Most of my clients come to me with dogs who are fearful, reactive or aggressive. Some of their dogs are shy; others are confident and a little boisterous. Usually they have problem behaviours that are interfering with their own well-being or the well-being of those around them. Some have problems with their guardians or with dogs in the home; others have problems when out in the real world and faced with life at large.

Solving the problem is never the issue: there are no problems we haven’t seen before. There are no dogs who have problems that other trainers or other vets, other guardians and other dogs haven’t overcome. There is nothing new in the world of dog training. There’s nothing new in the world of dogs.

Finding a way to solve the problem that fits your specific circumstances is a little tougher. All training needs time to acquire the skills you need and time to proof them in progressively more challenging circumstances. It’s that heady mix of slowly and surely, systematically and thoughtfully.

I’ve said before that there are no magic bullets. It’s just getting the little stuff right and practising until you’ve got it. Start way easier than you could ever imagine you need to and take the tiniest, baby steps until you’ve got it sorted.

Two things happen along the way though.

The first is that you worry it’ll never be right, that your dog will never be over their problem. You worry that they’ll never be ‘better’ and that you’ll never be able to cope. You worry that you’ll never be able to do X or Y. You worry that you might not get around to being able to do A or B, let alone X and Y. This generally happens about four to six weeks in, when you’ve forgotten the great progress you’ve already made.

You might, for example, have gone from worrying on every single walk that your dog was going to bark or lunge at someone. You might have gone from regular jumping, digging or humping to practically none at all.

But you’ve been managing the situation and you’ve been carrying the burden of making sure you never put your dog in situations that were too hard for them to handle. It’s all been on you.

Don’t get me wrong – they’ll have been great. You’ll have worked on focus, on impulses, on manners. You’ll have been desensitising like mad and counterconditioning like a fool, and you’ll have got your u-turns and your hand touches down perfectly.

You should have had a month of great experiences.

But in the back of your mind is the nagging doubt as you move to more challenging situations. The nagging voice that says, ‘What if?’

What if someone appears out of nowhere? What if a guest encourages my dog to start humping again? What if the delivery guy sets foot on the property?

A lot of this comes from having kept your dog safe during the early stages of training. That burden has been on you and it’s been tough. It’s hard to think of every single thing that could go wrong and plan it so that it doesn’t. It’s an emotional strain – just as it is living with dogs who have any kind of problem.

As you move out into the real world again and you start to put your dog and your training to the test, it’s bound to be nerve-wracking. My advice is to get a trainer to help you with it. However, they can’t be with you every single trial you’re going to do over the next three months. As you place your dog in more and more challenging situations, two things will happen. The first is that you’ll begin to have faith in them. The second is you worry they’ll relapse.

Heston is my go-to demo dog these days. He had 8 years to prepare for it, where other dogs carried that burden. Ralf, Amigo, Flika… they’d all done their share of helping guardians and their dogs. Heston, not until last September.

To be frank, Heston missed out on some stuff I should have taught him and I didn’t know enough then to raise him as thoughtfully as I should have done.

Oh well.

We trained. I kept him safe. Gradually, we met the world again. Vet surgeries and human contact, he’s come to tolerate if not enjoy. We learned how to cope around livestock and we learned not to go mental if we see wild boar sunning themselves. We learned not to chase swallows and not to bark at crows.

He has been the best demo dog. Mostly because he’s made the journey my clients’ dogs are making. He’s moved from barking at joggers and shouting at hikers to impeccable behaviour around all kinds of scary, strange humans. We found ourselves once in a masked parade by accident (don’t ask!) and our former worst nightmare turned out to be a walk in the park. He’s stopped over-reacting when he sees dogs and he is an absolute dream with dogs in the vets.

This is not to brag. This is to say, ‘Have Faith’.

Those As and Bs you don’t think you can do today will be Xs and Ys that will be a breeze in the future.

You don’t only need to have faith in your training and in that slow and repetitive process. You also need to rebuild your trust. I remember the day Heston lunged at a jogger who didn’t give us a wide enough berth, despite him barking like a maniac at her. That slow and steady process rebuilt my trust in him and his trust in me.

Every walk with Lidy, every car journey, we’re building trust. I get to watch her horizons broaden, little by little.

Lidy is never going to be my demo dog. That’s fine. I never expected she would be. She will be safe and her world will gradually get bigger, month by month. We might end up with some Cs and Ds instead of As and Bs.

Having faith, rebuilding your trust and respecting hard boundaries is all part of the process.

There will be days it will fail.

I remember about 18 months into working with Lidy. She’d not had any confrontations for those 18 months. One Saturday (coincidentally the Saturday I met Flika!) all her nightmares came at once: Saturday walks in the shelter, darkness, too many people, too many visitors, a man lumbering towards her. She couldn’t cope. Nothing much happened other than me getting a new set of holes in a coat. But it felt like everything had gone.

When it fails, we tend to think all has failed. It’s all been for nothing. Everything was wrong.

What we need to do is realise two things: what we were doing was working and we’re never back at Square One.

Repeat that like a mantra every single time you have a set back. You are never back at Square One.

You are NEVER back at Square One.

All your work counts.

Those 18 months of training and trust didn’t get wiped out in one fell swoop.

No.

We re-set. We re-calibrate (thanks Frances!).

We take a deep breath and we keep doing what we were doing.

I’m now 3 years past that last incident with Lidy. I have no new holes in my jumpers. We’ve seen very muscular joggers running at us. We’ve had dogs appear from nowhere. We’ve crested the hill of what we would do when an off-lead dog was going to come bounding over to us. That bridge has been crossed and the water has well and truly passed beneath it.

