitant at first. But, like you say, it really does work! Maybe this is an example of the clicker having become a secondary reinforcer?
I call Sadie’s name as well when I see her zeroing in on something and more often than not she breaks her stare and comes to me. Sometimes, still, though, and I hate when this happens, I’m not fast enough and her brain has traveled beyond freeze and she in “Bark-to-make-it-go-away mode.” Unfortunately, when she barks she runs up to the person. Dog people see the behavior for what it is and just take in in stride. If they stop and we talk I ask them to ignore her and before you know it Sadie is ‘touching’ their hand and looking to me for a treat. Great. But, the world isn’t full of such cool, collected characters. So we continue to work on this. I kick myself (Actually, I find it’s pretty easy. Lots of practice ;-))for not anticipating these events as when, for example, Sadie is a little stressed from meeting three labs rushing up to her for a sniff (they’re friendly dogs but it’s still 3:1). Stress as we know is cumulative. So after such an event that didn’t look like all that much on the surface, her brain is now in higher gear and she’s more likely to be reactive I to the next concerning thing that we encounter. Sigh.
Great advice, Deborah! Thank you for this informative post.
Thank you. It’s a work in progress to say the least.
Very interesting post! Are you not afraid that Sadie is not learning new behavior, as she doesn’t give calming signals at the moment of the click?
I am a newbie in this area …
HI Kenzo
I think Sadie is learning a new behavior which is to run back to me when she sees a person on the trail–that person has become a ‘cue’ for Sadie to turn around and come to me. When you use a protocol such as BAT, then you are looking for a calming signal before you reward your dog by walking away from the decoy. I suppose you could say that Sadie seeing the person as a ‘cue’ rather than a ‘threat’ that she needs to scare away is in itself calming although technically it’s not a calming behavior. But, on second thought it could be since turning away from that which is bothersome is calming. But, don’t quote me on that. 🙂 Great comment. Thanks.
Great post Deborah! Rewarding the reactivity is exactly what Debbie of FearfulDogs recommended that we do with Buster when we were chatting about his reactivity to other dogs in Denver. I’ve been implementing it, and we’re starting to see some progress. He may let out a bark or two, but he then he remembers there’s a treat for him whenever he sees another dog and looks at me for it. =) Because he’s pretty “sharky” when taking treats, I’m tossing them to him – which is great! He has to concentrate on me, because he knows a treat will be flying his way. And, if he misses it, I get a chance to think about what our next move is going to be while he’s sniffing for the treat. Thanks so much for the great advice.
It’s a great moment when Buster “thinks” “Oh wait! There’s a treat here somewhere for me!” That’s progress. It’s so gratifying, isn’t it, when we do something that makes a difference for our dogs? Now that’s what I call positive reinforcement–for us.
I appreciated this post too. Although I’m doing BAT training in my back yard, the idea of trying to find decoys for trail walks is overwhelming. Knowing that there are other, more low maintenance options that will achieve the same effect is encouraging.
I’d love to try BAT with Sadie, but, like you say, it’s just too overwhelming to set it up on trails. I hope Frankie is continuing to make progress.
Most, if not all, of Buster’s reactivity happens when he is on-leash. Just this morning, he started barking at a neighbor in his car – who we hadn’t seen in 6 months. We’re working on it, and this post has given us some good ideas. Thanks!
Good luck! Sadie’s friend, Romeo, tends to be more reactive on leash. I think he feels more confined, less able to get away, so he reacts. Dog have l o n g memories:-)
We use LOOK all the time with Lilly. For us it hasn’t completely fixed things, but it does give Lilly something to do other than react.
Exactly. Having something to do other than react is so helpful!
I am loving all these Never Shock a Puppy posts and videos! They’re coming at just the right time for me, since almost three weeks ago I got a foster dog who’s dog reactive.
Like Susan said, not having a decoy or fellow trainer handy makes many of the excellent training techniques impossible for me. So for now we’re doing pretty much like you suggest, though without a clicker (I haven’t advanced that far yet!). Right now I’ve discovered a slice of Bavarian smoked cheese does the trick when we see another dog. My problem is coordinating the dispensing of the treat with the behaviour I want.
Thanks for the post.
It sounds like you might be trying to do classical counter-conditioning. If so, try to keep your pup far enough away from the other dog so that your dog ‘sees’ the other but is below threshold, ie. not reacting. Feed the cheese then. Don’t wait for a specific behavior from your dog. Using this approach your goal would be to change your dog’s emotional reaction to the other dog, not reward a particular behavior. The order is important. Your dog sees other dog. Your dog gets cheese.
Thanks–what you describe is exactly what happened today when we saw Robbie the Great Dane in front of us on our walk. I knew him from my previous dog, and I think the owner was hanging back to talk to me, but I kept this dog under control the whole time with mini time outs w/ treats. He never lunged or barked, just really wanted to get to Robbie. Then we turned to head home, and Robbie went the other way. I had Sparky sit, and gave him a mini massage to calm him down.
Robbie might make a good decoy dog if I could ever work that out…very mellow fellow.
I have a fearful reactive dog, he is mostly afraid of dogs, but was starting to show aggression towards people on our bike path walks a year ago. Most notably, when he went ballistic, seemingly out of the blue, at a man with a walking stick. We have come a long way in the last year, back from the brink, I say. Today was a beautiful 70 degree and sunny day after a stretch of about 5 days of rain, so of course the bike path was hopping when we went out. Lots of bike riders, walkers, joggers, even a rollerblader, thankfully we had no direct encounters with any dog walkers. I was able to manage well, rewarding him for looking and then focusing on me as we moved along in passing of all of them except in one instance. It was a single lady walker dressed in a black jogging suit; he seemed to focus on her very intently and even barked a couple times. I stopped him on the path got him to sit and just knelt beside him giving him treats. It was then I noticed what he had surely already seen, a jogger coming up behind her. As she passed by she offered encouraging words, saying how he was doing so well. Nice, but I did not agree at all in the moment. I said to her after my epiphany that, “I didn’t think she was the one he had a problem with; I think it is the guy chasing you.” We stayed put until the jogger had passed as well. It is exactly those kinds of encounters we need to get a handle on, otherwise he has a tendency to generalize the fear he felt to everyone on the bike path getting more and more uptight as he sees them approach from a distance. And I thought we were doing so well, let my guard down again. We are still being plagued by that 3 steps forward, two steps back kind of progress. I am awful proud of my Looey and what we have been able to accomplish in the last year with the help of the 2 fabulous APDT trainers I found, lifesavers they have been. Thanks so much for the blog, this one definitely resonates with me.
We’re taking a Control Unleashed class right now with our favorite teacher and really enjoying it. We had done some work from the book in another class. But I did something wrong the first time because after a while my girl Misha figured out that the “Look” cue meant there was a dog somewhere nearby and she would “grrrrrgruff” before she even spotted the dog. It was certainly better than her deep, loud Bwharwharwhar hysterics but still not quite what I was going for! (Although it would have been kind of cute have the growl on cue, too bad it meant she was stressed…) Even though I messed up the cue the first time I think it is a powerful tool and I’m looking forward to rebuilding the action with a different verbal cue during this class.
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