One problem I often see in young dogs is an inability to handle any kind of frustration whatsoever. In fact, as I write this, I’m reminded that I saw it often in my old girl Flika, adopted age 14. Memories of her standing on a desk in the office shouting at me that she was absolutely ready to go home, thank you very much, are still fresh in my mind.

Why do we need to teach our dogs to handle frustration?

The first and main reason is that life is frustrating. Dogs are going to have to ride in cars. They’re going to have to wait for their meals unless you leave food down all the time. They’re going to have to sometimes wait for things like going for a walk, getting into a car or getting a treat.

Dogs who can’t tolerate the smallest frustration are the ones we often call pushy or rude, insistent or impatient. In fact, it’s on us: we’ve got to understand that it’s a skill we need to teach young dogs. It’s sometimes caught rather than taught, where the dog kind of accepts frustration. However, because inability to cope with frustration may well be an acquired skill, we also need to make sure we’re setting our dogs up to succeed.

Just this morning for example, I was on my way back to the car with my dogs. Yes, it was the crack of dawn. One reason for that is that I like to photograph the world, and crack of dawn and the pre-twilight golden hour are photographers’ hours. The second reason is that I can’t stand off-lead dogs who can’t cope with being unable to greet every single other dog they see. Lidy doesn’t need that kind of drama, and neither do I. You can imagine my horror then that just as I’m on my last 100m to the car park, I see a car pull up just behind mine with a springer spaniel going absolutely bananas, barking, bouncing off the windows, yelling at all of us.

As I said, Lidy does not need this drama, so we turned on our heels and found some space. We’re up on the moors with roaming sheep, so although I’m mindful that it says dogs should be under control, something about the time of day and the maniac brown and white blur in the back seat tells me that this dog absolutely will not be.

So what’s the problem with this dog in the car? The first is that their dog brain rules. They’re the kind of dog that’s not going to respond to recall, won’t be able to walk on a lead, can’t cope with car journeys, can’t cope with not being allowed to do exactly what they want to do at that very moment.

Now I’m aware in the last post that I said I love giddy dogs. Let me repeat that. I love giddy dogs. Giddy dogs. Not dogs who are red-eyed and frantic. Contagious enthusiasm is one thing. Being unhinged and being unable to cope are entirely different than being excited. Unfortunately, because so many people now have dogs who are completely unsuited to the lives they must lead and who’ve been bred without paying attention to temperament, I don’t think it’s a surprise that I see frustration mainly in dogs who have been purpose-bred. They’re often ‘high energy’ breeds with a bad reputation – ones that have a reputation for needing a lot of exercise… nordic breeds, working terrier breeds, many working gundog breeds and some shepherd breeds such as the Malinois. In other words, all the dogs that it’s recommended first-time owners shouldn’t get are ones who struggle to cope with managing their needs. That is a post in itself, I’m sure. In humans, disorders like oppositional defiance disorder and conduct disorders are believed to have strong genetic components as well as learned components. There’s little reason to suspect it’s not the same with dogs. As always, it’s a complex mix of genetic and developmental influences, so we have to understand frustration is neither a fait accompli nor something we can simply ‘teach’ out of dogs.

Frustration is also a by-product of not getting expected reinforcement. That’s to say it’s a regular by-product of operant extinction protocols and also of putting dogs in time out. But it’s also a by-product of not teaching dogs how to cope with life when there’s a time interval between what they want and when they get it.

Many dog trainers and guardians confuse teaching about frustration with teaching impulse control. I don’t think the two concepts are the same. You’ll see why. As Frans de Waal explains in his excellent Mama’s Last Hug, animals need impulse control. The cat who can’t slow down and stalk won’t catch the bird. The social animal who can’t control his impulses in a social group is likely to find himself attacked or ostracised. Being a predator takes impulse control. Living in social groups takes impulse control. Dogs are social predators, so it makes sense that they’d need to be able to control their behaviour rather than letting it spill out willy-nilly.

Impulse control is largely a failure of the prefrontal cortex. It fails to get the message through to the rest of the brain that NOW is not the time to do the thing. Now is not the time to leap on a bee. Now is not the time to take food. Now is not the time to try to grab the ball.

Impulse control can be one of two things: learning the right time or learning it’s not the time. Learning the right time is easy to see when we think about taking food. Snatching food is not acceptable. Waiting until it’s offered moments later would be. Grabbing the ball when the guardian hasn’t thrown it yet would also be an impulse control thing. If you grab it when the guardian’s still holding on to it, that’s the wrong time. You can grab it, but just not yet. Wait until it’s been launched and the ball is 30m away. Cues like ‘Wait!’ are about waiting for the right moment to do something. Learning to wait when the door is opened rather than dashing out, learning to wait when the car door is opened before jumping in or out, and learning to wait for food to be delivered rather than taking it when it’s still on its way – that’s all impulse control.

Alternatively, impulse control might also be learning that now is not the time at all. Now is never a good time to bite a bee. Now is not a good time to jump off a cliff after a wily goat. Now is not the time to dive off a dock into an empty lake. Things like ‘Leave it!’ are about impulse control, as are behaviours like ‘Wait!’.

Of course, controlling our impulses can lead to frustration, but learning how to control impulses doesn’t teach dogs to control their frustration. Not only that, impulse control is largely a matter of stimulus control: has the cue been given? If so, then collect $200 as you pass Go. If it hasn’t, no $200 and no passing Go. If the cue doesn’t come at all, that’s the same thing. It’s also about controlling how much of a behaviour: how fast, how frequent, how often. Slow or zen treat is a good example: too fast a movement and the treat disappears. Be still, wait for the cue and slow your movement down, and the treat is yours.

Impulse control can be a huge request, especially if the animal really, really wants something. It’s a huge request for puppies, whose prefrontal cortices, small as they are, are not properly online yet. If you can’t control your bladder and bowels properly yet and you’re still having “ooh, ooh!” moments in the middle of wrestling with your siblings, then your body isn’t quite tuned up to control impulses yet. Being a teenager makes impulse control a huge request as well. Medication and hormones can make impulse control a huge request, even if the dog had already learned not to do things they really wanted to do. Not counter surfing, not jumping on people, not biting people… that’s all impulse control.

So, coming to frustration, you can see that it MIGHT cause you frustration not to get these things, but not necessarily. I have to say my girl Lidy has low impulse control at times when she’s under a big cognitive load (like walking on lead rather than rampaging at the same time as trying NOT to chase cats or eyeball cows). She’s rarely frustrated if she doesn’t get what she wants. Heston has lower impulse control around food than he used to have – phenobarbital may do that to a dog – but he’s not frustrated if I leave stuff on the counter. He just accepts it and waits until I’m not paying attention. Yes, I know. My presence is a deterrent … I have thoughts about that! Even so, it’s enough of a deterrent that he’ll wait until I’m not looking before he’d snatch a sandwich.

Neither of them are behaving like that lunatic dog this morning.

By the way, when I drove out of the car park onto a long lane over the moors, I was chased by one of the two bonkers dogs. I had to stop my car because I couldn’t go fast enough to get away from him and he was in danger of getting hit. I got out, put a spare slip lead on him and walked him back to his guardian, some 200m behind us. She was mad at me. She’d have been more mad if her dog had been killed by my car – or any other car. I will say that walking that dog on the lead those 200m was insanely difficult. I know why she just drives him on to the moors and lets him off lead. He had no recall, no coping skills for not being able to do what he wanted, no ability to walk on lead. As soon as I gave him back to her, she let him off the lead again to hand the lead back to me. I said she could keep it if she had ‘forgotten’ hers. What did he do? Ran 200m back down the road and barked and circled and barked and circled my car.

We had to all sit in my car with this insane dog running around and around and around. I waited 20 minutes, feeding my dogs biscuits from time to time for being so patient.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

Learning how to cope with frustration does not always happen by accident. Nor does it always sit easily with learning how to control our emotions and behaviour. You can read some of my favourite activities to help dogs learn to control their bodies in this post about teaching parameters.

Teaching frustration needs you to start with errorless learning and immediate reinforcement I’m afraid. That’s your baseline. Every event in a programme to build up frustration tolerance is a winner at the start. Kind of like a very well-stocked lucky dip. You need to start from a place where nothing is frustrating, because otherwise the learning journey is going to be that much more difficult. To be honest, I always start with heavy reinforcement on a continuous schedule for virtually all behaviours when I’m working with dogs who have emotional disorders or who need a bit of help. The first ever time I took Lidy out at the shelter, she was jumping and nipping me for at least 500m. There was a minuscule gap where she stopped, I asked her for a sit and she sat. I gave up almost half my treat pouch to that first sit. Five years later, she growled twice at an insane dog circling our car for 20 minutes. Pay up, pay regularly, don’t be a cheapskate and make every event one where the dog will succeed. Not where they can succeed, depending on conditions. Ones where they will succeed.

#1 Scatter feeding

One of my favourite ways to do this is with scatter feeding. Basically, you take a handful of goodies – and if you’re working with a very frustrated dog, use big, stinky treats. I’m talking lumps of Stilton and shavings of Parmesan, chunks of stinky fish and slices of strong-smelling meat. Scatter heavily and densely that first time. You can find out about scatter feeding here.

How do you level up? Change one variable at a time. Spread the food out more. Make it more difficult to find. Use less stinky and smaller pieces. Use less food.

Why does scatter feeding help frustrated dogs learn how to cope with frustration? Because there are longer and longer intervals between appetitive behaviours (searching) and consummatory behaviours (eating). Scatter feeding builds resilience and helps dogs learn to keep going. It’s not unusual to find frustrated dogs are often anxious as well, and I find it builds skills that help them relax. I don’t know how or why that works, but I always think of scatter feeding like yoga for dogs. I’ve hundreds of Before and After videos, and every single one shows a contented, relaxed, chilled dog at the end. It also helps avoid the frustration of things ending – the odours linger on the ground. You’re also building frustration tolerance stamina in the actual exercise itself as the food gets more and more scarce.

#2 Free work

You can also do the same with a planned free work session. If you haven’t come across free work yet, definitely look for a practitioner who can help you. It’s Sarah Fisher’s baby and many people use it to help look at dogs’ physical condition and posture. I use it completely differently depending on what I’m using it for, but if I’m using it for building frustration tolerance, I’m using it in a very specific way. Free work was designed to help humans observe the animals in their life, but I’m sure Sarah would be happy to see it used to build up the dog’s skills as well as the human’s.

First, you start with an easy set. The food is easily available. There are no challenging frozen Kongs or Nose Its that take two hours to spit out one treat. There’s nothing difficult to access. Surfaces are low and non-challenging. I usually use a range of things like a pile of old clothes, maybe a Pickpocket, a Kong, a silicon snake, a robust licki mat, a stuffed marrow bone. I’ll also put things in that encourage the dog to take their time, like the marrow bone might.

I do find that frustrated dogs can’t even tolerate anything that’s more than a mouthful or takes more than one go to consume. Even that can be hard. I’ve seen dogs give up on Kongs that were packed too tightly or frozen, or stuffed with paté, so everything is easy.

And then we level up, just in the same way as you do with scatter feeding. On a planned and systematic programme, we add in the occasional more frustrating food toy or foraging activity. I put in fewer morsels of food and they have to work for it. I include non-food items like scent libraries (boxes of stuff with different odours on them). I put the treats in the pockets of the old clothes; I wrap snacks up in a mat. Everything gets harder, gradually and progressively. All frustration tolerance training really is is simply successive approximations.

How do you teach a dog who can’t tolerate frustration for 10 minutes? You start with 1 second. Then 2.

#3 Plan the Goldilocks increments

Whatever you’re doing, you need to plan like Goldilocks: it’s got to be ‘just right’. Too easy and the dog isn’t learning to tolerate any more frustration than they already are; too hard and the dog is just going to get frustrated. Joy.

Most humans are really bad at this bit. They take huge leaps. If their dog can’t tolerate ten minutes of not getting what they want, they start with one second. Then they go to a full minute. Now I’m not a mathematician. I can’t even tell you what percentage increase that is. What I can tell you is that you never do less than 5% of your last level and you never do more than 10% to your next. If your hyperattached dog can’t stand to be without you for 5 minutes and they’re howling, then you start with 5 seconds and you work up from there. Even 6 seconds is a 20% increase. So you need to shave your criteria and slice it thinly.

#4 Use Tug games creatively

I’m a big fan of Tug. I know it’s not for every dog but I encourage you to get yourself booked onto a Craig Ogilvie course if you aren’t sure. I love Tug so much because it’s safe, cooperative play. Much play is not collaborative between dogs and humans. The human is a ball launcher – a role that can be filled by a machine – and the dog is oblivious to your relationship. Wrestling and sparring are collaborative but they’re not for every dog and I use them with extreme caution with frustrated dogs. Other than that, you might also find Chase Me or Hide and Seek games can be lots of fun. Flika and I had bags of fun chasing each other. She’d chase me and slam into my legs and then I’d chase her. Collaborative games teach us to cope with frustration because they teach us that we won’t always win. You also have to work together to win. If one individual is pushy or demanding, then the game stops. It also teaches dogs about taking turns and it sets parameters… You have clear signals to engage and disengage.

I’d say that tug isn’t a game to play with a very frustrated, nippy or boisterous dog, but it’s definitely something to consider as you build up your dog’s tolerance to not getting the toy. You can also start with really long tug ropes so the dog’s learning about precision.

My boy Heston stopped nipping by 10 weeks and I swear that our careful games of chase and tug played a really important role in that bite inhibition. He’s not once set a tooth to me (or any other individual) since 10 weeks, not even in accident. Our tug games are a huge part of our relationship.

You can also start with quick, short games with a large number of long rope toys (1 or 2 metres even). The dog gets a bit over-aroused, you drop your end, you pick up another and you reset. They’re learning that if they take their frustrations out on you, sure, they ‘win’ the toy, but the toy stops being fun. You’re the fun.

#5 Teach the Counting Game

If you’re using free work set ups or you’re playing games, you definitely need to make sure you’re adept at bringing down arousal levels. The more aroused the dog is, the more likely you’ll see frustration. But how do you do that if taking things away from the dog causes frustration? I often interrupt and end games with an impromptu scatter feeding. I also put in Chirag Patel’s Counting Game:

I absolutely adore the Counting Game for reasons I can’t even begin to explain, not least for dogs who have trouble giving up resources, but also as a distraction method in case of emergency. However, its special forté is if you’ve got a young, boisterous, frustrated dog who’s destroying things, who’s finding it hard to play without getting overaroused, and you don’t want a battle or to raise their frustration levels.

So for dogs who ‘win’ the tug toy because they’re getting too over-aroused and they’re less likely to cope with the game ending – even though it absolutely needs to end because there will be bloodshed otherwise – they ‘win’ the toy and I move away and start counting out treats. If I really need to bring it down a notch more, licking or chewing is even better, so I might put down a few smears of peanut butter, paté or cream cheese.

#6 Build up to frustrating food or foraging toys

Some toys are massively frustrating and many dogs will give up. My two haven’t a chance of persevering with a frozen Kong stuffed with spreadables. If they can’t get it rapidly, they give up. I do fill up with spreadables to about half way these days, or mix it up so they cause some clumping, but frustrated dogs give up on frustrating toys.

That said, we can add in frustrating toys to our free work the better our dog gets at coping with frustration. I find awkward-angled toys with narrow openings like the Buster Cube or the Ruffwear Gnawt-a-Rock to be the most challenging of all. This hexagonal cube really takes a long time to spit out its treasures compared to, say, the Kong Wobbler.

You don’t need to buy expensive toys. One of my dog Tilly’s favourite frustrating foraging activities was what I called her Cocker Box. I saved all my cardboard boxes and paper bags, brown paper and tissue paper. Then I’d put a very small number of treats in it – say four or five. She’d spend hours with that box. That dog was a lesson in tolerating frustration. She once spent about six hours trying to get a trapped treat out from under the couch. There was only one caveat – if I was present, she’d look to me for assistance. Make sure, then, if your dog looks to you for help, that – once you’ve chosen an appropriately difficult toy – you remove yourself if you want them to truly learn to cope with frustration

#7 Start to remove yourself

I hate to say this, but we’re often the cause of our dog’s frustration. If we sometimes pay out really quickly and other times we don’t, we’ve got to expect that will be confusing for the dog. You’re the equivalent of one of those ‘maybe I will!’ vending machines that often take your money.

There’s even some forms of frustration that manifest as separation-related behaviour because the dog can’t get to you. I know about this, because I’ve been shouted at by a dog shut in an office. Some dogs find it really frustrating to be separated from us, especially if their frustration is often directed at us. If you’ve got a dog who’s barking at you, who’s ogling you, who’s pawing you, who’s nipping you, who’s whining at you, then it may well be that they’re used to having to tell you that they need stuff from you.

This ends up a vicious circle. I’ve got a frustrated barker. Heston gets very tired of me doing silly human things like tying shoelaces and brushing my teeth when it’s walk time. This manifests as excitement, but there are also elements of frustration in there too. When we set off out of the gate, it’s all a bit crazy. The problem is that he needs me to open the door and the gate or to drive the car, and he has to wait for me. The easiest way to deal with this gap between what they want and when you can deliver is give them something to do. He’s perfectly happy to wait if I give him a bit of random scatter feeding in the garden and then I can go and do my bits. If he can constantly access me, he’s constantly coming to whine and bark at me, even if he has scatter activities. My presence is a conditioned cue that predicts walks. If I remove myself from that, his frustration is much lower.

We may well have to train our dogs to start being a bit more independent too. You notice that I said there’s a co-morbidity of frustration and anxiety? Building up their ability to get their needs met without depending on us is one way to cut out the frustration.

#8 Shape your way to delayed gratification

I don’t often use clickers because most of the training I do is real world training out with dogs and poo bags and treat bags and leads. I use a word like ‘good!’ or ‘yes!’ and that suits me better than having to remember to pick up yet another thing before I leave the house.

That said, clicker training and heavy stimulus control is perfect for frustrated dogs.

Clicker training (or just marker training using a word) is great because you can successively build up the gap between you marking and you giving the treat. At first, you’re going to start with a really rapid reinforcement… click, treat… click, treat… click, treat. There should barely be any gap between the click and the treat. And gradually, stealthily, slowly, stretch out the gap between the click and the treat.

Click… one Mississippi… two Mississippi… Treat.

That’s the first step. You can also practise distance behaviours. I’m not a huge fan of traditional obedience on account of I am so very, very lazy and I cannot for the life of me see the need to ask my dog for a sit so I can walk off 100m and call them. If I can’t see a use for a behaviour, I struggle to find the reason to teach it. But traditional obedience like that, where you’re working at a distance, is great. You control the gap between it.

Sit…. stay…. (walk 100m)… Click…. (dog has to run 100m) … Treat.

I’m a big fan of that.

Another way you can do it is also to use a Pet Tutor. A Pet Tutor is an automatic treat dispenser. To start, you’ll need a remote-operated one. You park the treat dispenser out of the way, start doing some work with the dog. You click, you press the remote and the treat dispenser spits out the treat. Clearly, you have to start near to the dispenser, but as time goes on, you can stretch out the distance between where you’re working and where the dog gets food.

Why this helps with frustration is because it teaches the dog how to cope very gradually and gently with the gap between knowing they’re going to get something and waiting to get it.

#9 Use heavy stimulus control

I just said that I don’t just like marker training, but I also find heavy stimulus control to be useful. What this means is that basically, everything your dog gets is clearly cued. No cue, no reinforcement. This takes away the doubt and anxiety of ‘Will I? Won’t I?’ where reinforcement is concerned. The dog is clear when they’ll get what they want instead of floating round trying to find ways to ask for what they need. Predictability takes away a lot of the challenge of frustration.

#10 Build up to free shaping

Free-shaping or auto-shaping is an activity you can do with your dogs to build up their resilience, patience and ability to try again. As I said at the beginning, frustrated learners need an error-free, safe, reinforcing environment. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. That doesn’t teach them how to cope when they do make errors or when reinforcement is less predictable. Free shaping is not something for novice dogs, but I love it for those dogs who are building up their stamina.

Dog-led free-shaping is the first type of free-shaping. Here, you take a handful of treats, cue the dog that treats are available. I say ‘ready?’

‘Ready?’ simply means ‘if you do something, treats may be available.’

In dog-led free-shaping, the dog takes the lead. They offer behaviours, and you click or mark what you want repeated that session. The savvier the dog gets, the more easy it is for them to offer repeated behaviours. It really us up to the dog. We mark what we want more of, but it’s up to the dog to pick that first behaviour.

Say for instance I say, ‘Ready?’ and the dog takes a step back. I mark and reinforce. Then they’re not sure what they did right, so they try some other stuff. When they back up again (which might happen straight away if they’ve come forward for food) then we mark and reinforce. It’s that simple.

As you go, you might only reinforce novel behaviours.

This brings us into the second form of free-shaping: human-led free-shaping.

Here, you start with a goal in mind, and you just reinforce any progress towards that goal that the dog makes. Kamal Fernandez does a great example with a box. He puts a box down and has an end-goal in mind: the dog must, one way or another, get into the box. He marks and reinforces every step the dog takes towards the box. I’ve put tin cans down on the floor and mark and reinforce approaches to one can over the others. Other days, I’ll put up different sticky notes at dog nose level and mark successive approximations as the dog gets closer to one specific sticky note. It’s a guessing game where the rules change every time we play. It’s up to me to mark for any slight move towards the end goal, and up to the dog to be conscious of that they’re doing and think about what they’re doing.

Free-shaping is innately frustrating, because the dog doesn’t know what you want them to do, and you can’t lure or prompt to get them to do it. There can be long gaps between attempts. I’m particularly conscious of the fact humans are abysmal at waiting. Watch many teachers or parents with their children and look at how long they leave between asking a question and filling in an answer if the response isn’t quick enough. One thing I’ve done over the years is shape my gaps between asking a question and prompting a response. That thinking time can be frustrating for us. Human-led free-shaping is the gold standard of frustration tolerance for me.

As you can see, we move a long way from confusing impulse control and frustration. Free-shaping has absolutely nothing to do with impulse control. Okay, maybe it helps dogs process their own bodies and make more conscious and purposeful decisions about what they are doing. But if they learn impulse control from that, it’s a side-effect, not the main objective.

Free-shaping is not for frustration novices. It is the Olympic performance of the Gold Medal Winning Patient dog.

In summation, we can never entirely remove frustration from our dogs’ lives. Neither, arguably, should we. Frustration may be largely ‘caught’ depending on genes and socialisation, but it can be honed and mastered through ‘taught’ methods. While there is clearly some crossover with exercises for impulse control, I very much think teaching our dogs how to handle life’s frustrations is something quite separate.

I’d also highly, highly recommend Jane Ardern’s book Mission Control. Although it’s mostly focused on impulse control, learning voluntary control over our own bodies, emotions and actions will always reduce our frustration.

If you’d like to receive these articles directly to your inbox, don’t forget to sign up; I promise not to get spammy! That said, just a final plug for my new book – Client-Centred Dog Training: 30 Lessons for Dog Trainers to get Maximum Engagement from your Clients. If you’ve got it already, don’t forget to leave me a review!

Previously, I explored ways you could teach your dog new ways to greet you that didn’t involve dislodging contact lenses, kicking you in the kidneys or having 40kg of fur knocking you over. We looked at the reasons why dogs might jump up when greeting in the last post, focusing on how you can manage and modify this behaviour. Today, it’s the turn of jumping up for excitement.

If you’ve got a dog whose jumping up is a problem, your first job is to rule out greeting behaviour, as the majority of dogs I see who are jumping up are only doing so in a problematic way when they greet someone.

When you’ve ruled out jumping up in greeting, it’s then time to look at jumping up when overaroused or excited.

In many ways, jumping up for excitement is one behaviour we often find a nuisance in combination with a number of other behaviours which serve the same purpose. Those behaviours include excitement barking, circling, spinning and nipping. As you can probably guess from the name, excitement barking is different than alert barking, and it won’t be as easily resolved with a handful of treats and a bit of reassurance that your dog is the greatest guard dog ever. In a way, it’s a bit of an error to separate these behaviours from greeting behaviours that we might consider a nuisance: often that behaviour can be driven by excitement too.

When dogs are excited, we’re likely to see an increase in all kinds of behaviour, including ones that are noisy or a bit of a nuisance. They just behave more. They might pace. They might pant. They might whine. They might start grimacing. Lipsticks might appear where previously there were no lipsticks on view. They might nip. They move more.

Conversely, they find static behaviours and noiseless behaviours to be something of a challenge. Asking an excited dog for a sit is likely to end up as a fail, simply because the rational, controlled brain isn’t driving the dog at that time. Asking them to be calm or go to their mat, to lie down, to wait or to control themselves is likely to turn into a fail too. The sad thing about this is that there are hundreds of guardians asking for these behaviours. Asking for a sit when your dog is excited is destined to failure, not least because it’s an unpleasant thing to do in that moment. If I had one wish, it’s that we’d stop expecting our dogs to be still all the time.

The usual outcome of asking for calm or stillness is that we end up being cross because our dogs have ‘forgotten’ their training. We end up frustrated with them. We end up embarrassed by them. We try teaching them to be calm. Trying to get our a-rational dogs to be rational brings out the a-rational in us too.

Truth be told, this makes me a little sad. I love that ridiculous things make my dogs giddy. Lidy rhymes with giddy (if you were wondering!) and she is Giddy Lidy with good cause; I love that Heston, despite all his aches and pains, gets excited before walks. Every single time I see a post on social media about calming our dogs down, teaching calm, teaching settle, teaching them to Be Less Dog, a part of me dies inside. You know how, in Peter Pan, a fairy dies every time you say you don’t believe in fairies, in my head, puppies die every time people say ‘the dog just needs to be taught to be calm and to settle.’

I love that they have that kind of Christmas-Eve-meets-Snow-Day enthusiasm for ridiculous little things. We just went outside for two minutes and mine were like Best Day Ever! We were literally on the deck with a fur removing glove and a brush. I went in the kitchen and they were like Christmas Dinner With ALL The Trimmings. I picked up my car keys and they were like ROAD TRIP, YEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!! ALL THE ROAD TRIPS to ALL THE BEST PLACES!

That brings me to my first solution to jumping up for excitement: take off those great big, dull, grown-up, boring human-centric goggles you’ve got on and celebrate your dogs’ joy. If you can live with it and it’s harming neither you nor your dog, live with it! Celebrate it! Find more joy.

Let me let you into a secret… I work, write or conference for an hour. Then we celebrate for five minutes. We dance. We throw toys. We go out and shout at the wind. We get goodies. We play. I ask them to spin, twist, middle, jump, leapfrog me and pogo off me. Then I go do some more stuff that will pay bills. Another secret… all the behaviours I ask for are so much fun to do that my dogs only want paying with social contact. How mad is that?! And how cheap?!

Enjoy their joy. Live vicariously. Share it. Make it contagious. If it’s not harming them in doing it and it’s not harming you, a little jumping up when we get our food bowl is not the end of the world.

Lidy jumps up two times during the day. One is when I get our breakfast. She’s all Whoo Hoo with hers and I’m all Boo Hoo with mine. Perhaps I need to be thinking about how I can make my breakfast Whoo Hoo and not Boo Hoo. I suspect this may involve Haribo Sours and a lot of Sherbet so I’m going to refrain on the grounds that it would cause some kind of minor humanitarian crisis around me. But Lidy’s little jump for joy is not offensive to anyone at all.

The other time is when we go out for a walk. Having tried to make sure she is well secured before we go out of the front door, I ended up almost being dragged down the steps. For the sake of my back, I put a bucket of toys at the top of our steps and I make sure the gate is well locked. She’s safe. She picks up a toy and shakes it, tossing it about in the air, delighted with our daily walk. I tie my shoelaces without being headbutted, lock the door without being headbutted, walk down the steps without being pulled onto my arse and we all find equilibrium by the gate.

So your first job, if it’s not offensive or harmful, is to live with it. Change your understanding and your problem is no longer a problem. The best thing about this solution is that it involves doing absolutely nothing at all other than changing your mindset.

But if the jumping up is dangerous to you or your dog, then you can change that too. There’s two aspects to consider. The first is management. The second is working on how they handle frustration and how they control their impulses.

Unlike jumping on guests, there really aren’t consequences for excitement. Racing round your house like a maniac on Christmas Eve does not make Christmas Day come faster. Fixating on snow falling outside your classroom does not make break-time happen quicker. If I don’t put Lidy’s bowl down, she’ll jump some more, but it’s not controlled by consequences.

This excited or frustrated behaviour is controlled by what comes before, not what comes after.

It’s the realm of Pavlov and Watson, not the realm of Skinner. You see snow and then you get excited. You put out mince pies and then you get excited. You get out the dog leads and then your dogs get excited.

We might even anticipate these events (which can make them both more frustrating and more exciting) if the sky looks solid grey… maybe there’ll be snow… if it’s December 23rd… Christmas is soon… if it’s 7am…. we must be going out for a walk soon.

The excitement might stop once it turns from anticipation into participation. Frustration turns to satiation. We might stop feeling as excited when we open our presents or when we’ve seen all our relatives or we’ve eaten our dinner. We might stop being Snow Day giddy when we’ve played out until we have frostbite and we’ve lost nine pairs of mittens. We might stop being excited once we’ve been out for a walk.

In other words, we might see less behaviour when our anticipation has been satiated, but we’re not excited because it makes stuff happen.

Excitement belongs with anxiety in all honesty, not with learned behaviours like ‘sit’. Literally nobody had to teach a dog to be excited. Can you worsen it with social contagion? Sure! Come to a shelter at walk time or meal time and I’ll show you. But the behaviour we see with excitement is just a coping mechanism for dealing with the frustration of anticipation.

Like with jumping up in greeting, jumping up from over-excitement can be managed. Putting in safety features is one way of doing that. Since Lidy jumps up before walks, making sure my gate is really secure (and checking it out of the window before I open the door) is one way of managing the situation. If your dog jumps up for food and you have laminate floor, put in some rubberised matting or a non-slip rug. Put in baby gates. These don’t stop the dog from jumping up. They just mean the dog can jump up in safety.

You can also manage it by breaking the chain between what’s exciting and being excited. For instance, if I pick my keys up, my dogs will go nuts. If I want them not to go nuts I need to understand that they’ve become sensitised to the keys, that this is a Pavlovian conditioning process and that desensitising them to it would be to repeatedly pick up my keys in a gradual, slow, controlled way. In other words, I’m not picking them up, dangling them in front of my dogs, dancing and going ‘Whoo hoo! I’m going for a ride without you!’

I’m going to leave them on a side table and pick them up for a millisecond. Then again. Then again. Then again. Et cetera.

That’s all desensitisation is. A planned, systematic, gradual programme of exposure paired up with a feeling of calm. Ta-dah.

If I want Lidy not to jump up for her bowl, I’m going to start by having that bowl around me and reaching for it time and time again. She should never react.

The problem is that these pairings and associations are difficult to extinguish and easy to resurrect. In other words, once your dog knows that bowls mean dinner, well, good luck. It’s the same with hoping your kids don’t come to recognise the Golden Arches of McDonalds and associate that with Happy Meals. Good luck breaking that chain, she says, from experience. Hard to break that association and easy to resurrect.

Another way to manage the situation is to give your dog something to do instead. I’d claim credit for this, but Heston taught me rather than the other way around. He barks, rather than jumping, when excited. Given the state of his hips, that makes sense that he might always have found barking easier and more productive than jumping for joy. But the principle is the same. If you want the science terms, it’s a behavioural response class. Actually, I don’t even know about that, since response classes have the same effect on the environment. Excitement has zero effect on the environment. Anyway, he found a behaviour that provided the same relief, a coping mechanism. Instead of barking when he is excited, he grabs a toy and squeaks it. Lidy needed a little encouragement to pick up her toys and run round with them instead of jumping up, but now she grabs a toy and takes all that frustration and excitement out on the toy instead of out on her joints. All I had to do was provide the toys and make sure they’re easily accessible. Everybody’s needs get met, nobody gets head-butted and everyone is happy.

So that’s another strategy: provide access to other ways the dog can manage their excitement.

A fourth strategy is to give them something purposeful to do while you do the thing that’s inevitably frustrating them. If they can’t cope with the inordinate amount of time you take in preparing their breakfast, you’ve got two ways to handle this: either you can do stuff faster or you can occupy them while you do it. I’ve never found doing things faster to work. I take the dogs out pretty much as soon as I go out, and I’m damned if I can go from 1 to 500 like they can. I’d have to sleep in my clothes with my hair at least semi-presentable, with my contact lenses in and with a toothbrush in my mouth. Even then, if I didn’t go to the toilet, I’d probably end up having an accident at the first sight of a cat or a sheep or something. Minimum time from rising to leaving for me is at least ten minutes. That’s a long time for dogs to get themselves wound up. How do they cope with this? Lidy normally beats Heston around the head a few times in her primitive attempts to play, and he tries to ignore her.

If that’s an overly long time (it is, for them) and you can’t cope with your dog’s attempts to cope and occupy themselves before what is unarguably the highlight of their day, then you might want to provide some kind of alternative.

Now, I didn’t find scatter feeding – or any kind of food to be honest – to be useful with dogs who want to greet you, but scatter feeding and a bit of occupation, even dynamic trick training, can be a wonderful mechanism to help your dogs cope with the frustration of waiting for you.

If you’ve got an over excited dog, a bit of scentwork or scatter feeding can be wonderful. Just as a word of warning: it does have to be that magical ‘Goldilocks’ level. Not too challenging and not too easy. Too easy and it won’t occupy your dog long enough. Too challenging and they’ll just give up.

To occupy Heston, I just have to hide a ball the night before and tell him to find his ball.

To occupy Lidy, I just have to randomly shout out fun cues like ‘spin!… middle!… crawl!… stretch!… ‘ and that stops her punching my poor boy in the face.

Find something that’s right for your dog and occupy them.

Some dogs will occupy themselves if you give them the means. Others are going to need more interactive occupation. Now would be a really good time to use a Pet Tutor automatic treat dispenser, for example. Or two. If you can’t keep your dog busy because you’re doing things, there are machines that can take up the slack. You can set the reinforcement sequence to a variable rate but fairly frequently and it just might keep your dog busy while you put your mascara on. I would say, though, if you’re putting mascara on, I’m kind of with your dog on the frustration side of things…

All these strategies either help the dog cope, help the dog and you be safe or help keep the dog busy. They take a little bit of time to set up and then you’re gold.

Finally, you can (and, arguably, should) teach dogs to cope with frustration. A dog who has to be managed all the time is hard work. It doesn’t teach them that sometimes there’s a delay in getting what they want. If your dog’s behaviour is dangerous, then you may also want to add on some modification. I’m a huge fan of teaching parameters and also using graduated enrichment activities to build frustration tolerance. No dog ever tolerated frustration like my cocker spaniel with her Nose It toy. One treat once took her two hours to get out. That’s tenacity and also tolerance. Many dogs would walk away after a second or two, including my boy Heston. That level of cocker tenacity doesn’t come naturally, however. Building in tougher and tougher challenges through food toys and games or scent work can really help your dog extend their patience through successive approximations that get there without causing frustration. How do you get a dog to spend two hours searching for one treat? You start by getting a dog who can spend 10 seconds searching for one treat. And how do you get that? Starting with a dog who can spend 1 second searching for a treat. Beside teaching them to control their impulses, how to wait and how to cope with having their needs temporarily thwarted is a good way to make sure your dog can cope in a life that offers many frustrations.

If you learn to live with what’s acceptable, adjusting your requirements for perfect control at all moments, set up the environment to help the dog out, give the dog something to do and teach them how to cope with frustration as well as manage their impulses, you should find that you’ve successfully stopped your dog from all but the odd jack-in-a-box moment.

Next week: setting your dog up to succeed

Coming out of the other side of a pandemic, I’m getting a lot of clients whose dogs are reactive to other dogs. If they’re on lead, they’re barking and lunging; if they’re off lead, they’re racing up to other dogs for some pretty hair-raising greetings.

Guardians inevitably have an internal discussion with themselves about whether it’s reactivity, fear or aggression. They also have a discussion about whether the lead is causing the problem. Many guardians, knowing that the lead or fence seems to be making it worse, take their dog to classes for socialisation, on social walks or also to dog parks, often on the advice of random people on social media.

Let’s get the myths out of the way first. There’s first a myth that you can take a dog who has few social graces and turn them into a social dog. Second, there’s a myth that more social experiences will help do that.

What do we know for sure?

First, that the experiences a dog has from 3-13 weeks set the rules. After that window, they’re learning exceptions to the rule, which makes it slower and harder if the dog didn’t learn that other dogs are okay. What a puppy learns during this brief period sets their rules for their experiences and teaches them how to behave in different contexts.

Most people’s error is to think that a dog who has experience of litter mates or other dogs in the home is a dog who’ll be okay with unfamiliar dogs. Those are very different skills. Dogs who are ‘social’ with other dogs in the home don’t think of other dogs outside the home as being the same. They know how to behave with the family group but that doesn’t mean they know how to behave with other dogs.

Of course, trying to socialise a puppy also clashes with vet guidance about vaccinations, which makes it tougher, but behavioural euthanasia is a huge reason dogs don’t make it past their third birthday, so you need to check with your vet about current disease risks and balance this with finding some way to make sure that during this brief period (largely from 6-13 weeks) your dog actually sees or smells (if not interacting with) unfamiliar dogs in a non-threatening way. There are so many ways you can do this but I thoroughly recommend you read Eileen Anderson’s and Marge Rogers’ book Puppy Socialisation.

What happens after 13 weeks is really about confirming the rule or learning exceptions. If you learned that other dogs are scary during that short period, then you’re going to be learning exceptions to that. ‘All dogs are scary… except that one… okay, except that one… alright, not that one.’

If you don’t see other dogs during that time, they also pass into the ‘unknown, probably scary’ category too.

But if you learn ‘other dogs are fun!’ then that’s your general rule.

If you learn ‘I’ve got the automatic right to play with every dog I meet’, then that’s your rule. It’s going to be pretty frustrating when your dog realises at 16 weeks that you’re trying to impose an ‘okay, not that one’ rule. ‘And not that one either. No, not that one either’.

Of course, things are worsened by the fact that social and sexual maturity for dogs (and people) don’t happen at the same time. Like humans, sexual maturity may happen relatively early – way before social maturity. There aren’t exact figures because it depends on breed and size and lots of other things that affect sexual maturity, but usually that happens somewhere between 9 months and 3 years for dogs. And social maturity happens later – often between 18 months and 4 years. That means for a lot of our dogs, hormones are engaged when social inhibition isn’t at its best, or we start messing with hormones in sterilising dogs too. We’re also messing with breed and behaviour without really knowing what we’re up to, and that complicates things as well.

By and large, as a simple rule of thumb, I work off the principle that if you have a breed described as loyal or aloof, then you need to make sure you pay extra special attention to the breeder and the early experiences and how you’re socialising your puppy before 13 weeks or so.

Pretty much everything afterwards is remedial or learning exceptions.

Not only that, but many people only realise their dog has a problem when their dog is a teenager. Then you’re also trying to do this remedial socialisation at absolutely the worst time in the dog’s life.

You’re in a bind, because if you leave it, the situation will likely get worse, and if you try to tackle things, you could make it worse as well.

Many people take their undersocialised or inadequately socialised or even inappropriately socialised teenage dog and try to put them in with other dogs in the desperate hope that they’ll learn something.

Many people do this, but I’m going to court controversy and explain why I rarely do. Let me also add that I’m not talking about easy dogs who just need a bit more socialisation having had a bit of a rocky start, but who have already fifty or more greetings under their belt that went okay. I’m also not talking about dogs who are a low risk and have a relatively positive history. I’m not talking about dogs who occasionally bark or lunge. Putting them in with an experienced and well-managed dog group may be all they need.

I’m talking about dogs who always bark and lunge at others. Dogs who are so sensitive to the presence of others that they’re barking and lunging fifty metres away. Dogs who can’t be interrupted and are not interested in distraction.

There are many problems with putting dogs in need of socialisation in, unmanaged, with other dogs. One is that it depends on the social skills of the other dogs. If the other dogs are young as well, then you’re potentially risking a single learning event for them that will traumatise both dogs. Also, you’re putting the most delicate job of all in the hands of dogs whose own social development is not yet complete. That’s like my mum hoping I’d learn social skills from all the metalhead friends I had when I was 15. In fact, they taught me well, but it was more of a happy accident than purposeful socialising. I’d argue that I actually did pretty well because I had to go to school and learn how to interact with those people, and I had jobs, so I had to learn how to be with adults too. If you want your dog to end up like a Lord of the Flies maniac dog, then by all means, let them hang around with other dogs who are at the same development point.

If the dogs you’re putting your unsocialised dog in with are much older, you’re possibly putting an exuberant and difficult dog in with dogs who have health issues and are protective of themselves. That’d be like hoping my mum’s knitting circle would have been a great place to socialise the teenage me.

Not only that, but I don’t think dogs should have to carry the burden for mistakes in socialisation that human beings have caused. It’s not fair on those dogs. They didn’t sign up for being a guinea pig in your attempt to resocialise a dog who’s like a canine equivalent of Jack and his choristers in Lord of the Flies. So often, we can be really selfish about the needs of one dog without considering our absolute obligation to the others.

Another issue is that dogs who are truly frustrated on lead – and only frustrated, not fearful or aggressive – can you explain to me how letting them off lead helps them cope with social frustration of being on lead? You’re letting a gauche and naive dog self-reinforce or manage the situation in whatever way they see fit. Like it or not, you can’t let your dog off lead for the rest of their life just because you haven’t taught them how to cope with frustration yet. If you keep letting frustrated dogs off lead instead of teaching them how to deal better with the frustration of NOT being able to engage with other dogs, well, you’re never going to resolve their problem.

And yes, that’s YOUR job. You’re the dog’s family and the dog’s teacher. Most animals in the wild learn to cope with frustration of hunger or being thwarted in social greetings in ways that are often violent and inappropriate. Adult wolves, for instance, aren’t expected to socialise with other groups of adult wolves. Grown bears aren’t going around hanging about with other grown bears. Not unless it’s for reproductive purposes or to acquire territory or a mate. The animal world is not rife with frustrated social contact as it is for our dogs. Our expectations are insanely high. It is our responsibility then to help our dogs cope with the frustration and complicated feelings of meeting unfamiliar dogs. What are you going to do if you see a dog on the other side of a busy road? Let your dog off lead and dodge traffic just so they won’t feel frustrated?

Hoping they’ll just magically one day stop being frustrated and control their impulses by letting them throw themselves at other dogs, well, you need to follow a human about for a day and find out how they cope with frustration, and then ask yourself if we can truly expect a dog with a tiny cortex to do the same. I got beeped and sworn at the other day because I didn’t know where I was and I dropped to 25 from 30 to read the name on a street. I literally inconvenienced the person for less than 10 seconds and he had a red-faced shouty, sweary meltdown. So don’t expect dogs to do what humans struggle with.

Also, if you reinforce your dog’s behaviour by letting them access every single other dog they compulsively feel they have to ‘say hello’ to, then you’re building a behaviour you really don’t want and making it more likely they’ll be even more frustrated should you need to keep a lead on them. If you can’t let your dog off lead to run across a busy main road, you also don’t want your dog going nuts on lead only metres from the bumper of some big Discovery or Land Cruiser going 50. Your dog is going to be the bane of somebody else’s life, if not get into an accident.

Besides being a heavy burden on all the other dogs and not helping dogs cope with frustration, letting them off lead to ‘socialise’ them has other potential consequences as well. If we’ve made a mistake and they’re actually not just frustrated or needing to cope with greetings by bounding up to others, and they’re really truly struggling, what we’re doing is putting a potentially aggressive dog into a situation where they can really do some damage. At best, they feel ambivalent about other dogs. If all we’re doing is throwing them to the dogs, quite literally, then all they’re learning is basic survival skills for greetings. Often, that’s going to involve even more hair-raising events.

It reminds me of a story. Once, I was talking to a lady about the number of drunk drivers in her area. She admitted her husband drove drunk on occasion. She explained that everything was okay as other drivers avoided him. You see how this goes. One day, he got in an accident with another drunk driver who was relying on him to avoid him. One day, your ambivalent and unsocialised dog is going to run into another ambivalent and unsocialised dog. And then what?

Hoping for the best isn’t enough. I know sometimes that people find willing friends. I know dog trainers – like me – who use their own dogs from time to time. Hoping for the best with a friend’s dog or a client’s dog is not okay. Not where other people’s dogs are involved. If you wouldn’t do it with another client’s dog as the guinea pig, you really need to ask yourself why it’d be okay to use one of your own. I’ll explain shortly how I have involved my own dogs in the process.

Letting frustrated dogs off lead because they can’t cope with frustration also becomes the bane of other dog guardians’ lives. Twice in the last six months, an off lead dog whose guardian was busy yelling how ‘friendly’ their dog was has bounded up to my dogs. Luckily, Heston is still healthy enough to handle it and I’m usually able to restrain Lidy and let Heston pick up the slack to protect my girl from the one thing she fears most: aggressive, unsocialised Tarzan dogs bounding up to her just like those dogs do. That ‘friendly’ dog has then gone on to start being a complete arse around Heston, a much larger dog who could easily kill them. I have to keep Lidy muzzled because other people don’t understand their own dogs. She’s not muzzled for her own sake. She’s muzzled for theirs.

That brings me to muzzles. Now I am a fan of muzzles, and Lidy wears a muzzle a lot – to the extent it’s usually not an issue for her on walks and it’s just another piece of kit. What I see though are people forcing muzzles on dogs – or, at least, racing through the process of habituating the dog to a muzzle – and then throwing the dogs in the deep end. This is a bad idea because that dog is then unable to react should they need to. Once, we housed Lidy with a large German Shepherd when she was in kennels. It wasn’t my choice and we were full. She’s the one who lacks in social graces, yet he’s the one who picked a fight with her, flattened her and pinned her to the floor when another dog went past. If she’d been muzzled, we’ve effectively removed her ability to protect herself. A muzzle says you realise things could go pear-shaped. If you’re considering muzzles, I think you need to take a step back in your training.

Muzzles also put us into a state of false comfort about physical fallout and we don’t consider the emotional fallout. We are so sure that the dog will be unable to bite that we put them in with dogs where we’re worried what the outcome will be. We flood them. We dump them in, take away their teeth, hoping that they’ll get over their fears or frustrations or lack of social skills and just, miraculously, magically ‘get better’. We forget that a) this puts the dog in past their comfort levels b) it risks muzzle punches and one-sided fights where the dogs aren’t evenly matched c) encourages people to take a shortcut to muzzle training and d) doesn’t teach them how to manage their emotions other than some kind of weird trial by fire. Also, muzzles come off. Some muzzles can be bitten through. Fixed muzzles are easier to get off and soft muzzles or biothane muzzles are easy to bite through. Ultimately, muzzles allow us to flood the dog knowing that we’ve prevented physical injury. However, it also allows us to put aside the needs of the other dogs, as well as the emotional consequences of flooding, potentially doing a lot of damage.

Ultimately, unless your dog is happy in a muzzle, you’re potentially wasting eight weeks of extensive training on muzzles that you could be putting into lead frustration and working around other dogs. It adds an obstacle rather than taking one away, unless you’re going to force your dog into a muzzle quicker than they can cope with. Then, they’ve got to greet dogs who they feel ambivalent about at best as well as wearing a muzzle they don’t like. How can we on the one hand say, ‘Oh the lead changes their behaviour and makes them more…’ and then think a muzzle is absolutely fine, never altering the dog’s behaviour? As a regular muzzle user, I’ll tell you how muzzles affect Lidy. She’s totally aware of wearing it in situations where she might want her teeth. Instead of lunging, snapping and biting, she cowers, tail between her legs. I can’t understand how we’re swapping one piece of equipment that changes behaviour for another piece of equipment that also changes behaviour – a piece of equipment most of the dogs aren’t used to in the first place. I’ll tell you something for nothing: nobody – literally nobody – muzzles their dog as much as they should. We humans have got issues about that. Most dogs arrive for their trial by fire with issues about their muzzle as well.

So is there any hope for a dog who is reactive to others or who can’t cope on a lead – whether through fear, lack of choice or frustration?

Yes. But the outcome depends.

First it depends on their age and how long they’ve been practising the behaviour. Second, it depends on their genetics and their social experiences so far in life. You need a thorough, robust risk assessment. If you’ve got – heaven forbid! – a very young dog-reactive scent hound who has good social skills with the dogs they live with but they’re trouble with unfamiliar dogs, then there’s a good prognosis. If you’ve got an old, grumpy terrier who’s lived on his own since he was eight weeks, who has terrible social skills and an absolute litany of fights under his belt, then not only is there a poor prognosis, but there’s perhaps also not the same need. A six-month-old dog has a need to learn how to behave around other dogs. A twelve-year-old dog … well, you’ve managed so far. If you are unsure if remedial socialisation is for your dog, go to a professional who can help you carry out a robust risk assessment taking into account your dog’s prior history.

The second, and I am absolutely firm on this, is that throwing your dog in with the dogs is completely and utterly off the table. I don’t care if you have the most amazing group of stooge dogs, demo dogs and nanny dogs in the world. It is not THEIR job to teach a frustrated, fearful or aggressive dog how to speak dog. Now I know I am risk averse and most people haven’t seen the number of fights I have, but if your dog is frustrated on the lead, then they need to learn how to cope with frustration and they need to learn how to behave around other dogs without interacting with them.

That is my bottom line. You don’t pass into remedial socialisation until you know how not to be a dick on the lead when you see other dogs.

With a good programme, we shouldn’t be talking more than three to six months. That may need medication on board as well as modification and management.

If your dog can’t cope with seeing other dogs when they’re restrained, then that’s a skill they need to learn. I know that may be controversial and I know some people might see that as adding another level of skill on, that dogs can sort it out themselves, that 99% of fights aren’t that bad. I’m glad that you’ve not seen the damage dogs can do to each other through a combination of bad genetics and poor socialisation. But if your dog can’t cope with seeing other dogs when they’re on lead, I’m afraid sooner or later you’re going to have to master that anyway. Life is not a dog park. How are you going to even get into the dog park if your dog can’t cope on a lead with dogs who are behind a barrier and in a dog park?

Once you’ve got your head on board with that, life isn’t too tough. There are at least twenty posts I’ve written in the past six months or more on how to modify antisocial or frustrated behaviour around other dogs. Between understanding threshold, using a stimulus gradient, desensitisation, counterconditioning, selecting the right training method, management, distraction and avoidance skills and operant counterconditioning, you’ve got all you need to retrain a dog.

That might take 12 – 24 weeks of work, depending on the dog’s health, lifestyle, history, genetics and their guardian’s level of skill.

Only then will you move up to putting them in with other dogs.

At this point, you may be considering whether to muzzle or not. I’d say if you’ve been through the training programme, if you’ve selected the right dogs and environment to do this next step in, you won’t need a muzzle. By this point, the dogs I’m working with are relaxed around other dogs on lead or under control off lead who don’t approach.

The best step I’ve found next is to get them into a well-managed class with some older, larger, opposite sex, calmer dogs who are busy doing stuff. If your dog would find that too tough, you’re not ready yet. The other dogs can be off lead and doing active stuff with their guardians by all means. A couple of weeks of training around dogs who are occupied and don’t attempt to engage can also be put on a stimulus gradient too. You can be working nearer and nearer, the dogs almost side by side at points, and you should still have a calm and relaxed dog. Then you stretch out the ‘unoccupied time’. It depends on how things are going, but it’s an easy step from there to being off lead while the other dogs are on lead, or being on lead while the other dogs are off (but with rocket recall or long lines). Then you mix up the class with younger on-lead dogs and livelier dogs, same sex dogs, smaller dogs, larger dogs… you start to generalise. All being well, you won’t need to vary the class too much. This way is much more humane than ramming them all in together and blindly, naively, hoping for the best. It takes longer, I know, but it actually re-teaches the dog, rather than hoping for the best and putting your faith in random dogs to teach your dogs. Matching dogs up is an art. We learn that at the shelter where our dogs are kept in pairs, and also in pairing up our dogs with the dogs of our future adopting families. Our shelter director – like me – is firmly of the opinion that muzzles and leads alter things. She’d be happier with letting the dogs manage things themselves – of course she would. I’m not but I respect her stance. She has an ethology background and she knows dogs. She knows how anxieties pass down leads and how frustration complicates things. Yet, at the same time, off-lead greetings don’t happen. No matter what your best instincts are about dogs, safety is the first priority. Respecting the other dogs is right alongside it. It is totally and utterly unethical to put inexperienced dogs in with just any old dog in any old circumstance. I’m sad to say I know of dog training classes where trainers let their clients’ dogs take on the burden of socialising naive adult dogs. To take a risk with our clients’ dogs is another thing altogether.

Now I have used my dogs in the past in training scenarios. I will do again when I have the right dogs; currently Heston is unwell and Lidy is the last dog in the world who should be a guinea pig. Flika was a wonderful demo dog. So was Amigo. But I will say this… I worked long and hard with my clients on training their dogs, desensitising them, counterconditioning them, helping them feel okay around other dogs… and then, and only then, did I work well below everybody’s thresholds – humans and dogs alike.

Dog-dog aggression has the least positive outcome in ‘solving’ aggression – unless you add in predatory behaviour which is much tougher. Of course that varies from dog to dog. It’s dependent on numerous factors. Whether you think the dog is frustrated or fearful or lacking in social skills, there are too many moving parts and uncontrollable variables to leave remedial socialisation to the whims of two dogs – one of whom needs work. Absolutely, your clients will want to work quickly and will want to see outcomes. If we aren’t explaining the risks to our clients in ways that help them understand why it’s going to take six months or a year until their dog will be off-lead with a handful of carefully selected other dogs, then we run the risk of lawsuits and injuries on our consciences – if not worse. There are so many nuances to putting remedial groups together that you really need to find a more experienced trainer (or refer to one if you are that trainer yourself) if you’re thinking you should rip the plaster off, stick a muzzle on the dog and hope for the best with a few of your mates’ dogs.

At the very least, make sure all humans have also done a defensive handling course and know how to break up dog fights. Often, it’s not the dogs who are injured but the humans who try to separate them. Remedial socialisation is absolutely possible and is certainly the aim of many of my training programmes. Lockdown has meant I’ve got a few young teenagers on my books right now who’ll be aiming to be okay around other dogs and even mingle with them – hell, perhaps even play with them one day. But at the same time, I know and accept that remedial socialisation is not for all. Some of our dogs will need small worlds, and that is fine.

A trial by fire is not the way forward.

A muzzled trial by fire isn’t much better. It might end up less bloody if we’re lucky, but trauma doesn’t have to be physical to have consequences.

That’s as true if the dog is just frustrated or if the dog is fearful. It’s as true for dogs who are just barking and lunging as it is for dogs who are snapping, fighting and biting. Emotions running rampant lead to bad decisions. That’s as true for humans as it is for dogs.

Remedial socialisation is a fine art. It can easily go very wrong. It is hands down the most difficult, nuanced and complex training procedure that a dog trainer will ever undertake. To be blasé about that can have very serious consequences. It’s much easier to teach dogs to cope with frustration, to learn a little bit of control, to feel safe in spaces where there are other dogs and to cope when they see one. If the only reason you are considering remedial socialisation is to help your dog cope with undersocialised dogs who rampage up to them when out in public, ask yourself if that 1 hour a day is worth this very intensive programme. If you’re running into objectionable off-lead dogs every day, it’s well worth contacting a trainer or behaviour consultant who specialises in aggression as they’ll be able to teach you coping skills as well as help you find places and times where you can exercise your dogs safely. Most of us only need our dogs to be okay from time to time. I can count on one hand the places I’ve faced off-lead dogs who were out of control in the last five years, and I walk Lidy every day.

Ultimately, there will always be idiots. I was walking my two (on-lead, of course) at a French service station in the lorry car park. We were 10m from lorries going 110km and cars going 130km. Some nutcase had an aggressive off-lead labrador with no recall who charged up to us. That guy had a jet ski and an unsupervised toddler wandering around in a service station, so I don’t think he was blessed with risk aversion. Putting Lidy through a years-long socialisation programme that may never truly work so she can cope with the very occasional dogs of blokes who think off-lead dogs with no recall are safe on motorway service stations is not the way forward. All the training we’d done and it was little more than a simulation for my dogs who recovered admirably within minutes. I’m still angry about it, but that’s another story. Right now, we live 10m from a French bulldog, 50m from an Australian shepherd and some little scruffy ball of fluff. Two shih tzus live 100m away. We are in the most dog-heavy environment that Lidy has been in since the shelter. There haven’t been incidents. No barking. No lunging. No hackles raised. No off-lead dogs charging up to us. What I needed – and what many of my clients need – is a way to cope with other dogs that doesn’t cause them embarrassment and doesn’t cause their dog frustration. They don’t want years of delicate stooge groups and intensive remedial education for their singleton dog. Often, throwing dogs in with the dogs, trials by fire, are not actually what clients need or want. We want dogs who can cope in the vets. We want dogs who can cope with the odd off-lead dog. We want dogs who aren’t trying to tear down doors like Jack Nicholson in The Shining just because they heard the neighbour’s dog. We may want to be able to let our dogs off lead around others and be able to call them back (I don’t!) but these are not skills that happen through hapless trials by fire.

Remedial socialisation should always be something we consider for dogs who react to unfamiliar dogs. It should always be the end-goal if the dog is young, in my opinion. But it is so dependent on the dog that if you have a blanket policy, it will end up being torn up eventually. Not only that, it’s hands down the hardest situation dog trainers and behaviour consultants will ever manage, so it’s worth passing on to someone who has bags and bags of successful outcomes with both remedial socialisation and also with helping dogs cope on lead. Often, trainers who bang a muzzle on (and, worse, shock collars, or rely on punishers) and then leave it to the dogs to teach each other are rushing the dog, pushing the dog too fast and actually not that skilled at dealing with on-lead frustration. It’s worth asking how many successful outcomes the trainer has had with on-lead frustration too. In many ways, I would expect them to be incredibly successful at helping dogs manage their emotions. I do a hell of a lot of this, and not so much of the remedial socialisation.

Remedial socialisation is one time it pays to be cautious and, if you think you are going too slow, slow down. It really makes me itchy when I see dogs left to their own devices and literally thrown in with the dogs. It doesn’t have to be this way and it relies on luck rather than skill.

I realise that guardians may push dog trainers into moving faster or initiating remedial socialisation groups. If you’re a dog trainer and you’re struggling to help your client set realistic and achievable goals and build sensible habits, feel free to check out my book!

In the past month, I’ve had a number of clients whose teenage dogs are jumping up on them or on guests. I was contemplating doing a post on this topic, just so that I could put everything together and keep it all in one place when along came an article in The Guardian last week asking for ways to stop dogs jumping up on children which spurred me to action.

The first thing we need to do when we’re thinking about dogs jumping up is define the context, the purpose and the emotions underlying it. Without this, what you think this behaviour looks like and what I think it looks like might be worlds apart.

I’m writing here about jumping in a very specific circumstance: on you, on guests or on people you might meet out and about. It’s a behaviour that would happen within two minutes of greeting, if your dog isn’t on a lead or behind a gate. I’m going to write next time about dogs who jump up when they start to get excited. Heston does a little pop of joy when he sees the special treat bowl come out, and Lidy does a leap for joy when she sees her bowl. These two behaviours are different and they have different mechanisms requiring different solutions. They have different underlying emotions and we need to think about them differently.

I am not, however, talking about dogs who jump to get over fences or baby gates, who hop like cats onto various high surfaces for a vantage point.

If you’re not sure whether you’re reading the right post, ask yourself if your dog jumps up or would jump up on people within two minutes of meeting them. That may even be if the person had gone out of the room and come back in again. The gap between that absence might be days or weeks. It could even be seconds, particularly if you have an anxious dog or a dog who is very attached to one individual. If your dog would generally jump up on people when you meet them, this post is for you.

I’m talking about dogs who jump on you as soon as you get in through the door when you come back from work.

I’m talking about dogs who jump up on your guests as soon as they arrive.

I’m talking about dogs who bound over to other people when you’re out on a walk and jump all over them.

Why are we starting with the ‘why’?

Because if we don’t understand WHY dogs do this, then we have no business trying to stop it. If you don’t understand what drool and blinking do, then you shouldn’t go around trying to stop it either. Only when we understand what the behaviour is designed for can we then find efficient ways to address problems with it.

The fact that my clients whose dogs fit this bill have dogs who are teenage dogs between 6 months and 3 years is also telling. I don’t think dogs jump up more at those ages. I just think we start to get a bit tired of our puppies doing this. No doubt it’s a behaviour they’ve been doing since they were puppies but it gets more tiresome when they grow up. Not only that, as dogs come to social maturity, then they tend to be more conflicted about social activities which can fuel their behaviour. They’ve lost that puppyish ‘Hail, fellow, well met!’ feeling they get when they see new people or greet people they already know, and they’re into the realms of feeling awkward about it. It’s at this age (and younger… Heston started at 10 weeks – shepherds!) that dogs start feeling ambivalent towards new humans. They may also be fueled by feelings of discomfort if they’ve been left alone – and that can start even from days after birth.

Unlike humans, dogs are not a fusion-fission species. We apes live in large groups that tend to disperse and come together regularly. Think about all the times you split up from your family group and come back together again. You probably don’t even all sleep in one single room anymore and even within the home, you’ve got walls splitting you up from the rest of the family at various points. We split up, we come together.

Lots and lots of other mammals don’t do this. Either they disperse and stay dispersed, or they stick together. Some larger groups of social predators like wolves do split up from time to time on a daily basis, and that’s where we might see quite frenetic greetings.

I adore this video of wolves – we don’t have context but this looks like typical pack regrouping behaviour. Say one or two had gone off, this looks like very typical reunification. It could also be the kind of pre-hunt behaviour. Wolves quite often exhibit this exuberant behaviour when they’re about to go off and hunt together.

Look at those open mouths, those loose tongues. These are not stressed spatulate tongues that are hanging out way below the mouth. You can usually see the bottom teeth. But it’s not warm and these tongues are not on show for panting and temperature regulation. Mouths are open and loose. Bodies are loose and wiggly. There’s some lovely head-to-head greetings, almost like playful head butting. Eyes are soft. Tails are sometimes high but loose. There’s lots of submissive behaviour towards the big guy on the right who’s much less playful than the other four. Look at how the wolf approaches at 0.10 – 0.15 – low, curving, indirect approach, head low, mouth open, eyes soft, long blinks. And what does he do at 0.16? Opens his mouth from a much lower position and licks and nibbles the other wolf’s jaw. The same head-pressing at 0.22 – 0.23 with the new arrival. We’ve a lovely shake-off at 0.45 and a great five-way head-to-head at 0.52 before we’ve got a huge knot of wolves and tails. Seriously, if you have five minutes, slow it down to 0.25 speed on YouTube and look at the synchronised tails. It’s quite magical.

There’s a lot to take from this. The first is the amount of face to face contact, including muzzle licking and muzzle nudging. The second is to see all the same behaviours even in our bichons and maltipoos – the loose open mouth, the wiggly body, the low posture, the soft eyes.

So why does jumping up happen? Face-to-face greetings, soft headbuttings even muzzle licking … they’re all part and parcel of social greetings for dogs.

And where is your face?

Usually at the top of an upright body.

Added to this, humans don’t all like or accept bending over to have a dog lick their mouth and chin. I confess I’ve become much more accepting of doggie greetings now I understand what they are. Dogs can, of course, be taught not to do this to humans during the socialisation processes which tell dogs WHEN it’s appropriate to do a behaviour. Lots of my dogs have been taught not to lick humans… Ralf, Tobby, Heston, Tilly, Saffy, Amigo, Flika… none of them were lickers.

How does a dog try to solve the problem of you having your great big face over a metre above them?

Well they jump.

Do we see dogs jumping at the faces of other dogs?

Sometimes. I’ve seen some small dogs who were ignored by big dogs trying to jump up at their face.

But mostly, dogs of different sizes tend to dip or raise their head to make a face-to-face possible. Horses greet dogs in this way. Friendly cows do.

How is it that human beings with our great big uber-developed giant brains can’t understand that jumping up is caused by a desire for a face-to-face contact?

I don’t know.

We’re very out of touch with animals sometimes. Especially since, living in France, the hardest thing about Covid was not going to kiss the cheeks of literally everyone I know… those face-to-face greetings can be a real compulsion if you’ve built a culture around them.

But you don’t want to get down on your knees and stick your oddly-shaped head up close with a dog. Or maybe you can’t. Also, I don’t advise this, especially with dogs you don’t know.

And if you do (and I do, sometimes, with my own dogs or dogs I know) then you understand you can’t ask that of everyone. Especially if they’re small children who might get bowled over, or older people who might easily get toppled.

The most important thing to understand, then, is that face-to-face greetings are normal for dogs. They don’t separate and come together in ways like we do, and it’s stressful. We also need to understand that really, we ought to be teaching these skills when the dog is young and we can more easily modulate in-built behaviours than trying to do it when the dog is six months old and it’s already an entrenched habit we don’t like anymore.

We also need to understand the emotion behind the behaviour as well as its purpose or role. Jumping up is often fuelled by social anxiety. People see it as friendly behaviour. This is especially true compared to, say, barking at strangers or growling at them. Yet what I see in many of our so-called ‘super social’ dogs are behaviours that are frantic and slightly compulsive, fuelled by social anxiety. We think often of dealing with stress as ‘fight or flight’ – and that is especially true of unfamiliar encounters. But we also need to think about ‘tend and befriend’ behaviours, especially within familiar groups or with humans and dogs we expect our dog to behave in a friendly manner with. ‘Tend and befriend’ is another model of coping with stress that is proposed as an add-on for how we handle stress. Often, after stressful events (like greetings) there will be a lot of social grooming, displacement behaviours, checking others out. One prime example was a dog who’d snapped at another. The other dogs present, straight after the two had split up and shaken it off, then went to go and check out the snapper, as if to say, ‘Things okay mate?’

Jumping up often fuelled by social anxiety. Those who get the most exuberant jumping may well be the ones who cause the most anxiety for the dog. Alternatively, the most exuberant jumpers can often be caused by people ignoring them. This is what’s known as an extinction protocol and it means often that dogs will try harder and put more effort into what they are doing. This is not to say we should indulge jumping up, but it is to say that people ignoring it will often find that it gets worse. I’ll talk about that later.

Jumping up can also be fuelled by social tensions, particularly in teenage dogs. I often find that if they’re jumping up more at specific individuals, it can be related to appeasement behaviour: it’s often the person who makes the dog feel most ambivalent who gets the most jumping up. That goes for children too, if your dog doesn’t have a long socialisation history with children. It may also be worsened in times when children are developing – particularly when they start becoming hormonal.

The third thing that may fuel jumping is overarousal. As you know from my post about dual processing, when in doubt or arousal, dogs are going to choose the dog thing to do, not the odd little quirky thing you’ve taught them to do. If it’s a choice between voluntarily sitting or pogoing in someone’s face, then if a dog is aroused, innate learning (pogoing) will always trump learning from this lifetime. Who has most problems remembering their learning? Teenagers…

So jumping up has a function. It is an instinctive way that your dog is solving a problem of your face being very far away and not having been taught when to greet humans face to face.

It is sometimes fuelled by anxiety. Other times it can be worsened by social tensions and frustrations. And it may be worse when our brain is at a developmental period where we’re struggling to even remember the most basic things we’ve known since being very small indeed.

Now you understand that, we can start by thinking of ways to address it.

Management

The first is management. Baby gates, distance and leads are a very good ways of preventing a dog from jumping up. If you’re far enough away and your dog is on a lead, your dog can’t jump up on a guest. Management is going to be vital for anyone training a dog not to jump up. If you’re just letting your dog jump all over people, they’re just practising and getting better at it. If people are finally giving in and greeting the dog or giving them attention, then you’re also shaping bigger, more frantic, more frequent and more dangerous behaviour.

If you’re trusting your guests not to encourage it, stop. You can’t trust people not to reinforce your dog with attention.

In any case, not giving your dog attention is ignoring the dog’s needs and it’s going to create both frustration and fallout. When frustrated or thwarted needs fuel behaviour, we’re going to see dogs trialling other things, such as barking at the guests or even nipping at them. Ignore jumping up at your peril. Not only is it unkind in that it doesn’t meet your dog’s needs, but it may also fuel way worse behaviour that you’re going to really struggle to ignore.

Manage every situation in which your dog feels the need to jump up by keeping them far enough away and removing as much social anxiety as possible. One of my dogs barks at guests. He has a Kong when they arrive and a few treats, and he settles almost immediately. Another is not the type of girl to cope with greetings, so she stays in another room with some fun stuff to do. If those people are going to be sticking around, we have our own programme of what to do, but trying to bring her along with me in a fusion-fission human world is a recipe for disaster.

Lower arousal and social anxiety

Many dogs live lives where they are in semi-permanent states of arousal. They have compulsive behaviours. They can’t settle. They’re frantic, busy dogs who seem constantly on edge. Twice this week I’ve advised more mental enrichment for teenage dogs, and both times the guardians have seen an almost immediate reduction in arousal levels in other areas of the dog’s live. Teaching dogs to permanently settle down or calm down is holding them to higher standards than we hold ourselves to. It is also dull. Dullsville dull. It requires the kind of insane willpower that even humans don’t have.

Let’s stop proposing teaching calmness and settling the whole time. There are other ways to dampen arousal levels, and that’s to make sure our dogs have the right balance of mental and physical activity alongside plenty of sleep.

Most fired up dogs have too much physical activity. I see them red-eyed and panting after two-hour walks. They live on adrenaline and never come down from that high.

I’m not a fan of making dogs work for every morsel of their food. But using a good proportion of it for scentwork, games and scatter feeding can make an enormous difference.

Enrichment alone will not stop your dog jumping, by the way, but it might lower their general anxiety and arousal levels just enough so that they remember what you’ve taught them.

Many dogs I see like this are singleton dogs who have missing socialisation. They’re battling against early learning. Many have a place to sleep in a highly frequented place in the home: kitchens, living rooms, hallways. They’re underfoot and unable to get any solid naps in during the day. Unlike humans who tend not to nap, dogs are diurnal and I see a lot of dogs who can’t get undisturbed sleep during the day. Being free to go to your basket in a room where the TV is on, where kids are playing, where machines are running… that’s not enough. Sleep is such an essential prerequisite for learning that to miss out a long siesta during the day is to make it even more difficult for your dog to remember what it is you are trying to teach them.

Desensitise greetings

For reasons you will now understand, greetings can be stressful for dogs, even those who we might consider to be super social. You may really benefit from taking the emotional sting out of those. Don’t be too judgey: you surely don’t get as giddy as you did when you were a child over those kind of knicker-wettingly exciting things as Christmas or birthdays, snow days or holidays. Nor do you (hopefully) feel meeting people is traumatic as you did when you were a child and you used to hide behind a parent.

Taking the emotional sting out of things is best done through a classical counterconditioning process known as desensitisation. This pairs a state of relaxation up with a very minimal exposure to the thing that causes the jumping. As the dog learns to habituate to people and feel relaxed, the level of exposure increases. That will include distance and time. In other words, we start with a single person who is very far away for a very short time and we build up incredibly slowly to a number of people who are very close and for longer periods of time.

Desensitisation is a process that I think most of us understand, and many of us try, but most people go far too fast in steps that are far too big. Make sure your steps are very gradually incremental.

You can also improve your desensitisation by teaching it out of context. So if your dog just jumps up on people in your hallway, doing it outside the home rather than in the hall will help. Then move up to doing it in the garage, the dining room, the kitchen. Remember too that when you put the dog back into that context, you’re more likely to see the behaviour pop back again, so go back to being as far away as possible with the least challenging humans and for the shortest amount of time.

If your dog does jump up, take a brief break. Do something different and then come straight back to it. During sleep, our learning is consolidated. What that means is that we firm up the neural connections and it makes learning stronger. That’s something we absolutely don’t want to happen with problem behaviours, so tackle them straight away if you can.

Teaching better greeting behaviours

One thing that I see some guardians trying to do over and over, and failing over and over, is to teach their dog to be calm and to sit during greetings. Usually, they’re using food to try and make sure the dog sits, or keeps four feet on the floor, or even goes and lies down on a mat.

There is a logic behind this. In science terms, they’re trying to to reinforce an incompatible behaviour. Put simply, they’re trying to teach the dog to do something that they can’t do at the same time as jumping up. You can’t sit AND jump. You can’t lie on a mat AND jump. You can’t have four feet on the floor AND jump.

But if you’ve ever seen dogs trying to do this, you’ll know it’s an exercise in futility and frustration. We can make it so much easier for ourselves and for our dogs!

The first thing to do is realise that jumping up is fed by attention and greeting. Generally it stops once this has happened. Dogs don’t keep pogoing for ever. They just don’t. Nobody is calling me saying their dog is still jumping up at a constant frequency or intensity after three hours.

Jumping up is reinforced by contact.

Dogs aren’t jumping up for food or toys. They’re jumping for social contact.

It’s vitally important to build new behaviours that allow dogs to access that same thing. Trying to build any incompatible behaviour will fail if you are not using the reinforcer the dog wants to access. In other words, if they weren’t jumping up for food, it’s unlikely they’re going to stop doing it for food either.

It’s literally like giving me a sandwich if I want to shake your hand.

We’d make our lives a whole lot easier if we understood it’d be much easier to teach a replacement behaviour using the same stuff the dog wants to access. Not only that, it’s kinder and more appropriate. If the dog wants contact and we’re depriving them of that, especially if it makes them feel anxious not to get contact, then we need to give our heads a good wobble.

Once you know that you should be building behaviours that are reinforced by contact, you’re going to make life easier.

When you understand that asking for what I call Taxidermy Behaviours is also making our own lives more difficult, as well as those of our dogs, then you’re also going to make life easier. By Taxidermy Behaviours, I mean the kind of thing a stuffed dog could do – hold a sit, hold a down, hold four feet on the floor. Asking for moving, fluid behaviours rather than something a stuffed dog could do is going to make your life easier as well.

When you know those two things, whatever you ask for is going to be so much easier. Absolutely anything can generate human contact: hand touches, chin rests, standing between legs, leg weaves, pushing a flipping pram with a baby doll in it…

You do, however, want something that naturally encourages your guests to pet and make contact with your dog. Not everyone likes being bopped by a dog nose, especially on their hand. Vertical people have very little to rest a chin on (except feet, for very little dogs). Standing between legs can quickly knock people over. Also, and I’ve done this myself, when your dog likes jumping, the last place you want them to try to do that from is between your legs. That way, very unfortunate accidents can occur. But it depends on the dog. One dog who was anxious and jumping on people was very happy to go stand between her guardian’s legs until all the people had sat down. That worked for her. For a dog named Zébulon (Zebedee in French, from The Magic Roundabout) standing between his guardian’s legs ended up with a very unfortunate head making contact with very unfortunate delicate bits of the of the male anatomy.

The replacement behaviour I like the most is a leg lean. Most people instinctively bend down when a dog leans on their legs. Most people pet the dog. Flika used this to her advantage to elicit petting from various humans she met. Sometimes with me it was more of a leg slam, but most of the time, it worked.

If you’ve got seated people, a chin rest is a good one. Amigo, the tart of the dog world, would make his way around with his doleful eyes, resting his chin daintily on any lap he could find. Again, it most naturally ends with contact and I find those two behaviours to be most natural to the dog.

If you’re going to choose a replacement behaviour, make it easier, make it less effort, make it natural and reinforce it with the same stuff.

Teach it out of context and make sure it’s really well embedded before you embark out into the world. Make sure your dog can cope with times when they won’t be permitted to make contact – for people who don’t want to pet the dog or give the dog attention. You can, of course, use food when teaching the behaviour in the first place, but even there, I switch quickly to using contact and attention. You can put it on cue if you like. Ask the dog to ‘lean’ or to ‘rest’ is one way to do this. That way, you can encourage guests to ask the dog for the behaviour.

In sum, the whole chain would look like this:

1. Teach the behaviour, reinforcing with contact (and food if you like)
2. Put the behaviour on cue: ‘lean’
3. Manage and teach the behaviour around guests (say behind a baby gate or out of context)
4. Encourage guests to ask for the behaviour if they want to greet the dog
5. Keep the cue fairly sloppy – let the dog do the behaviour when they like and reinforce. You shouldn’t have to ask them to do it all the time
6. Manage the dog in context, ask guests if they’d like to greet the dog. If they do, ask them to cue the behaviour and reinforce with contact.

Having a good recall and a dog who can tolerate frustration will also help. You may well need to call your dog away. I quite often cue them to do the exact thing to me – Flika never seemed to care who petted her at greetings as long as someone did. Asking her for a lean meant she knew who was paying up and who wasn’t. A long history of reinforcement means the dog is more likely to seek contact out in people they can get it from rather than arse about trying to get it out of people who aren’t likely to pay out.

Between those four steps, I find the problem soon resolves itself. Give dogs the means to ask for what they need in ways that are socially acceptable, and everybody wins. You don’t have to put an end to your guests fussing your dog because it ends up restarting your dog’s pogo problem, and you don’t have to starve your dog of contact when it’s in their very DNA to ask for it.

Should we punish or correct?

If you follow the steps above, you won’t need to. Of course you may be tempted towards spray bottles, shake cans, kneeing the dog in the chest or even shock collars. You don’t need to use these methods. Punishment deprives the dog of getting their needs met. If trying to teach a dog to sit for a biscuit instead of jump on guests for greeting fails, you can be sure you’re going to need a pretty unpleasant experience to override your dog’s basic instincts.

It’s for that reason that many aversives fail.

If they succeed, they run the very high risk of a) damaging your relationship with your dog and b) making them feel even more uncomfortable around greetings. When you’ve read the explanation of what fuels excessive greetings, then you’ll realise that dogs already feel uneasy or ambivalent about greetings. They’re going to tend and befriend MORE if they feel nervous. So, here you are with your knee ready to punch the dog in the chest, wondering why your dog feels more anxious than ever about greetings. Punishment won’t resolve that. So besides potentially worsening your own relationship with your dog, worsening how they feel about people coming into the family group and needing to start at a high enough level to act as a deterrent for a very natural and normal behaviour, we should always remember that punishment simply suppresses behaviour temporarily.

It does not suppress the need to do the behaviour. It does not meet the dog’s needs. It may not even meet your guests’ needs if they’re in need of contact too. It’s our responsibility to teach our dogs. When we’re successful, we won’t have a problem. If your dog still isn’t quite getting it, it’s because you’re asking too much. Make it easier for them.

I find it massively ironic that people are so weird about greetings. Just 22 miles over the sea from the UK, where no contact at all is fairly standard, our French neighbours are busily shaking hands much more frequently than we British people do, and they’re also happily kissing cheeks in ways that can make repressed British people incredibly uncomfortable. Americans are huggers in ways that I will never be, and don’t get me started on life in Japan, where every bow is nuanced with meaning and even eye contact can be offensive. When we have a queen who people are supposed to bow or curtsey to – are they? Who knows? – and there are people to tell you how to address her if you meet her, it all feels a bit rich that we can’t understand our dogs’ frantic attempts to be a dog and their discomfort when they don’t have their needs met. If you are unsure how this works, try elbow bumping or bowing to the next person who offers you a culturally acceptable hug, kiss on the cheek or a hand shake. If you don’t both feel awkward, I’ll be happy to retract my statement and update my understanding. Fist bumps, high fives, back slaps, butt slaps, hand shakes, hugs, bisous, bows, curtseys… humans are WEIRD and etiquette matters. If you didn’t feel awkward when Trump tried to shake the Queen’s hand, don’t be upset when your dog gets it wrong with you. Humans are not just weird but weirdly unable to understand that dogs greet like dogs and that it’s hard for them not to.

In next week’s post, I’ll look at dogs who jump up because it’s exciting and things are WHOOO HOOOOOO!

PS I’ve got a book out! Find it in Amazon.

You know the old saying: ‘Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you.’

That expression is so very true of dogs.

It can seem like such a simple solution to our problems. Just do it. Get it over with. Whatever it is won’t be that bad that the dog will take an instant dislike to it. Vet visits, medical treatment, trips in cars, being on their own, tolerating absence, going to daycare, visits to the dog park with scary-looking dogs, trips to the market, going for a walk, visits to cafés, nail clipping, muzzle use… even wearing a harness. All of these activities are the kind of things where humans can be tempted to think, ‘oh let’s just get it over with!’

To be fair, there are times when needs must. I lived with cats before having dogs as an adult. The first time I realised I needed to use a cat transport cage was the time my cat had an abscess that needed urgent treatment. I did not have time to make the whole experience more pleasant. In fact, since he’d arrived with me in a crate, you can be pretty sure he still remembered that horrible experience.

When you’re a cat guardian, I think you realise more easily that you can’t fool cats twice. Thinking of disguising a pill in paté? Good luck! It may work a little the first time, but I’d put money on it not working the second.

So when things are true emergencies, when we really don’t have the benefit of time, we might resort to force – whatever the situation is.

As long as it’s a one-off occasion, we won’t have to worry about the repercussions.

The trouble is that most things are not a one-off. Especially things that the animal finds traumatic.

So why can that one-off single traumatic event be so powerful?

Single-event fear learning is well-known in the psychology world. Where we truly fear for our safety or our lives, then our brain is very good at finding ways to make us avoid that situation in the future. After all, many millions of years of mammalian evolution mean that our ancestors – dog or man – were the ones who did learn from traumatic experiences. Avoiding or trying to escape from potentially life-threatening situations is advantageous from an evolutionary perspective.

Now you know and I know that wearing a harness is not a life-threatening situation. It doesn’t hurt, for goodness sake. We may even have gone out of our way to buy a harness made of fleece and loveliness.

Sticking a muzzle on a dog isn’t going to kill them.

Taking them for a walk in the park is not a life-or-death thing, on the whole.

Getting your nails clipped isn’t going to take you out of the gene pool.

In fact, that reminds me. There is a very popular viral video with a number of dogs fainting. It’s called ‘drama queens’ or something along those lines. People laugh at dogs who’ve, most likely, got a stress-induced medical condition called vasovagal syncope. For whatever reason your brain thinks fit, it shuts down all non-essential services and puts your body in lockdown. Syncope (fainting) can be caused by any number of things, but if you’re showing your dog nail clippers and they keel over, the likelihood is that their brain says ‘nope!’ and causes the dog to faint. The dog is not being a drama queen.

The reason I recognise it is because I have vasovagal syncope too. So does my mum and so does my paternal grandmother. I’m only saying that in case there are geneticists out there who are interested in the heritability of such a thing. It happens to us all in the exact same situation: needles.

Don’t get me wrong: my sisters are nurses. We have strong stomachs. I’ve cleaned up teenage vomit on coach-loads of schoolkids. I’ve cleaned ulcers and bathed wounds. I’ve nursed an old poodle who had an ulcerated wound on his head where you could actually see his skull and bits of other stuff I don’t want to think about very much. Helping out on vet day at the shelter opens your eyes to all kinds of wounds where you have to be grown-up about it. I’ve sat round Christmas tables while firefighters and emergency nurses explained what degloving means and what motorcyclists look like when their scalp comes off… The type of people who tell you off if you can’t pronounce vasovagal syncope because you’ve only read it on the internet… the people who’ve seen just how many people have such a fear because they’re passing out in Covid vaccination clinics across the world with surprising regularity.

So it’s not a phobia.

But once when I went for a routine tetanus, the doctor made us wait. I was standing up and … then I wasn’t. I think I hit the deck and I was unconscious for a couple of hours. It also happens when people talk about hip bones. I have no idea why. I feel icky, I feel warm, and boom, gone.

Now I’m a human. I do meditation. I know how to avert these attacks if they’re coming on. I put my head down low. Vasovagal syncope makes blood pressure and heart rate drop suddenly, so making it easier for the heart to pump it is always helpful. Not only that, if you’re standing, you make an almighty crash (apparently) if you pass out onto the doctor’s stone surgery floor. So I sit down, I wait for the cold sweats to start and for the yawning to pass. And then I’m fine.

I am a rational, grown-up human being. My rational brain is saying, ‘you got this! It doesn’t hurt at all… Don’t be a baby… it’s for the good… it’s over in milliseconds… Nurses are great at this…’ and my vasovagal nerve says, ‘I think you might die if I don’t protect your internal organs’

It’s even whispering that right now as I write about it.

So what I’m trying to say is that humans shouldn’t be judgey when thinking what animals might be afraid of. We share common fear responses to being trapped, being caught up in things, drowning, asphyxiating, certain creatures.

Here’s my girl Lidy with a snakeskin I found. It had just been shed and I don’t know if snakes smell, but you can see her hesitate. She starts by walking in very hesitantly, does that thing where her feet are planted as far back and she stretches her neck as far as it can, then steps back, licks her lips, backs up, yawns, looks away, comes in from another angle, and then my boy Heston comes in like a wrecking ball, sniffs it, decides it’s not good to eat and ignores it. Look at the length of her neck though as she stretches out to eat it. I heard a new way to describe this last week: giraffe neck. Totally.

Now Lidy is adopted and I can’t swear she’s never had a bad experience with a snake before I knew her. In other words, it could be a learned fear just exactly as this post is about. But I have known Heston the vast, vast majority of his nine years and I know he hasn’t…. and he doesn’t care. Fear of snakes is such a universal fear, though, going across many species, that it may be almost instinctive.

We don’t get to choose what upsets our dogs. Heston? Brave with that weird snakeskin, barked at a stone cross. Terrified of large spoons and cups being offered to him. Brave with dogs and people. Terrified of the vet even though I promise she never hurt him. So terrified he wet himself. Sorry for sharing that, Heston.

Lidy? Will bite a live snake full in the face. Terrified of snakeskin. What’s up with that? Scared of corncobs. Brave with cows and vans and cars and dogs way bigger than she is. Can walk past a gas bird-scarer at full volume. Petrified of thunder, fireworks and people cheering on the other side of the road if someone scores a goal.

Deciding for dogs that they should just get over whatever experience it is and stop being babies usually backfires. Some dogs just become more fearful when forced. Heston does. His anal glands have given way twice in his life and he’s quite a fan of wetting himself when I’d be hitting the floor head first. Other dogs freeze. You can see Lidy freezing, approaching, freezing approaching. Some dogs hit the deck and don’t move. You see videos of these ones too, usually being dragged around a park with comments like ‘my dog’s so lazy!’ Some dogs just stage a sit-in. Bum hits the floor and it’s a great big NO from them. And the ones I work with will often bite. That’s usually way more effective than lying down and being dragged around on your lead anyway.

The thing is, we’ve known this a long time. The fallout of coercion, force and punishment is well known and documented. Sixty years of lab-based and field-based studies and we’ve still not got our heads around the fact that if we use these methods, there may be unintended and unpredictable consequences. It’s time we put our sensible heads on and step way from forcing animals into doing things just because we can. Or, at least, just because we can once.

Bribery also falls into the category of coercion as well. I know it probably doesn’t feel much like you’re forcing your dog if you’re bribing them with cheese to get them to put a halti on or to come back to you if you call them and they’ve stolen something they shouldn’t have. Of course, less knowledgeable trainers may think reinforcement training with food is bribery. It isn’t. That works ‘behaviour’ then ‘food’. Bribery starts by offering food and if the dog wants to, then you’ll get the behaviour. There’s a big difference between choosing to do something because you’ll get a predictable consequence like food for doing so, or being cajoled into doing something with food. Worse still, if you’re in the habit of bribery, as soon as you get your bribes out, the dog can predict you’re about to do that incredibly mean thing again.

Sometimes, that pressure or force can be relatively minor. Even bringing dogs to us with food as a bribe can be just as uncomfortable for them as doing something really, really unpleasant. Remember: we don’t get to choose what animals find unpleasant. I pass out because I think about hip bones…

Even things like stepping in towards a static dog to coerce a sit may seem like something fairly innocuous. It’s not the least unpleasant thing in the world, but stepping in to a dog’s space when they’ve failed to respond to a cue is a way of putting pressure on a dog because they didn’t respond the last time. It can be really tough to stand still and not use our own bodies as a way of coercing dogs into doing things.

So we can fool our dogs once. We can bribe them a few times. We can shove the muzzle on. We can clip the harness on. We can attach a lead to a newly-adopted street dog who’s been caught with a catchpole and never been on a lead in their life before. We can force a dog into a crate or a travel kennel or an Elizabethan collar. We can grab them and wrestle them into the car. We can pin them down at the vet and restrain them. I could have got that snakeskin, backed Lidy into a corner and held her there, trapped, until she ‘faced her fears’. We can force our dog to swallow a pill. We can hold their mouth open and force that pill down. We can stick a halti or a snoot loop or some other offensive piece of equipment on them.

And it might work. Once.

If we’re incredibly lucky (and the dog is incredibly unlucky) because we outweigh them and we’re inventive little apes, we may be able to do that for the rest of the dog’s life. Want a walk? Well, you’re wearing a muzzle. Suck it up.

If we’re fairly lucky, Pavlov might come along for the ride and if the very horrible thing like a car journey or a muzzle or a lead or a head halter or a harness is then followed by a very lovely thing, then the scary thing will come to predict the very good thing through association and our fearful or unwilling dog will come to see the offending item as being a predictor of something good.

And for the rest of us?

You’ve guessed it.

We’re going to suffer the consequences of coercion.

Aggression is one potential side-effect of using force. That may be directed at you if you’re the one trying to manipulate the dog or do something to them, or it could be directed at another individual. One example is the dog who’d been forced into a muzzle and manipulated at the vet’s, The case was very much worsened by the fact the dog had severe hip dysplasia. You’ve guessed it. The dog saw the muzzle the second time and bit their guardian as they tried to put the muzzle on.

Another possible side-effect of coercion is avoidance. Yes, you can see how this plays out. The first time you forcibly remove an item from your dog, your dog may tolerate it. But the next time they pick up something you don’t want them to have? They’ll scarper. Then you’ve set yourself up for a nice game of ‘Catch me if you can’. Avoidance is particularly problematic if you’re in big spaces, so it’s really not a good idea to catch a dog when they’ve failed to recall and then force a head-halter on them. Not only will they scarper when they see the head-halter, but you’ll also blow all your recall training. Forceful people are not nice to be around, and dogs will become wary of humans who reach out to do things to them.

It’s not unusual, therefore, to find dogs avoiding the guardian clipping the lead on, and then behaving aggressively if the guardian manages to corner them. The same for pills, medical interventions, putting dogs in the car… you name it. The last thing you need is a dog who feels uncomfortable and chooses to stay away from you if you really need them to be close to you.

Dogs who have a history of coercion also tend to offer less behaviour. They sit more. They opt out more. They lie down and refuse to move. Again, if approached, that might well turn to aggression. I’m sure you’ve all been in class with a teacher who insisted on asking you questions. When you didn’t know, what did you do? If you had lovely teachers, you’d say ‘I don’t know!’ and they’d explain. If you have teachers who humiliate you and make it an unpleasant experience, you’ll avoid eye contact but you’ll also do less. Nobody wants to draw attention to themselves when under threat. Also, if dogs have no choice and no way out, they may also have what psychology professor Martin Seligman calls ‘learned helplessness’. I write a lot about this elsewhere, but frequently coerced dogs end up doing very little. They are still and small and avoid eye contact, while at the same time keeping an eye on the person who’s been doing the forcing.

Dogs who are frequently coerced by guardians also suffer because they have no outlet for their anxiety. It’s not unusual therefore to hear of dogs developing stereotypical behaviours such as circling or pacing as a way to cope with their anxiety. Often, when avoiding a guardian, they’ll become restless and agitated. They also become hypervigilant for all the contextual cues that mean they’re about to be forced into doing something, and then they generalise wildly. Living in a hyperalert state and not trusting your guardian are recipes for ongoing anxiety problems in dogs.

Just because dogs have been forced into doing something doesn’t mean they learn how to do what you want. When Tilly had ear problems, she’d come to me, present her ear and I’d put her drops in. No force. She knew exactly what she needed to do. When I get harnesses or muzzles out, my dogs approach me and stand while I put them on. No force. I present the muzzle and they put their noses in and hold still. No force.

Choice is also a very powerful motivator, where force and pressure are not. Where dogs understand what’s happening and they’ve been taught gradually and without fear or uncertainty things become more predictable. The funny thing about unpleasant events is that individuals cope better with predictable unpleasant events than they do with random ones. If we can pair predictable unpleasant events up with predictable yummy stuff that follows, then we can very quickly turn something unpleasant into something that’s acceptable. This is how we teach dogs to accept muzzles and harnesses, leads, constraint, being in the car, having injections, getting their nails clipped…

So force a dog at your own peril, I say. Accept that you may have to do it once or twice in emergencies. Know that this will destroy a whole lot of trust with your dog and you’ll need to rebuild that trust. Prepare your dog for all of life’s unpleasant events. The last thing you need is a dog who really, really needs to wear a muzzle for a couple of vet visits being forced into one and then deciding that she didn’t like it very much and makes your life miserable the second time she sees the blessèd thing.

We should all remember, too, that we don’t get to choose what our dog decides they are opting out of. There is no rhyme or reason that says one dog will be afraid to approach a stone cross and another will be afraid to approach a snake skin and that both will be happy to go into the vet but neither feels happy going in to water that’s too deep. We don’t get to predict and we don’t get to choose. It may seem ridiculous to you that your dog literally passes out at the sight of nail clippers, but in your dog’s brain, it’s literally a matter of life or death. And if you’re thinking they should grow up and get over it, remember most humans have got some weird thing that they can’t do. I can’t touch felt. I can’t stand people sweeping carpets with sweeping brushes. I like watching the swallows in the evening until I realise they’re bats, and then I freak out even though I like bats and they’re literally no more likely to fly at me than a swallow is, and if they did, it’d be no less bad.

We don’t get to pick what we find icky. Animals don’t either.

Remember that the first experience sets the rule. After that, we’re learning exceptions. So if you want your dog to learn that leads and collars are horrible, they feel like they’re choking and they might die, then go ahead and force them that first time. That initial experience sets the rule. If you want your dog to enjoy walking on lead, introduce the lead carefully enough that there’s no force involved at all. That sets the rule.

And if you’re looking for cooperative ways to handle your dogs, then you can always read my post about cooperation and handling.

References:

Azrin, N. H. (1956) Some effects of two intermittent schedules of immediate and non-immediate punishment. Journal of Psychology, 42, 3-21.

Azrin, N. H. (1960) Effects of punishment intensity during variable interval reinforcement. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 3, 123-142.

Bolles, R. C. (1970) Species-specific defense reactions and avoidance learning. Psychological Review, 77, 32-48.

Fantino, E. (1973) Aversive control. In J. A. Nevin (Ed.), The study of behavior. Glenview, Ill: Scott, Foresman

If you’re here as a dog trainer, why not check out my new book?

Client-Centred Dog Training helps you get out of the coercion and compliance mode with human students too. No grown person should be forced to do something they don’t believe in. I really feel that, if we’re working with humans and their animal companions, we need to step away from words like ‘compliance’. Guess what? Force free works for humans too! If you enjoy my articles, you’ll definitely enjoy this!

No, I’m not talking about wafer-thin ham or lion cuts in grooming, I promise!

One of the things I find to be absolutely true is that guardians have already tried to do what I’m proposing. I never turn up and propose something they’ve never considered. If they have a dog who’s wary of strangers, they’ve tried to expose their dog to strangers. If they have a dog who barks when people come in their house, they’ve tried to expose their dog to people coming into the house. If they have a dog who’s chasing cats, they’ve tried to expose their dog to cats.

And so it goes.

So when I say we’re going to try it again, they’re all: ‘Tried that. Didn’t work.’

The main difference between what I’m proposing and what they did is that I’m going to do less of it over a longer period. Much less of it. Much longer period.

When we’re working with dogs to expose them to things they find exciting or frustrating, or when we’re working with them on things they are afraid of, then we use a planning tool called a stimulus gradient, like those road signs you see to show you inclines and declines.

It means instead of exposing our dogs to things they’re scared up right up close, we’re going to take our time and work further back. We’re working either to train them and teach them new skills, to desensitise them or to counter-condition them. We can, of course, do all three.

So why am I doing exactly what the guardians have already done, knowing that it will work?

Basically it comes down to understanding and expectations.

Lidy, the recalcitrant malinois, has recently discovered pigeons. We’ve never known pigeons, other than the wood pigeons that lived in the garden and were much more wary of other species. At the moment, we’re living among cocky, well-fed pigeons who have never met a Lidy. She’s never stalked birds, but now she’d decided she’s a pointer, she’s in full-on stalk mode around 200m away.

Now we will be working on this once life settles down for us again. Right now, we’re just getting by.

When I start working on her with it, though, that gradient will be so gentle and so ridiculously slow. We’ll start over 200m away, where the sudden flight of a flock of pigeons isn’t likely to set off all her chase mechanisms.

Where most guardians start, though, is when the dog is so aroused that they’ve no chance intervening when the pigeons all decide to fountain up into the air. Often, they will tell me that they’ve had loads of space. And when I ask them how much space that is, it turns out to be 10m or so.

Not only that, but they’ll also lump the distance and increase the challenge too significantly. I may well do a couple of days around 225m and then 210m for a couple of days. This is shaving. Slicing off such fine, fine tranches of the distance that it may seem barely noticeable.

Generally, I tend to work between 5% – 10% off the gradient. Any less and progress will be frustrating. If I’m doing 3%, for the sake of argument, over 225m, by day 21, I’m going to be around 125m away still. It could take me 3 months of diligent work. For most guardians, that can be very frustrating. It can also be frustrating for the dog too.

Yet most guardians shave off too much distance or add too much time. For instance, even a 25% gradient will take you 17 days, shaving off 55m on that very first day, and if I’m working on Day 1 at 225m without reaction and I dip down to 170m on Day 2, it’ll be unlikely my dog will be able to cope with such a big dip, especially at the beginning. If she’s stalking them at 200m, I’d be silly to think that one day of training will be enough. The gradient is too steep.

In fact, most guardians aren’t always aware of the point at which a trigger becomes noticeable. We call this salience. Last night, hot night, windows open, some neighbours were out late in the garden drinking and chatting. I was trying to drop off to sleep. Most of the time, their voices were background noise, and once or twice every two or three minutes, the decibels would increase. Background noise became salient.

Now I was a long way from yelling at them out of the window but two hours of spiking did test my patience. Yet most dog guardians do the equivalent of waiting until their dog is leaning out of the window yelling obscenities. If you wanted to work on my tolerance of night-time noise, then waiting until I’m involved in blue-faced yelling about respect out of a window at one in the morning is never going to work.

So partly we have to notice that point of salience and work at that point. Not the point of reaction.

In other words, we want to know when the trigger becomes noticeable, not when is the dog out of control. The salience point for Lidy is around 200m. The out of control point is around 10m when the pigeons all decide to take off. That’s the first thing we need to do if we’re going to start shaving off thin slices: work out the salience point and the reaction point. When does it become noticeable? When does the dog react?

When we’ve got the point of salience, that moment the trigger slips from the periphery into relevance, that’s where we need to start the gradient. As you’ll know from my other blogs, that can often be around 500m sometimes.

But that’s where we start planning.

A stimulus gradient is basically like any other gradient. It can be steep or it can be really shallow. Our dogs’ exposure to things that excite them or things that make them afraid is most likely to fail when we expose them on a steep gradient. That 25% gradient is too steep. Even a 15% change gradient is too much for most humans involved in achieving goals – let alone a dog who feels murderous around pigeons. Think of us going down a steep hill in our cars…. We know the steeper it is and the more pressure we put on our brakes, the more likely they are to overheat and fail. The same happens to our dogs’ control mechanisms.

Making the gradient less challenging without making it frustrating is where the shaving and fine slicing comes in. The better we are at this, the more likely our dogs will be able to cope. Too big a gradient over too short a time and we’ll lose. Too small a gradient over too long a time and we’ll lose. We’re looking for the Goldilocks gradient: just right.

Once we’re working at the point of salience, not the point of reaction, and once we’re working on the Goldilocks gradient, the animals we work with will find life much easier.

Now I could take you through the complex maths and pyramid sets I do with clients, or the occasional variable sets that average out to the set increase for that day, but most of my clients find that too precise and overly complex. I find that, as long as they’re keeping an eye on body language and they’re working roughly around the Goldilocks level, things usually go just fine. It doesn’t need to be planned in compulsively inflexible mathematical steps. In fact, I think most of my clients would give up if I expected this. That’s not to say I don’t expect journals and logs along with rough estimates of distance, but I don’t expect them to get their measuring wheel out, glue some pigeons in to place, measure out exactly 169m, do five trials that average out to 169m and repeat the next day at 162.5m. That’s where frustration lies.

I have found, though, two other techniques that can help. The first is to keep to a short number of trials.

I know people who’ve shaved their gradient so finely that they’re doing eight months on a programme. Not only that, they’re starting at reaction point, not salience point, and they’re still battling the dog eight months in. If you’re doing it at that beautiful sweet spot, you’ll find that five trials that finish on a win is more than enough.

You don’t need to be doing twenty or thirty minutes. Everything we know about Pavlovian conditioning says that associations should happen within a brief number of trials. We do five trials and we go.

Of course, my clients think this is madness at first. We rock up, we do five trials, we go home. What kind of trainer is this?!

And this is why I need them to be able to do most of it themselves. I don’t expect to have to go and hold their hand over this once they know where the dog notices the trigger and they’re making sure their next-day goals aren’t some enormous and unreachable challenge.

We turn up, we do five trials. We go home.

Dog working on fearfulness around people? See five people, go home.

Dog working on predation of pigeons? See five flocks of pigeons, go home.

In fact, it may even be five repetitions of the same trigger. That’s fine too.

That’s my first piece of advice. Keep training sessions ridiculously short.

My second is to finish on a win.

Humans are terrible at pushing things too far. We always do it. ‘Just one more!’ we think to ourselves. Our hardest habit to break will be getting over that just one more mentality. When we finish on a loss, not only is the dog rehearsing a behaviour once more, but they’re also strengthening the link between doing the behaviour and what comes next. One loss and we’re then fighting to try and get a win. What happens if we have to go through fifty repetitions to get that win? We’re at 50:1 in terms of practising vs learning. I want zero practising.

So when I finally get around to working with Lidy on her pigeon fancying, we’ll be doing those four things: starting at the point of salience where she notices them, not when she’s leaping after them… planning a ‘Goldilocks’ gradient to make sure I’m not asking too much or too little… keeping sessions short… finishing on a win.

Once those four rules are in place, the progress made is astounding. Those four rules are the difference between trying a technique and failing, and trying a technique and succeeding.

In other news, my new book came out on Saturday. It’s a book for trainers who are looking at ways to increase client engagement. If you’re a dog trainer who wishes that you just had to work with dogs, because they’re easy, but their humans are a challenge, this book is for you!

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If you’ve ever felt like you know how to train dogs but you’re missing out on key skills on training people, if your clients testing your patience with their weird and idiosyncratic ways, then this book is made for you.

‘Owner compliance’ is often seen as the magic ingredient where successful outcomes are concerned in dog training. Yet the concept of force is at odds with how many of us work with animals in a compassionate and cooperative way. In this book, you’ll find 30 lessons to sharpen your skills in taking a compassionate and cooperative approach with your human clients too. Make no mistake, though: it’s not tea and sympathy! It will also give you a business edge too!

Client-Centred Dog Training by Emma-Jane Lee: Out Now!

Working with dogs who are afraid of humans can be tough. Sometimes we may find our dogs are aggressive towards unfamiliar people, barking and lunging at them. Sometimes our dogs may well have bitten guests, groomers or vets.

Other times, our dogs may well be very fearful around new people, be they people we meet on walks or people who come to the home. Perhaps they try to make some space, lick their lips or cower away from anyone who approaches them.

If we work in kennels or a shelter, we may find that certain dogs are aggressive or fearful with employees, making it hard to care for them.

Even if our dogs are simply more agitated than they are normally around visitors, perhaps approaching them or fussing them for attention, it can also be a sign that our dogs feel uncomfortable with strangers. Just because they seem really friendly, it doesn’t mean that a dog who is jumping up or harassing guests is actually any more comfortable with unfamiliar people than a dog who is growling or flinching.

We may well have labelled our dogs ‘reactive’, for those sensitive, shy souls who we hope wouldn’t ever bite but who still make a lot of noise around people they don’t know.

The most straightforward programme to work with dogs who are afraid of strangers will include two compulsory elements and a third option for those who are really struggling to cope.

The first compulsory element will be management. We need to make sure our dogs aren’t habitually running into people when they’re unable to cope, simply because most of the time, they end up practising the behaviour over and over. Management means making sure we don’t put our dogs in situations they can’t cope with. It means avoiding busy places like cafés and shopping centres until we’ve put in a lot of ground work and it means not hoping for the best. It might mean setting up a safe place in our home, in our garden or making sure our dog is safe on walks. I’m managing my stranger danger dog right now: we’re taking early morning walks, using doors and making sure the neighbouring gardens are empty when we’re outside. Management may be all you need.

But management doesn’t really treat behaviour. For that, we need a behaviour modification programme. In fact, I said this was a compulsory element and I’ll correct that to say that, if I’ve got a dog in a sensitive fear period, if I’ve got a dog who’s unwell, if I’ve got a dog who is old, or if I really haven’t got the time to dedicate to training, then management may take all the weight. However, management for the rest of a young, healthy dog’s life is not just restricting them to the smallest life they could possibly live, it may also be depriving them of future friends, of contact and of being a functional member of a social species. Management will undoubtedly fail in the course of a young dog’s life, which is why, for most dogs, it’s just not enough.

Behaviour modification programmes may have many elements, but the main retraining will fall into two main approaches: changing the dog’s emotional response to unfamiliar people and giving them some skills to help cope. This is where, depending on the level of your dog’s problems, a well-qualified trainer or behaviour consultant can really help. Not only will they give you the benefit of many years’ tips and tricks, but they should also make the whole process more efficient and also more effective. That, in turn, improves the welfare of your dog. It doesn’t really need saying that we need to do this thoughtfully, kindly and systematically. Flooding a dog by overwhelming them until they shut down, or suppressing both emotional expression and behaviour through punishment such as choke chains, prong collars, shock collars or slip leads are methods that are doomed to failure. Not only that, they fail to take into account the dog’s view of the world and these approaches dismiss their feelings recklessly and insensitively. What you do with your dog to help them cope is very much dependent on what works for both the dog and their guardian. That said, no matter the dog and no matter the guardian, punishment and flooding are both methods that no good trainer will need to use. There are plenty of safe, reliable and efficient methods that don’t cause harm to our dogs and risk the health of people they come into contact with.

Medication may be the third strand of a programme, dependent on your dog’s needs and your vet’s recommendations. There are also many nutraceuticals and herbal remedies that may help your dog cope if they are anxious around strangers. My dog Lidy is not generally an anxious dog, so the vet has never felt that anti-anxiety medication would be necessary, although she does have moments when she’s afraid. That’s normal and adaptive. She didn’t understand all the cheering she could hear following the goals in football matches, and she doesn’t understand thunder. But generally speaking, she wouldn’t benefit from medications to lower her anxiety. Feeling afraid or uncertain following various changes in the environment is normal and adaptive if we’re not sure what’s going on and it scares us. When our dog does not adapt to scary stuff, or when they have an extremely strong reaction to things in the world around them, panicking even when they can’t see, hear or smell things they’re afraid of – those would be times that seeing a veterinarian would be a sensible precaution. In part, this is not least because noise phobias can be related to underlying musculoskeletal pain, and it may be that, especially if your dog’s fears have got worse gradually over a period of time, or if they suddenly changed, then a health check is always vital.

One thing that can be really difficult is when we need to interact with people. Lidy has mastered the fine art of coping with people who don’t interact with her. She’s watched men with diggers. She’s come across picnickers in the forest. She’s kept her beady eye on the people in the supermarket car park. We’re fine with people we don’t know. I protect her from their unwanted attentions, and absolutely everybody has been amazing about leaving her alone.

What is hard is moving from non-contact strangers to contact. It can be very hard for dogs to learn that people are not scary, and progress can be glacially slow. I worked with a lovely setter a couple of weeks ago, and it took two hours before the dog was really relaxed around me. And I’m a professional who keeps my hands to myself.

As you know, asking strangers to give your dog food can really backfire. If your dog approaches, your dog is drawn into the space of someone they perhaps feel uncomfortable with, and when the food runs out or the energy changes, you may find that your dog reverts to aggressive, fearful or reactive behaviour.

Personally, I’m a huge fan of Suzanne Clothier’s Treat and Retreat and I have a couple of other protocols I designed myself so that I can approach dogs when I need to. I mean, when you’re in a shelter, needs must. Treat and Retreat is surprisingly easy and also insanely effective. However, I can’t ask people to play Treat and Retreat with my dog.

Lidy had a vet appointment just before we came away to make sure she’d had her wormer and to check her health. Can you imagine, in a very busy, noisy vet surgery asking if your vet will play Treat and Retreat with your dog for ten minutes or so? You’d have to run them through what it was… then pass them some treats in the hopes that they could manage it… give them a bit of coaching to get it right… manage your dog… hope that the vet nurse didn’t walk in…

Yet there is one thing that you can use to help your dog cope with humans. An item that has a magical power, if you will.

Some dogs in shelter kennels have a really hard time with all the staff passing. One day, I noticed that one dog was an absolute lamb for the guy who brought him his dinner. The volunteer who turned up with the lead got the best reception. Yet this dog regularly threw himself, barking and lunging, at his kennel gates in a display so terrifying you’d have had no doubt it would have ended in a horrible way if he’d got out.

Turning up the next day with a bowl in my hand, I got the same reception. When I walked past later, I got the same response as the day before – a real telling off to move out of his space. Bowl = cute ‘yck-yck-yck’ behaviour and a lovely sit with a charming smile. Lead = delighted ‘whoo whoo’ behaviour and some joyful dancing. Nothing = barked at and lunged at from behind the gate. Eventually, because I took him out often, that lead transferred its magical power to me and the dog was as pleased to see me as he was with the lead.

The process by which this happened is not new. If you’re a trainer, you’ll know that this is Pavlov at work. Instead of bells, we’ve got bowls. It’s pure magic at work. However they feel about the food or the object, then that’s how they come to feel about the person holding it. It does work the other way, too, by the way. Not just for dogs either. Working with New Caledonian crows who are captured and then studied before being released, the researchers soon learned that the crows remembered who’d captured them and attacked them in the enclosure. It was so bad that they had to send novel researchers in who had no connection to the initial capture.

In shelters and in kennels, you can really use this power to help fearful or aggressive dogs out. When there are objects like these which have a magical power to bring out an emotional response, you can use them to make the shelter world routine and to help dogs (and cats) overcome their fears of strange kennel workers.

The word I use for these magical items is a talisman.

A talisman, an object thought to have magical powers, brings good luck. Our talisman in this example doesn’t bring good luck. It brings good science. Any object can take on magical powers to elicit responses from your dog. Bowls, harnesses and leads are common ones for us in the home. Some of us resort to saying W-A-L-K-I-E-S because even the word walk takes on magical properties. Actions like putting shoes on can cause immense excitement. Weird confession: the second time I go to the toilet in the day gets my dogs excited. Walks come next. Brushing my teeth makes my dogs excited. Brushing my hair makes my dogs excited. No, they’re not just excited by my occasional attempts at personal hygiene. Putting on my boots brings them to near delirium. Picking my keys up? Same. Putting my bag in the car? Utter ecstasy.

It’s not just objects like bowls, boots and leads. Nor is it just actions like picking up keys. Dogs respond to noises. Words like ‘walkies’ and tea can bring out the most giddy puppy in the most sedate pensioner. My alarm goes off at 6am and 6pm to give my boy Heston his medication. That invariably means Good Stuff At The Fridge. What do my dogs do when the alarm goes off? Get excited and run to the fridge. My mum’s been using the magical power of noise to announce herself to Lidy as she arrives, so that by the time she gets to the room, Lidy’s already dribbling with delight.

You think it’s just visual stuff, noises and words?

Don’t overlook the dog’s biggest and most powerful sense – smell. In shelters, it’s very easy to use smell to help dogs learn who new people are. Using zoopharmacognosy scents or even pairing up items of worn clothing from kennel workers can be one way to link smell with food or walks. One of my clients had adopted a sweet little girl who was very dog-aggressive. Unfortunately, her daughter was coming to live with her and she had a dog. We thought things would be okay, but to shorten the odds, we paired up the other dog’s bedding with food. The first day, we just put some treats inside a blanket that we’d wiped over the other dog. The next, a blanket we’d wiped over the other dog’s feet and interesting bits. If you don’t know what’s an interesting bit to a dog, pick off bits that’d normally make us cringe. Then we had a blanket the dog had slept on for an hour. Next, a blanket he’d slept on for the afternoon… you get the picture. When the dog finally arrived, we kept them separate for a few days, then we set up a meet and greet that was very carefully staged using walks and neutral spaces. When we came to introduce the dogs, she already knew all there was to smell about him, and she also knew that the smell of him meant fresh roasted chicken. Sure, we did a bit of work at a distance and we continued to take it easy, but pairing up smells with good stuff can be an amazing way to help your dog progress.

Even people can be a talisman. If your dog associates the presence of another person (or even of you!) with good stuff, then you can use them as a talisman to predict the arrival of good stuff, but also to predict safety and how events will unfold.

A talisman can be a word, then. It can be a smell. It can be a sound. It can be an object. It means, ‘when this thing is present, good stuff happens.’

It is a way for your dog to know that, in the presence of that magical item, it’s nothing but good stuff. It’s reliable. It’s predictable. It leads to more good stuff. I also use mats very often for exactly this. The mat comes out and good stuff will happen.

What you want is a full ‘whoo hoo!’ to whatever object you choose. Ironically, you can do this with virtually any neutral item. I get a whoo hoo when we see the muzzle. What you want, though, is a talisman that you can pass to the other person. Whoever carries the thing has the magical power.

I use a paté pot with treats and paté in it. Whoever holds the paté pot is magical. When I took Lidy in for her wormer, the vet was holding the paté pot. Lidy didn’t lunge. She didn’t growl or freeze. No hackles went up. No tail went between her legs. She trotted up to the vet, sat at her feet and was A Very Good Girl.

Aww, how lovely, you’re thinking. Surely this Lidy that she is describing had some mild worries about people. Not so. Lidy is more than capable of some very frightening behaviour.

Now when we have all the time, it’s great to take it. My mum has gradually been getting to know Lidy for a few minutes a day. When the Mother is here, nothing but good stuff happens. Meals, walks, snacks. She announces her presence so Lidy isn’t taken by surprise. And Lidy chose to approach her for cuddles. Don’t get me wrong: we’re not up to the point where I’ll be letting Lidy off-lead just yet, or hoping she’ll cope in moments of tension. This stuff works and it is just fine.

But I don’t have 7 days to go live in my vet’s house and ask her to do these things with the dog. So passing her the magical talisman meant that – just for that short period of time – the vet had a magical charm. Of course, I’m still relying on management (Lidy had two leads on and she was muzzled) and modification (I’ve spent a lot of time charging that paté pot let me tell you!). But, for the five minutes in the surgery, the presence of the paté pot meant that good stuff was assured.

Anything can become a talisman. In fact, you can make use of the super powers of having several work together. It needn’t even mean that the stranger is going to give out food. It simply means that the stranger is safe. It’s a transferable icon that means there is nothing to worry about and predictable things will unroll. Our paté pot is easy. It means paté. But we can also ask people to use words or ask for specific behaviours. When unfamiliar humans can ask for a behaviour like ‘spin’ and the dog knows it will lead to predictable results – the world really is your oyster.

Some final thoughts about the object you choose. The first is that it should be portable and fairly small so you can take it with you and your dog will know what is about to happen. It should also be unusual. You can of course hand a dog bowl over to your vet although it may be confusing – eating from bowls tends to happen in predictable places. Our paté pot comes out at regular intervals. On walks. In car parks. Just for fun. It’s small. It’s portable. It is very well charged. By that, I mean that paté and treats have come out of that pot at least a couple of times a day since as far back as I can remember. I don’t overdo it. And I try to keep lots of surprising things going on. Sometimes it might contain a piece of liver or kidney, a bit of black pudding, a piece of salmon, a bit of cheese. It’s always massively yummy human-grade food. I usually ask for a behaviour with it too, like hand touch.

Talismans come from the Arabic verb meaning ‘to complete’ or ‘to perform a rite’. A talisman that you use with your dog can be just the same. The talisman will be produced. The dog will be asked for a behaviour. The dog will do the behaviour. Treats will rain from the sky. Magic will happen.

I use a talisman frequently to make the world predictable for the dogs I work with. It helps them understand how the world operates. When we know what’s going on, we don’t have anything to be afraid of. It makes for confident dogs who understand the world.

I don’t place all my faith in them, and certainly not for long. But they form a central role in helping the dogs I work with move to interaction with humans when I need to do that a little more quickly than the dog would like. As I said… growling at the vet one visit, sitting for a wormer at the next. That’s not a speed I like to work at because it’s a speed that has been coerced unnaturally.

But if needs must… a talisman can work wonders. It can also, if used properly, form a bridge in building relationships of a longer duration.

Understanding the power of objects, sounds and smells can also help shelter managers ensure kennel safety. Imagine knowing that you could go into a block of kennels, say ‘Hi dogs!’ and be greeted by lots of wagging tails because they know that ‘hi dogs!’ always means snack time! It ensures safety for new kennel workers if they can pick up items with which dogs are familiar. They may not know you, but they know the routine. Certainly, having Lidy’s little green harness on display when I was away from the shelter meant anyone who approached her kennel with it must certainly be a friend because they were carrying the Magical Harness of Joy. Lidy knew what that harness meant and what it rituals it predicted. If you know much about Pavlovian conditioning, you’ll also know that it doesn’t take many pairings at all for an association to be formed. What you have then is a baton that can be passed from staff member to staff member and can be used to help dogs understand the world around them.

Unlike asking strangers to give your dogs food from their hand and risking a nasty bite when the dog realises they’re closer than they wanted to be, the talisman can be used at a distance, even behind fences or guards, or when your dog is on lead. Food, if that’s what the talisman predicts (mine do) can be given by the guardian or dropped and moved away from. Quite often, as I did with my vet, they might do the feeding (well, giving of wormers) and then I’ll move the dog away and feed them before returning again so that dogs who are startled by movement aren’t suddenly thrust into a situation where things were okay while the person was still but all bets are off when they move away. I’ve seen a few butt bites in those situations, so it’s well worth moving your dog away before the person starts to move.

Used well, Pavlovian conditioning can go a huge way to helping our dogs make sense of the world around them. A talisman tells the dog that they are safe and predictable events will occur. We try so hard to tell our dogs using words that they don’t understand. Why not use the objects that they have faith in to really make a difference?

One of the first things my clients want to know when their dog has bitten is whether it will happen again. It’s one of those impossible questions because there’s no answer that will put an end to people’s worries and there’s definitely no accurate answer.

A risk assessment definitely helps. I designed one I use with my clients to help them understand what is serious and what’s not. It’s easy for me to say that I don’t think their dog will bite again when as far as they’re concerned, Tricky Woo the Shih Tzu is now an unknown entity. But it is never easy for me to say, when there haven’t been any bite incidents, that I think if nothing changes for the dog, then the dog will find it increasingly difficult not to resort to using their teeth. Why is it that those of us whose dogs have bitten are frightened it will happen again, and those of us whose dog might be a huge risk are convinced it won’t happen in the first place?

A lot of it comes down to human psychology.

As you may have read about in Dog: Thinking Fast and Slow, humans have many cognitive biases. One of these is a negativity bias. We think that things are unlikely to improve and we don’t expect a positive outcome. That way of thinking can make it very difficult for us to put dog bites behind us and move on. Most of my clients go through a period where they completely lose trust in the dog and don’t know if they can go on living with an animal that they’re concerned is a ticking time bomb. I feel a little like this living with Lidy. New situations are always concerning and I’m probably much more cautious than I need to be. So many times, her behaviour has said that she’s well and truly moved on from her darkest days. She’s moved on. Maybe. I haven’t.

That’s the first stage I think we go through when we care for a dog who has bitten. Will they do it again? How can I trust them again? We lose all faith in them and in ourselves. We become overly cautious, even sometimes opting to rehome or euthanise our dog simply because we can’t trust them again after a bite, despite the fact we trusted them before. I don’t think there are many of my clients who don’t worry incessantly. And where the bite has been directed at someone in the family, it somehow becomes so much worse. Not least if we’re living together all day long. I never, ever feel judgemental if a client says they can’t live any longer with their companion, even if the risk assessment suggests a positive outcome. We live a life of blind trust before the bite, and then a land of constant worry after.

So why do we live in this land of blind trust before the bite? Even perhaps following one or two incidents?

The joy of human thinking also means we have a default optimism bias. I know. An optimism bias and a negativity bias. What fun! Who dreamed up these brains of ours?!

In reality, both have an evolutionary function. A negativity bias keeps us in place. It keeps us safe. It makes us risk averse. I’ve just spent three weeks on the move, in new locations, in new homes. Every walk goes back to being a walk into the unknown. Strangers are dangerous and change is bad. In experiments where mice were moved from one habitat to another, those who’d been there five days before predators were introduced were much more likely to survive than those who’d just been transplanted. In the real world, change can kill you.

And an optimism bias stops us dwelling so much on past experiences that we can’t move forward and we become crippled by anxiety. In fact, when we lose our optimism, it can cause us all sorts of problems.

I find some people to be very blasé about the risks posed by their dog. This is not really their fault. That delightful optimism bias carries us through, sometimes even past plausible deniability that our dog has a problem. I know many people whose dogs are repeat offenders, but because the bite hasn’t been bad enough yet, they continue with blind optimism. I’m there hearing stories about people who take incredible risks with their dog. It’s not that the dog is dangerous. They aren’t. It’s just that people take incredible risks with their dog simply because nothing bad has happened yet. On our way up north, I stopped off for a leg stretch with my dogs. We’re on lead. Lidy is muzzled. It’s quiet. I don’t, for one minute, expect there to be off-lead dogs at a motorway services when there’s 130kph traffic thundering past only 10m away. Guess what? We turn a corner and a guy is there with an unsupervised off-lead aggressive dog (he really was…) who charged at us all. No recall. No apology. Things ended okay – his dog took one look at Heston and changed his mind. But not only could there have been a horrible fight, his dog could easily have ended up getting squashed by traffic. I guess the jetski and the unsupervised toddler that the guy had with him said a bit about his view on life – and I guess the two leads and the muzzle and the deliberate choice of a very quiet services says a lot about mine. I expect perfect storms. He doesn’t.

I’ll tell you something else too. Instead of sighing with relief and realising what a lucky escape he had, he’ll do the same thing again in the future.

I don’t blame people for this, either. Even if I’m explaining until I’m blue in the face that their dog is a risk. This is not just for dogs who bite, but even dogs who jump up on people or who have poor recall. Nothing Bad Yet is a dangerous state. I’ve lived in it, with dogs I’ve taken risks with myself, even over simple things like not securing them properly in the car or letting them off lead when I shouldn’t.

We put the dog in situations they can’t cope with, and boom, you’re then dealing with a negativity bias and wondering how you’ll ever recover. Once bitten, twice shy. Literally.

Take the dog that was in before Lidy and me on one of our vet visits. I say ‘visit’ and I run it like a military operation. At this visit, there was a a teenage labrador in for routine vaccinations. There were lots of stress signals I could see but were ignored by the guardian. As soon as the vet walked in, the dog started lunging, barking, snapping. That dog was a big dog and the guardian had him on an extendable lead. Luckily, the vet was risk averse. That’s the optimism bias at work in the guardian, though. It doesn’t cross our tiny minds that our dogs might actually, one day, inevitably, bite someone if we keep doing what we’re doing. Lidy got to be the best dog in the vet surgery simply because I’d planned to keep people safe from her.

I walked in and Lidy’s muzzled, on two leads. I’ve checked her harness, but also have a lead clipped on her collar. I’ve checked the clasp on the muzzle and secured it. I have paté. I’ve booked us in at a very special time (just after the vets open – so we don’t get trapped on a day when there are five or six overnight emergencies being brought in, and before things get too busy with queues). I went in first, leaving Lidy secured in the car. I scope the surgery. I check for problems. I let the assistant know I’m there. She tells me to go straight on through into the vet consulting room so I don’t have to hang around trying to be polite to people with cats when my dog is having a meltdown. That’s the negativity bias at work. Plan for the worst. In the end, she did a tiny growl and went back to eating paté.

So what is the biggest problem for our dogs after they’ve bitten?

Us.

We are.

It happens with those perfect storms, when we think we’re safe.

The problem about the brain making quick decisions is that it quickly reverts to the optimism bias even if you live in a carefully risk assessed world, especially if nothing’s happened for a while.

I always tell my clients: ‘Watch out for the day when you think your dog is better… it’s inevitably followed by the dog reminding you that they are not’.

That’s not just some silly fatalistic view. It’s not a case that the dog knows we’ve let our guard down. It’s just a case that we have let our guard down and usually that means we’re not as careful with risks.

What happens when we think our dog is better is that we drop our negativity bias and re-find the optimism bias once more. We become risk takers. We put our dogs in situations they can’t cope with and – boom – they remind us that we took one too many risks. It’s usually the day after we start feeling relaxed.

It also happens when we’re stressed and when we’ve five hundred things on our mind. This is me too. I do sometimes think Lidy is ‘better’ and then she reminds me she’s not. But most of the mistakes come when I’m stressed.

Our rational brain is the one that makes all the plans and security arrangements. Baby gates? Check. Hook and eye lock on the door? Check. Sliding lock? Check. Secure buckles on harness? Check. Secure clip on lead? Check. Muzzle to hand? Check.

And then, when we’re stressed, we forget all of that.

Take me three weeks ago. Unexpected change in house moving date. Got a few bits and pieces to move out. What do I do? I let Lidy ‘supervise’ moving tables and she can’t cope. All I needed to have done was put her behind the sodding baby gate for two minutes. That’s all. Two minutes.

We ditch our rational mind’s probability and possibility risk assessments and safety measures when we’re stressed and even doing something that I’ve done a hundred times then becomes something I forgot to do.

At the end of the day, she coped much better than she could have done and I’m here reminding myself that under stress, the best laid plans of dog trainers and guardians go astray. That is the biggest risk post-bite. That we’ll think they’re over it or that we make hasty choices when we’re stressed.

What I would say to my clients is this: know your dog. Do the risk assessments. Keep them safe, if you have even the slightest doubt. If you don’t have doubts, then you’re probably stressed or walking into another bite situation. Watch the flashpoints where there’s excitement and little control. Watch the hotspots where dogs come in contact with people or dogs they’ve targeted before. Be risk averse and have double, triple or even quadruple safety protocols in place. Then make those protocols so automatic that you could do them in your sleep.

They say insanity is doing the same thing you always did and expecting different results. Well, in that case, there’s a distinct loss of rationality – if not sanity – when we’re under pressure and I promise you that you too will fall foul of taking your eye off that proverbial ball. In your moments of rationality, put every safety measure into place and practice routinely and predictably. I secure Lidy in the car on every single journey – as I should, mind – as I know the one time I’m stressed, I’ll forget. I want it to be so automatic that I do it on autopilot. Our brain’s autopilot system is pretty efficient as long as you’ve practised something long enough. I didn’t forget how to drive my car during that unexpected move, although I did have to very consciously remind myself to stick to the speed limits, which I never have to do under normal circumstances. Autopilot is good for dogs and their guardians. Safety checks and security measures are the perfect things to have on autopilot.

So when guardians ask me if their dog will bite again, whether it was just a perfect storm, I say I don’t know. I don’t. I do know that dogs with a bite history will repeat that behaviour when we stop paying as much attention to safety as we were, and that we’ll revert to our own stress behaviour patterns when we’re under fire, just as they will. We spend our lives thinking ‘only’ in a perfect storm – and yet perfect storms happen so much more frequently than we’d expect.

If we can take anything from this, it’s the need to always stick to your safety and management routines, and never let your guard down because you think your dog will cope. Why did I let my crazy malinois supervise furniture removals? Just because in the heat of the moment, it seemed like she would be okay and she’d cope.

I got lucky.

And relying on luck means one day our luck will run out.

Make sure you rely on good management habits for the days when perfect storms hit, and stick to those procedures even if you think it’ll be okay.

That way, I’m sure we’d have fewer ‘repeat offenders’ and fewer guardians who regret the day they took the eye off the management.

I’m going to apologise straight away that this post is technical, rather than one for the average guardian. It’s mainly based in some very rich and interesting discussions I’ve had with other dog trainers and behaviour consultants in the last couple of weeks.

The question, as always, is rooted around picking the right training method for the dog (and the guardian!). I’m finding more and more that although all individuals learn in the same ways, some ways we can train are singular precision tools rather than a Swiss Army Knife that can do a lot of things, but none of them particularly well.

I’ve been posting a lot recently about dogs who growl, bark, lunge, snarl, snap and even attempt to bite unfamiliar people either when they visit the property or when we’re out in the street on a walk. Today I’m going to keep my focus on that. I seem to go through trends where I get a run of dogs who exhibit the same type of behaviour. The behaviour I’ve mentioned here, I refer to as ‘Stranger Danger’. as a shortcut This post is going to focus on that single, very specific behaviour. Dogs barking and lunging, snapping and snarling at members of the public. This is a perennial problem for the dogs I work with.

The decisions about which tool to use to change this behaviour is a much broader discussion, however, that is as relevant to many other situations where we might be engaged in changing emotional responses to the world. I just wanted a handy example. I can’t think theory without the actual practical bits. It’s only when I can see it in concrete reality that abstraction makes sense to me. So Stranger Danger dogs it is.

Stranger Danger is not just about barking or lunging at unfamiliar people in the street. It can also be a fearful reaction, with the dog freezing or cowering when people approach, and then turn to barking or even biting. I even see it with dogs that people assume are super-social – often gundogs – and what I see are dogs who manically feel the need to assuage and befriend everyone present to diffuse threat. All of these behaviours – even though we might class one dog as aggressive, another as fearful or panicking, another shut down and another as a social butterfly, these can all be rooted in fear of unfamiliar people. All the teenage dogs jumping up on guests can be just as much about Stranger Danger as barking and lunging can… just another way of expressing nervousness around new people.

Does it matter how you modify this behaviour? Is training bespoke or does one-size-fit all? Are there really different methods that might be more fitting?

All my training programmes consist of three elements.

The first is management. Whatever problem the dog has, it’s our obligation as guardians, caregivers or trainers to make sure everyone is safe. It’s not normal for dogs to treat all people outside the home as if they’re dangerous, armed robbers. Nor is it normal for them to be so afraid that they shut down completely. And no, it’s not normal for them to be so needful to make contact that they’re screaming behind a baby gate and then jumping all over guests when they’re finally allowed to make contact. We have to make sure the unfamiliar people are safe, and we need to make sure our dogs are safe. Not to do so is a legal issue on the one hand and a welfare issue on the other.

That means leads, muzzles, distance, security, barriers. Yes, even for the ‘friendly’ dogs. No person – especially not a dog trainer – should be put into a position where they can be harmed. A dog can’t bite strangers if they’re on two leads, muzzled, behind a secure fence. Nor can they knock Nana over in a frantic bid to modulate their anxiety by leaping all over her.

So management is the first strand. That might include distracting the dog. It might include avoiding the situations they struggle in. It might involve securing the dog. Management is fine. It’s not a treatment, but it’s fine. Plenty of dogs, including my own, go through various parts of life being managed. It’s not lazy. It’s just life and priorities. Sometimes, we might do more management than other times.

Behaviour modification is the next strand. Behaviour modification essentially means putting into place a programme to change the dog’s emotions or behaviour. This is what most of this post will be about. Behaviour modification is a fairly limited toolbox in reality, with about a hundred variations on a theme. Good trainers have specialist methods and can adapt the variations to best meet the needs of the animal and their guardian.

Less effective practitioners will have a much less broad range of tools. If you’ve only got a hammer, you’ve got to treat everything you come across as if it’s a nail.

Behaviour modification will include skills in habituating animals to new things in the environment, working with them to take the sting out of stuff they’re already reactive to, changing their emotions, teaching them new behaviours. It can include training, of course.

The third strand won’t be appropriate for every dog. That strand is medication, changes of diet or the use of nutraceuticals. Not all dogs will need this, but if they do it makes behaviour modification destined to fail without it. Or, if not destined to fail, it certainly makes it much harder and much longer to see progress.

So today I want to focus on that second strand, and about how I make my decisions about which behaviour modification tool to use when working with dogs who have a heightened sense of Stranger Danger.

Basically the tools I have available are:

• Desensitisation: exposing the relaxed dog to the scary thing at levels that don’t elicit a response, and gradually exposing them to more and more of the scary thing.
  
  The key elements of desensitisation are pairing a relaxed state with low doses of the scary stuff. In human therapy terms, desensitisation is often called exposure therapy. According to Domjan (2015) exposure therapies are ‘extinction procedure[s] in which the participants are exposed to cues that elicit fear in the absence of the unconditioned stimuli’ (p. 246). In the lab, this would mean presenting the conditioned cue without the shock. In reality, this means presenting the conditioned cue – in this case, the scary humans – without the unpleasant emotions and without other unpleasant factors like yanking, jerking or reprimanding the dog. If you want to get technical, Domjan seems to be intimating that desensitisation is actually an extinction protocol. Extinction perhaps being very different than a counterconditioning protocol at a neural level, though we don’t know enough to say this for sure.
  
  Chance (2014) explores how systematic desensitisation is the process by which a conditioned stimulus is paired up with a state of relaxation (p. 98) While it doesn’t help that there are not agreed definitions of these processes, I take desensitisation to mean the pairing of a conditioned stimulus – the scary person- at levels that do not elicit a behavioural response – with a state of relaxation. This is how it was conceived by its progenitor Joseph Wolpe.
  
  As such, desensitisation is a subset of counterconditioning. There’s an unresolved tension, of course, with how Domjan defines exposure therapies. You can see why: to Domjan, they are not a pairing procedure; to Wolpe, the scary stuff being paired with a positive emotional state is pivotal.
  
  To my mind, desensitisation processes are not aided by food or other positive stimuli except relaxation, and this is going to become an important part of discussions that follow. I take the same line as Wolpe does. After all, he named it. To my mind, and she may completely disagree, but Grisha Stewart’s Behaviour Adjustment Training is a desensitisation technique in part. Multiple, careful exposures when the dog is in a relaxed frame of mind.
  
• Counterconditioning: this is often lumped in with desensitisation, but desensitisation is a subset of counterconditioning if you subscribe to Wolpe’s definition: it is a counterconditioning process in itself.
  
  Chance says that counterconditioning is an exposure process to reverse the effects of previous conditioning (p. 394). I think this definition is a bit weak though, not least from a neuroscientific perspective. I know, I know… picking and choosing which definitions I like. I’ll discuss why later, but essentially, I quibble with the idea of reversal and I also think counterconditioning in the animal training world has come to mean something a little different: the pairing of the scary person with food. It’s not unlearning. Counterconditioning is definitely not unlearning.
  
  I don’t think trainers always understand the difference between desensitisation and counterconditioning. This is not helped by very poor quality examples in very popular dog trainer textbooks. Only this weekend, I read a post from a well-respected animal researcher in which she called ‘DS/CC’ a process. Well, no. It’s two processes for me, and it’s those differences I want to discuss today. For Domjan, they’re two processes: respondent extinction and counterconditioning. For Chance, they are two processes: pairing scary stuff with positive emotional states compared to the reversal of learning.
  
  Whether you agree with the definitions or not, this is how I define the two in relation to Stranger Danger: where desensitisation is pairing up an emotional state of relaxation or safety with the scary people in progressively more challenging circumstances, counterconditioning is pairing up scary stuff with physical unconditioned stimuli, most often food or toys.
  
  The aim of counterconditioning, then, is that the scary thing comes to predict the arrival of the good stuff. If we’re talking trainer terms, then Jean Donaldson’s ‘Bar is Open – Bar is Closed’ is the most well-known example of counterconditioning.
  
• Operant training: basically operant training requires the dog to behave voluntarily and this is the bit that’s open to consequences. This is Skinner and his pigeons. It’s typical dog trainer territory. Sit – get a biscuit. There are ways we can use operant training to make sure dogs are distractable in the face of the scary stuff, to teach them another behaviour they can do instead, to watch us, to check in with us, to stand between our legs if people go past, to do a u-turn, to ‘Look At That!’ … This is where we’re using food to shape behaviour and we can give cues like ‘Watch!’ or ‘Let’s go!’ to get the dog to move.
  
  We can even use a thing called operant counterconditioning which not only changes the dog’s emotional response but also gives them a behaviour to do instead. When I do Leslie McDevitt’s Pattern Games with my dogs, or I use Deb Jones’ Focus Games, these can either be used to distract and keep the dog busy in the presence of scary stuff, or they can be even used as a way to help the dog cope with the scary stuff.
  
  Operant training might not necessarily involve cues, clickers or marker words but we often think of it with a cue, a behaviour, a marker and a reinforcer like food. It needn’t be this four-part structure, however. Simply speaking, behaviour and reinforcer is as much as we need. If I play the engage-disengage game with my dogs, for instance, where I reinforce looking away, that is uncued operant training.

These three tools are basically the ingredients of most programmes to help dogs deal with scary people. In one blend or another, they’re mostly what people are using. In order to think about some of the inherent problems of each tool, it’s going to be really important to separate counterconditioning from desensitisation. Of course, you are full on board with the knowledge that Pavlov and Skinner are sitting on both your shoulders when you’re training and you can’t do one without a bit of the other unless you’re engaging in some very restrictive training, but I do think there are techniques that are MORE Pavlov than Skinner, and vice versa. They’re a sliding scale. Some protocols are more heavily dominated by either Pavlovian processes or by Skinnerian ones.

Desensitisation and counterconditioning are not, however, one single process.

Desensitisation is a subset of counterconditioning using a careful, systematic, gradual stimulus gradient of the scary stimulus paired with a state of relaxation or safety. It’s not the stimulus gradient itself. Some people think it’s about the systematic and gradual bit. It is, but that’s only half of it. It’s the relaxation bit that is being associated with the stimulus that it is the key component for me.

For the purpose of this post, it’s going to be really important to remember that they are distinct processes. Desensitisation wouldn’t involve food, for example. Where there is food, you may also be pairing up with a state of relaxation, but that’d be counterconditioning. Where there is a stimulus gradient, you may be using counterconditioning. If you’re using desensitisation, there will most likely a stimulus gradient. Confusing, I know. For the moment, I think the best way to describe it is to think of the DS bit as being foodless, and the CC bit having food (or other positive stimulus).

Now recently, I’ve had a lot of discussions about the role of counterconditioning or even the role of teaching dogs operant things like ‘Look At That!’. Which are best for the dog and their guardian?

I firstly want to say there is sometimes a bit of confusion over them. I’ve heard of very prominent professionals saying counterconditioning isn’t even a thing, that it’s not even possible. It is. It absolutely is. Thousands of animals have gone through fear conditioning with foot shocks in the lab to prove it is, so let’s not breed deliberate ignorance. In itself, therapies to counteract PTSD are counterconditioning, so let’s not just write off a load of actual science by spouting nonsense.

What is true is we don’t know much about the neural mechanisms by which counterconditioning works exactly. Yet. That said, we are pushing the boundaries of our understanding all the time. There is evidence from applied psychology about respondent extinction that suggests it might be more a case of reconsolidation of fear memories (see Brain & Behavior by Garrett and Hough 2017 for a primer and for cornerstone research) – we’re actually over-writing neural networks during a period of malleability. Maybe. Perhaps when we undertake counterconditioning, we’re just learning exceptions to the initial rule formed by our first learning experiences.

What we also know is that initial learning – the original conditioning – forms a type of rule about the world and also a strong neural connection that, in the case of fear conditioning, is designed to keep us safe, and that forgetting is not what is going on. If you think counterconditioning is about causing ‘forgetting’, it’s time to get your cognitive psychology books out and read the chapters on forgetting. Counterconditioning is not ‘un-learning’. This is why I have problems with Chance’s definition.

But we are probably rewriting that rule about the world with a load of exceptions as we go through counterconditioning procedures (including desensitisation). We may also, at a neural level, be weakening the neural pathways and building new ones. We’re learning exceptions.

Another thing that I’ve heard recently is that counterconditioning doesn’t work because it makes animals more sensitive to the trigger. Say for instance you have a dog who is afraid of scary people and you do Jean Donaldson’s ‘Bar is open – Bar is closed’ game when the scary person comes into sight, where scary thing appears, the bar opens and food rains from the sky, and then the bar closes and food stops the moment the scary thing is out of sight. Some people say that this is sensitising the dog to the trigger. You can see their logic, I guess. In their view, it makes the dog look for scary people.

The trouble is that this naive psychology is not accurate. Sure, if counterconditioning is done badly, then you might make the dog more reactive to the scary stuff. What you’re probably doing is flooding the dog and seeing an extinction burst though. What they’re doing is not counterconditioning. This view about it sensitising the animal is also not evidenced in the lab, however, where counterconditioning with food has been much more effective than simple extinction procedures. Food does help. Their claim that sensitisation happens is not borne out in science.

What trainers who say counterconditioning sensitises the dog probably mean is that the use of food makes the dog actively look for the conditioned cue – in this case, the scary human – because of the food that will inevitably happen when they see the scary person. I think what they are actually referring to is an attention and salience process, not a sensitisation process. They’re different psychology chapters from forgetting or from fear conditioning and counterconditioning. They’re different processes. What I think they mean when they say the dog becomes more sensitive to the trigger is that the scary stuff is becoming more salient. I guess what people who think it can sensitise dogs to a stimulus are really saying is that they think the addition of food can make a stimulus more noticeable. It’s about attention and valence.

To a degree, I think this idea that food might make the scary people more salient might hold some truth. I certainly see it with some dogs. I know dogs who, upon seeing the conditioned cue – the scary human – look back to their guardians, salivating at the thought of the sausage that is about to materialise. If you’re waiting for a payday that’s dependent on a cue, then you’re going to look for the cue. That is evident. From my own anecdotal experience, I think this is sometimes true. I think the food can also hinder the process if it comes to dominate the process. I’ve known dogs who are so fixated on the sausage potential that they barely notice the scary stuff.

Here, counterconditioning fails because the dog is barely aware of the scary stimulus. Sometimes, that’s fine. Distraction is a useful tool. I’ve certainly used it a million times. But distraction involves no learning. If I truly want the dog to feel differently about the scary human, distraction will get in the way. Today, I stopped at a breaker’s yard to drop off some parts and Lidy barked and lunged at the guy who came to carry the box. Later, we stopped at the supermarket and I picked up some sausages because I’m that type of guardian. When I opened the packet, a lady walked past much closer than the guy had been in the breaker’s yard. Lidy didn’t even notice. It was all about the anticipation of the sausage. On the other hand, though, we always have sausages at the supermarket. The sausages simply overshadowed everything else. I think, if you’re doing counterconditioning on every excursion, you might get a dog who’s fixated on the sausages. Make sure you secrete them carefully, I’d say, and you probably won’t have this overshadowing.

This problem is as equally true for dogs who are working operantly – trick training or obedience training in public, if you will – where the patterns and the routines and the food stop them engaging with the scary human. I’ve known dogs who were so lost in a ‘Watch me!’ that they failed to even notice the scary stuff go by. Again… fine, if distraction is your aim. If the dog isn’t noticing the stuff because you’re involved in your own routines, then it’s not really doing anything by way of learning. This can be amazing if your dog builds up such a trust in you that they only have to look at you and work with you to feel safe, but that’s about your relationship, not about the world. However if you only engage in operant training when scary stuff happens, then I think that also may end up making the scary stuff more salient. Counterconditioning, because the very nature of it is to only do it when the scary stuff is present, runs an ever bigger risk of forming links in your dog’s mind that make the situation more salient than not.

So perhaps, then, counterconditioning may make things more salient, especially at first. I don’t know. That’s just my experience. I do find those dogs who are highly fixated on the food lose that sensitivity the more they do. I think it’s sometimes a phase you work through with some dogs: ‘Look! There’s the stuff! Where’s my goodies?’ But I don’t think it is a bad thing. What you have then is a dog who is ready to switch to operant cues. When a dog notices the person and then looks back for a sausage, well, then you can ask them to do something else. I wait for this moment, rather than trying to avoid it.

Does the food increase the level of arousal in general? Maybe. I think this is mostly true in dogs where the scary stuff was already salient, though.

For instance, I work with a lot of car-chasing dogs, and I’ve been the guardian of one too. Sometimes, where I’ve paired the car up with food, I never had a moment where I thought with Flika that she was ‘noticing’ cars to get food. Or, even, that she was more sensitive to the presence of cars. Her level of ‘noticing’ cars neither diminished nor increased. Her reactions decreased, though, for sure. They weren’t more salient, but she shouted at them less and chased them less.

However, for my non-car-reactive boy Heston who walked with her, HE certainly knew that cars meant the bar was open when cars came by and HE came to expect food. In other words, cars didn’t become more salient for Flika, but they sure did for my boy who had no previous interest in cars in eight years of his life. Before, cars were a non-thing to him, as innocuous and meaningless to him as trees, bushes and benches. In fact, if I were to imagine him loose in a road, he’d be surprised to find cars around him. What I was doing was conditioning a neutral stimulus, with him.

The level of initial reaction and salience, as well as the usual frequency of reaction informs my choice of counterconditioning as a tool. If the dog is already having a huge reaction to the scary stuff, well, counterconditioning can’t make it more salient. It was already 100% salient. Cars were 100% salient to Flika. If there was a car, she noticed it. Counterconditioning – adding food when she noticed a car – couldn’t make it more salient. The mechanic was 100% salient to Lidy. Adding food when she saw him couldn’t make him more salient.

But, if the dog is not reacting 100% of the time, or the reactions are fairly mild, then if I add food, I may run the risk that I’m actually conditioning a dog to the stimulus by making the pairing of stimulus > food more strong. For instance, in Pavlov’s famous experiment, when the white coat guys came in the room, pairing them up with food 100% of the time will have made the white-coated assistants more salient. That’s what happened to Heston with cars. The food that inevitably arrived for Flika (and him by default) increased the attention he paid to cars.

So if the dog is not reacting 100% of the time, or even 50% of the time, then I may not choose pairing the stimulus up with food because I may actually be conditioning them, rather than counterconditioning them. I’m creating an association rather than changing their emotional response to the stuff.

Because I’m still wrangling with this in my head, here’s another example. Lidy very occasionally alerts to large birds walking in fields. So if she sees a crow, very occasionally, she’ll start to stalk it. That happens probably once in twenty times. Now if I open the bar on crows, well, I’m making crows more meaningful than they currently are. I can see why, if I start adding food when she alerts on a crow, she may start noticing crows more.

In this case, where the reaction is mild or occasional, I’ll probably choose desensitisation alone. Pairing up a relaxed state with low doses of the stuff. I did this with Heston when he was a pup and barked at cows. We walked at a distance with a few very slow cows in our sight for a short period. Gradually we increased the length of time we were around cows, the friskiness of the cows and we decreased the distance to cows. When a cow recently stuck her head through the hedge, Heston didn’t even notice. They were a non-thing. It might as well have been a part of the bush or a curious flower. Cows don’t trip his neural connections of things that are worth noticing. They are just part of the fabric of our environment. Now.

What I’m getting at, I think, is that the aim of desensitisation is to lead to habituation. It’s to help animals return to a state of neutrality. Repeated exposures at low doses and we get used to things. Does the addition of food in counterconditioning actually make the stimulus more salient? I’d argue it may, if the dog wasn’t always finding it salient in the first place.

So that’s my first decision: is this dog reacting to the stimulus often enough where we need to countercondition them and change their emotional response? Or am I aiming for neutrality and habituation?

For example, Lidy’s reaction to people was so extreme that respondent counterconditioning – bar is open, bar is closed – and operant counterconditioning – Leslie McDevitt’s Look At That game – didn’t have the risk of making the scary people more salient. They were already salient. If she noticed them, she reacted to them. Also, given the severity of her reactions and the length of time she had practised the behaviour, coupled with poor breeding of an already sensitive breed of dog, and an extreme lack of appropriate socialisation, and a highly-traumatic single event in her adolescence and I’d like to put money on the fact scary humans are always going to be salient. If you have a pathological fear of zombies or clowns, I’d say they’re probably going to be salient to you compared to other things. You might say, ‘Hey, there’s a clown!’ and have a milder reaction, but those clowns are never likely to become a non-thing, I’d argue.

So if the scary stuff is never going to be a non-thing, then why not add food? Why not countercondition or train around them? You can’t make them more salient. You might as well make the scary clown a cue that ice cream will shortly arrive.

The irony is that from time to time, I do wonder if scary humans and scary dogs are becoming non-things for Lidy. I was prepared for a lifetime of salience. I was happy with Look At That rather than BAT. I was happy with her cuing me for a u-turn if she needed one. I was happy to scaffold her and give her a support structure of pattern games and focus games if it got too much for her. Yet there are more and more frequent times when she clearly notices the people but they are non-things, not worth paying any attention to, and she’ll go back to sniffing the grass or walking or even showing her best sass moves off. We walked past people in the woods the other week without treats, cues, scaffolds, patterns, worries or reactions. They were a non-thing. The problem with desensitisation if it is an extinction protocol as Domjan suggests, is that extinction is weak and faulty process open to renewal and recovery where the initial behaviour comes back with friends.

I guess what I mean to say by this is that there are times for a more pure, foodless desensitisation process where you’re just ‘being’ around stuff at low doses. There are dogs for whom this is all they need. I worked with a pointer last Tuesday and adding food to the mix was just not necessary. He just needed a carefully scaffolded exposure process.

This has a lot to do with his guardians, who were not clicker people whatsoever, and I mean that kindly and without judgement. Their timing was lousy. It was massively complicated. The food got in the way. She was trying to hold a lead and get food out and she was all thumbs. So I may choose a technique depending on the guardian’s skills.

I may also choose desensitisation over food-based techniques with dogs who have a long history of life without humans and where they have been responsible for making their own judgements. Flika was one of these dogs – she wasn’t used to relying on a human to make decisions. I did choose a food approach for her because her car chasing was reliable and extreme. She’d had 14 years of making patently bad decisions around cars. But if the dog would, under normal circumstances, make a good choice, then desensitisation is great. It goes without saying that severe aggression is not a good choice the dog has been making. The pointer was another of these dogs. Given the lives of pointers in France, it’s likely he’d largely been left to his own devices and been responsible for his own decisions. Counterconditioning and operant conditioning are guardian-controlled processes. Desensitisation is not, other than putting the dog in the right place at the right time at the right distance for the right length of time. Thus, for independent dogs or dogs who have been responsible for all the decisions in their past, desensitisation may be the more suitable procedure.

Besides the guardian’s natural aptitudes and the dog’s learning history, I also think about the severity of the behaviour and the salience of the scary stuff. That might make me lean towards a food-based method one the one hand, or avoid it on the other.

Breed fits in here too, as well as temperament and individual traits. I find malinois need a lot of structure and scaffolding. Gundogs and shepherd dogs seem to benefit more from the bond that food will give to the guardian more than other breeds. Independent breeds may struggle to profit from food-based methods of counterconditioning or operant training, but I find the gundogs and shepherds need more direction. If I didn’t direct Flika or Lidy, I’m pretty sure they’d fill in the gap with some vastly inappropriate shepherd behaviour. But that depends on the dog, their history and on you.

It also depends on the dog’s appetites, behaviour and preferences. I do love a dog who can take food in public, but if I’ve got to teach that as a skill before I even do any work because the dog won’t eat in public, then desensitisation may be the tool I’m looking for. Likewise for food-obsessed dogs. If I had good food on my person, I was the only salient thing in the whole world to my cocker spaniel. Once she heelwalked for 5km. We could have walked over glass and fire and she’d have emerged wondering why her paws were in such a mess. Food overshadowed everything.

What I’d conclude by saying is that it’s helpful to think of desensitisation and counterconditioning as distinct processes – one with food and one without. Other than that, they have the same rules: small doses, breaks between sessions, clean set-ups, positive experiences, finishing on a win. If Heston gets a bit shouty around stuff, I’m desensitisation all the way. His phenobarbital/steroids combo is so potent in terms of his appetite that he wouldn’t notice the scary stuff anymore. With Lidy, I’m counterconditioning and operant training all the way. Leaving her to make her own choices will mean she’ll probably end up lunging, barking and attempting to grab the offender. Many of my clients are that kind of dog: they need the structure or their behaviour is so severed that they’re unlikely to make better choices.

There have been many interesting conversations which, while they might not address this topic overtly, address it in passing somehow. Much of my thinking here was kind of intuitive until I listened to Sarah Stremming’s Lemonade Conference slot. Initially, I had a reaction to it and thought leaving out the counterconditioning bit was certainly not going to help the majority of dogs I work with. But then I thought there was a lot of wisdom in her thoughts about just working around scary stimuli, in just the same way that Leslie McDevitt’s materials work with dogs who benefit from the structure of training. Here, the scary stimuli are nothing more than environmental chatter. I’ve also benefited hugely from reflecting on Grisha Stewart’s BAT procedures, where I’ve known dogs who needed more structure than it offered and had a long history of making dangerous choices. In reality, I do a little Grisha Stewart, a little Leslie McDevitt, a little Jean Donaldson – and in implicit levels dependent on the dog, their age, their history, their personality, their reaction strength and likelihood, the salience of triggers and the capabilities of the guardian. I do think we need to be mindful, however, that using unconditioned stimuli of a positive valence (food!) may be working on a different neural network based on reward learning, and in that case, it’s going to trump desensitisation hands down. Suffice to say – sometimes I use food and sometimes I do not, and it depends on a lot of things.

I’d like to thank Sonia, Ryan and the DoGenius students for making me formulate these thoughts into some kind of conscious and explicit process rather than just unconscious and intuitive practice. We all get better through reflection and discussion.

If you want the cutting edge on respondent extinction, by the way, our DoGenius extinction course should be right up your street. So many of the nuances get missed and it’s vital that we understand them so that we’re keeping those tools sharp. Only then can we make the most difference for our learners. There are three hours of lectures that cover the most up-to-date research. Definitely worth purchasing if you want to know more.

* At least until they’re really well and truly ready for it…

One comment that strikes the fear of God into me when I hear people talking about their new rescue dog is “I’ve been taking him to the market to socialise him.”

This is closely followed by my fear of comments saying, “I’ve been taking him to cafés to socialise him.”

What this generally means is that the new guardians have noticed that their dog is a little wary of people and they’ve decided to do something to show their dog that there’s nothing to be afraid of. We don’t even think to try to socialise a dog who’s already social.

We’d all very much like a dog like this splendid guy and we think that exposure to markets and cafés will help them. The trouble is that nobody says they’re talking a relaxed and friendly dog like this to market to ‘socialise’ them.

Worse is when I hear this comment within days of arrival, when the dog is no doubt still adjusting to their new life. Sadly, it often happens with dogs who’ve been adopted into a world that asks them to make a huge cultural shift, like being adopted from an isolated rural working life into a life of sociable, urban, retired people who want a dog who’s a companion rather than a tool.

I know these actions are well meant. I know every single guardian who’s ever embarked on taking their dog to a market or a café is trying to help their dog. However, there are two fundamental misconceptions that could lead to a deterioration in behaviour, or, worse, a bite.

The First Misconception

The first misconception is that we can ‘socialise’ an adult dog. Sorry. That boat has largely sailed around the 14-week mark. What you are doing is remedial socialisation. Or, at least, that’s what you’re hoping for. You’re hoping to fill in the early learning gaps that have left your dog feeling less than confident around humans.

Like any corrective event, you’re working against initial learning which is always and without question the most profound learning. There’s even some debate about whether we can actually ‘unlearn’ what we already know. So you’re not just hoping to teach your dog, you are trying to ‘unlearn’ and ‘reteach’.

Our early learning is arguably the learning which sets the rules. Either we learn that people are lots and lots of fun, and not scary at all, or we learn that people are scary. We might also learn very little about people – and that hurts our dog’s development too. Very often when people tell me their dog is scared of children, it’s more that their dog has never met children.

What we know about learning is that the first experiences probably define the rules. That dog in the photo? His initial experiences between 6-14 weeks will have been that people are harmless and even kind of fun. I don’t even need to know this dog to know that’s what he’ll have learned.

Everything after those first experiences – including remedial learning – is about learning exceptions.

So you’ve got a dog who, for whatever reason, either doesn’t understand people or is afraid of people. That’s their rule. People are scary. If you keep taking them to places which are scary, that’s just confirming the rule they already understand. Yep. Those people. They’re scary too. And, if you’re their guardian, if you keep putting them in scary situations, well, people are still scary and now you’re not very trustworthy either.

I’d argue that every single carefully-constructed positive social experience where we’re consciously, carefully, thoughtfully exposing them to their triggers is where the animal is learning, “People are scary. Okay, not that person.”

“People are scary. Okay, not them.”

“People are scary except those ones. Okay, not them, either.”

Notice that I said every single positive social experience. If it’s a bad experience – even just because the dog feels afraid – then it just confirms the rule.

“I was right after all! People are scary!”

Don’t forget either that for some breeds or mixes of dogs, their innate, default position – the one they have before they’re even born – is that people are scary. If you’ve a fancy for dogs whose kennel club breed standard says things like “aloof” or “loyal”, if they’re the kind of breed that people say, “Oh he’s lovely when you get to know him!” then they’re often bringing a preset package of suspicion into the mix. Any dog bred for protective qualities – from small lapdogs up to big livestock guardian dogs – comes with that default setting too. Early and appropriate socialisation before 14 weeks just helps them modulate how scary they think strangers are.

When we do remedial socialisation, we have one aim: to help dogs feel relaxed around humans. We’re aiming for hundreds (yes, really!) of experiences where they’re learning, “Okay, not that one… okay, not that one… okay, not that one…”

There will be days when you’ll wonder if they’ve fully generalised that new rule. People are not scary. One day – maybe six months in, maybe a year, maybe two – you’ll wonder if they’ve got it. Maybe, just maybe, they’ve finally learned that 8 billion people are not scary and you won’t have to introduce them to each and every one of them in a carefully controlled and constructed ways.

“Wonderful!” you’ll think. “They’ve got it!”

On those days, I practically guarantee that the very next day, your dog will remind you that the rule is SCARY and there are a limited number of acceptable exceptions.

Make no mistake about it, we’re unlikely to turn our spooky dog into a social butterfly. That dog in the photo? Well, your dog is probably never going to look like he does. Sorry about that.

That’s the first misconception: we’re not socialising our dogs. Our adult dogs are not being socialised when we take them to market. You don’t need to treat your adult dog (or your puppy) to a ticklist of situations. I hate those ticklists. I especially hate ticklists that circulate on social media. You know – the ones that say to go to a café, a bus station, a train station, a supermarket, the town dump, a church service, a wedding service, a funeral. If you’re going to a funeral, make sure you go to ones with people in black. Take them to a mosque and a temple and a synagogue and make sure they’re used to a djellaba and a burnous and a person in harem pants. Neither initial experiences of humans nor remedial experiences are a check list.

If we get lucky with our pups and they’re used to it, you’ll be able to take your dogs to scary social events and they’ll be blasé about stilt walkers and fire-eaters and dagger throwers, clowns, apothecaries and knights in shining armour. What we’re aiming for is a dog whose general rule is that people are weird, and harmless but not scary and their exception of, ‘Ok, not that one… he was harmful and scary!’ doesn’t become the general rule.

With a dog whose general rule is either that they find people scary or they don’t know people at all, we’re working against the current. At best then, what we’re hoping for is remedial education that helps them find many exceptions to rules they’ve already learned.

The Second Misconception

The second misconception people make in trying to solve fearfulness by going to busy venues relates to the hope that dogs will learn people are great if we fully immerse them in such situations. What usually happens is the dog is flooded. You can read about flooding here. Because they’re on the lead and because we’re often in places where there aren’t many places to escape because there are small alleyways, tables, stands, people and so on, the dog is subjected to an inescapable situation. They are unable to get away.

Because they are unable to get away, we’ve effectively removed their ability to escape. That means we’ve left them with few options. One is to become obsequiously and obnoxiously friendly. I know. You’re thinking this is a good thing. I see it as a coping mechanism used by a lot of dogs whose guardians think that the dog is really sociable. Another option is to just shut down. There’s a difference between dogs who’ve chosen freezing as an option compared to having given up, but if you’ve ever been under the beady eye of a teacher looking for a volunteer and you’ve chosen stillness in the hopes that they’ll not notice you or pick on you, then you’ve used freezing yourself as a behaviour choice under duress. Other dogs get restless and fidgety. They move more, seem agitated and seem to be looking for comfort more. I notice these dogs panting a lot or offering quite a lot of behaviours to get their guardian’s attention. Other dogs shut down or cower. They try to make themselves as small as possible.

And yes, of course, there are the dogs who growl, bark, snarl, lunge, snap or bite. That’s sometimes the only solution we leave our dogs with. Sadly, I know a lot of dogs who’ve felt the need to do this when grabby hands approach, and let me tell you, it’s one form of learning you don’t want your dogs to become familiar with.

It’s invariably those people who say, “Oh dogs just love me!” who crowd our dogs, shove their hands into the dog’s face and then end up getting a warning bite. Never take your dog to a place of professed dog lovers. Take them around professionals who see dogs all day every day and won’t even try to pet your dog. Or take them around people who are not interested in dogs at all. But don’t take them to see your friends who tell you that all dogs love them or that they just love dogs. Those people will try to grab your dog. I know. I am that person. I have to physically restrain myself. It takes a lot of willpower.

I find as well that some people say, “Oh, market works for me! My dog copes better with people up close and lots of them than they do with one or two people on the horizon.”

What is generally happening in these circumstances is that the dog is absolutely not okay with people but because there are people everywhere, they’ve no choice but to kind of suck it up. The problem is that this often leads to a dog shutting down, seeming to cope, trigger stacking and then having a bit of a meltdown when something pushes them over the edge. I see these dogs slinking around markets being ‘socialised’ by guardians who unfortunately don’t realise that their dog is one step away from that meltdown.

Believing in full immersion for ‘treatment’ is the second misconception. It’s really important that we understand this is not therapeutic but is very likely to go wrong. Even human therapies from fears, with adults who can sign up with informed consent to conquer fears and phobias do not work on full immersion. Full immersion is what we see on fictional crime shows where the villain is a therapist gone wrong. It’s what we see on news reports about practitioners who’ve been struck off. It’s the worst practice from the past – practices that now make us sick to our stomach to realise what we made people endure in the hopes of ‘curing’ them. We shouldn’t be doing it with animals who don’t understand what is happening to them. Throwing them in at the deep end is no way to teach them how to swim.

What to do instead

If you’ve got a dog who’s skittish around people and you really want to make a difference, there are a few simple tips to help you.

The first is to choose a place where you can control what people are doing and how close they will come. I’m a big fan of working right at the very back of supermarket car parks where there’s regular comings-and-goings, and starting at a quiet time. That only works, of course, if your dog is okay with cars coming and going, and with things like trolleys. Often, dogs who have limited experiences of humans have limited experiences of other things too, which can make it more complicated. Industrial estates are also great. People who are working, who are often in yards or busy doing stuff aren’t going to drop their stuff and come to see you.

The weather is also your friend if your dog is happy in the rain. Get your coat on and go out in the rain and I guarantee there’ll be fewer people and nobody will want to stop to pet your dog, especially if you’re at a distance.

I’m a fan of using natural see-through or see-over barriers other than fences. Fences can be okay, but sometimes they can cause more problems than they resolve. Roads and rivers are great. If your dog is okay with moving traffic, having a busy-ish road between you and a bunch of people can be an easy solution. For instance, one local supermarket has a busy road leading into it and a barren bit of wild, empty space opposite. We go and work on there. People don’t tend to cross that busy road and nobody wants to come into a dirty bit of unkempt green space. Another favourite is a playground just on the opposite bank of a river. We can see the children, but they’d have to get through a very wide river to come and pet us. Industrial estates, docks, ports and warehouses can also be great. Wherever people are doing a job and in a nice, secure area, you’re very able to go and do a bit of stealth training at a distance.

When I know an area really well, I’ll also stalk local hikers and ramblers groups. When you know they’ll all be meeting up at 8.30 and setting off at 9am from a particular car park or train station, you’ve got a very good timetable for when there are going to be people at a distance and you can work a good distance away from them. That’s especially true if you can put a road or river between them and you as well. I keep an eye on the ramblers’ groups and go and do a bit of work at a safe distance from their meeting venue. If your dog is happy and comfortable, you can even follow them a little way for increased exposure. In general, though, I work on the principle that five minutes is actually more than enough. Finish on a win and never be tempted to push it too far.

What I’m aiming for is for my dog to see people loads and loads of times without any single thing happening. Nobody approaches them. Nobody tries to touch them. Nobody crowds them. Nobody is ever nearer than at least 20m (more if necessary). My eyes pop when people are within a metre of loads of bare legs in shorts at a summer market, hoping their dog is socialising. Even more joyous are those bare legs in among loads of tables and dropped food morsels in a café. I once watched a lady trying to ‘socialise’ her Tervuren at a street market where the dog was grabbing people’s bags and lunging at passers-by. Well-meaning but not educative, that’s for sure.

No cafés. No bare legs. No grabby hands. No people who think dogs love them. No markets. Not for fearful adult dogs. Not even quiet cafés and quiet markets.

All these scenarios are what I call Final Boss level.

You know in conflict video games where you start fighting the easy villains? You’re cutting your teeth on those who are easy to defeat. As you go on through each level of the game, the villains get harder and harder. But you’ve got better and better. In each prior level, you’ve learned skills that help you beat the baddies on the levels that lie ahead. Final boss level is the ultimate challenge. The Goliaths to your David.

If you haven’t done all the levels before, you’re going to be chopped into tiny morsels before you’ve found out how to even wave your sword about. Game over.

But as you’ve gone through the game, you’ve got so good that the villains on level 1 are out for the count within a few swift strokes.

Markets and cafés are Final Boss level for a fearful dog.

Plan out your challenges. Start with something so easy you know your dog will ace it. 1 person for 1 second at 200m.

And as you increase your levels, keep two of the factors the same while you make the third more challenging. 2 people for 1 second at 200m. 2 people for 2 seconds at 200m.

Keep it so easy that you’d put money on your dog winning the challenge.

Will they be able to do 200 people for 30 minutes at 1 metre eventually? Maybe, if you put enough of the right work in. I accidentally ended up with one of my dogs in the middle of a Venetian carnival parade complete with cloaked plague doctors. Life definitely gets in the way of best laid plans! My dog is a bit fearful of people, but he coped. We’d done a lot of work to get to that point.

But when your dog is ready for it, medieval carnivals with bands, stilt walkers, musicians, acrobats and flamethrowers are not beyond their grasp. It’s just… they’re Final Boss level and your dog hasn’t passed level 1 yet. And, as far as dogs are concerned, markets are no different than medieval carnivals. They’re just as wild, unpredictable, foreign, bizarre, frightening and potentially dangerous. Just because we understand markets are safe doesn’t mean dogs do.

But do we start with the Venetian carnival parades complete with cloaked plague doctors?

Not if we want our dogs to cope.

Many people want to know how long it will take to go from scared to social. It’s impossible to say how long that will take, but one thing is for sure – it won’t happen in a couple of weeks.

In general, I work with dogs for 5-10 minutes every couple of days. We rest. We have time to reconsolidate our understanding of things. We play. We sleep. We keep it short and sweet and we always finish on a win. Depending on the severity of the behaviour, most dogs seem to get there within three to six months. Some are helped enormously by medication alongside that programme. If you think it will take longer than six months, even if you make sure there are no great leaps between each level, then I’d say asking the vet if there’s anything you can do to help and considering nutraceuticals if not pharmaceuticals should definitely be something to think about.

But it all depends. I don’t have time to do this with my own dogs. We do a lot of stealth and accidental training. It’s slower, but that’s fine. I don’t have a need for my dogs to cope with Mardi Gras in Rio. I don’t want to take them to cafés and I don’t ever want to walk them through a market.

It also depends on the dog and what you’re doing with them. Some dogs have such holes in their socialisation, they’ve practised behaviour for so long, they’re breeds who are especially suspicious of trainers. They’re the kind of dog I do a lot of scaffolding around and a lot of support. Other dogs, like one of mine, don’t need that same support and it can backfire, accidentally sensitising them or making the people significant. Just as an example, my boy is not car-sensitive at all. He’s lived on a main road all his life and we walk around cars all the time. They’re just not even salient things to him. They’re as insignificant as stones. But my old girl Flika was sensitive to cars. There was some quite embarrassing behaviour from a senior girl. Once, she ran off and got in a tractor to my unparalleled shame. So we did a bit of work around them. But because my boy was always with us when we did, he paired those cars up with the fact we’d stop, play games, do stuff, eat things… and soon he came to anticipate those cars when he never had before. They were always a source of delight, because treats came out, but nevertheless, there was a turn of the head and a brightening of the eyes that said, “Hey, did you see that?”

This, though, is a post of its own and for that reason I’ll be discussing what kind of training I might do with different kinds of dogs in the next post.

Because there are so many subtleties, however, it’s primordial you work with a good trainer who can help you through. If you need someone to coach you or to give you a few tips about how to help your dog master each level, a trainer can definitely help you with that! Having good intentions is amazing. With the right know-how, you can make a real difference to the quality of your dog’s life and broaden their horizons in a safe and nonthreatening way.