We crest new hills all the time. She isn’t the dog she was. Heston is not the dog he was.

None of this is magic bullet stuff. If you read my articles, you know it’s patience, training and working with the dog at their pace. That’s all.

But it’s not just about the dog. It’s about us.

We need to remember to have faith. We need to trust in the process. We need to remember that we’re never back to Square One on the Snakes-and-Ladders board called Life. All that work counts.

So if you’re just starting out with your training plan, remember it’s as much about you as your dog. It’s about you remembering that progress isn’t linear and that life is what happens when you’re busy trying to hold it at bay.

Don’t waste your worries on whether you’ll be able to take your dog to the beach in two years’ time, if they’ll cope in kennels, if they’ll survive yet another off-lead dog running up to you, if they’ll ever stop humping Auntie Kitty.

All your training counts.

It can be hard to keep the pessimism at bay when you’re dealing with dogs with problems. There’s no good reason, though, that you can’t achieve at least some improvement before you compromise and settle on a life that suits both you and the dog.

Grit your teeth, make your training plan and keep going!

Life is all about balance. We want our dogs to be free to investigate the environment, but we don’t want them to pull us along through the mud. We want our dogs to be free to make their own behavioural choices, but we don’t want them to make choices that are injurious to them. We want to walk our dogs off lead, but we want them to come back when we call.

I’m a fairly laissez-faire guardian. I don’t micromanage my dogs and I’m too lazy to do obedience with them. Plus, I can’t see the point of drilling my dog to gaze at me as we walk as if I’m the hottest star on the planet. My cocker would do that for 5km if I had an accidental pig’s ear in my pocket, and after the first kilometre, it gets a big tedious to be honest. Plus, I’m walking them for them not for me. I would like to go eat cake and drink coffee. So if I’m out on a walk, this is my dog’s time. I don’t care for them heeling for 5km in the hopes of pork products. I want them to enjoy their walk and be dogs.

Yet the truth is that it’s never been possible for dogs to live in the human sphere without rules. If Lidy didn’t have rules (and doors, gates, fences and leads) she’d have run into the cow field opposite and either been kicked to death in her efforts to bring down a prize beef bull, or been shot by the farmer. If Heston didn’t have rules, he’d have died of starvation in the forest after spending his life chasing creatures and investigating. I don’t think it would have crossed his tiny mind to even go rooting in dustbins or eating the creatures he found even if he was very hungry.

Even street dogs and feral dogs, those who live in spaces between the human world and the wild world, are bound by rules. You don’t chase traffic, you don’t harass humans and you don’t harass other animals. Strict penalties, including the death penalty if you do.

It’s a balance for those of us who live with a dog – trying to find that magical world between a ‘full’ life for a dog and a life limited to one of sentient cuddly toy.

The truth is, though, when many of us give our dogs liberty, they don’t know how to cope with it. Just yesterday, we had a run-in with an off-lead dog who couldn’t cope with his liberty and charged up to us in a completely inappropriate way. And when we deprive them of their liberty, we’re faced with the need to teach them to walk nicely on lead, to accept being enclosed all day and to accept the frustrations of not being able to fulfill their most basic urges.

Some dogs struggle with achieving balance and when given liberty, make choices that put themselves or other individuals into harm.

One of the responsibilities, then, of entering into a relationship with a dog is to manage the balance between giving them freedom and helping them cope with restriction. Our lives with dogs are all about that balance. If we do the former, we have happy, fulfilled dogs. If we do the latter, we have dogs who cope with the frustrations that come along with living with humans.

What we need to do, then, is teach them how to cope with frustration and how to make good choices.

This is much easier with a puppy, of course. We can habituate them to small amounts of frustration, of not being able to get what they want immediately. We can inoculate them against the stresses of frustration by very, very gradually putting them in situations where patience, settling and calm are rewarded. We can teach them how to cope when alone. We can help them cope with frustrations of not being able to get to us or not being able to access play or petting or food when they want it. We teach them that all good things come to those who wait.

There are many ways you can teach dogs to wait. It doesn’t have to be painful. Most of this is basic manners: don’t mug me for your bowl; don’t jump up on me for affection; don’t charge my legs as you run out of the door; don’t paw me or nudge me because you want me to stroke you. We can teach our dogs nice ways to ask politely – I always teach my dogs that they can have as much petting as they like if they rest their chin on me. It beats being clawed to death. My dogs know that if they wait patiently, they’ll always get what they want. And I never ask them to wait patiently if they’re too young or I haven’t taught them how yet. No mugging is an absolute basic starting point:

You can also do ‘slow treat’. Once you’ve mastered ‘no mugging’, you can use slow treats to help your dog cope with their impulse to grab.

I love Deb Jones and I love this slow treat procedure. It’s been an absolute Godsend for so many other dogs. I used it with a big, grabby malinois x GSD who was reactive to other dogs. ‘Slow treats’ was his favourite thing to do with me other than getting aggressive with on-lead dogs around him. Some dogs – particularly the confident ones I find – like this focus game and it helps build up that concept of good things coming to those who wait. Shy dogs find it tougher, so you can start at the elbow. It’s a really good game as a prerequisite to ‘watch’.

Some trainers don’t like teaching dogs to watch or asking them to check in with us, but if you see something they’ve not seen yet that would end in a battle, if your aim is distraction, it can be a useful tool. I used it on Thursday when a deer stood stock still in the path ahead of us for a good couple of minutes trying to decide if we were a threat. I prefer nose down to the ground for real distraction, and many dogs find it hard to keep visual focus for a long time, but it’s a useful tool that has its place. Lidy really struggled with this game at first. No surprises there. The big surprise was that in starting it, lots of her other impulsive behaviours lessened without teaching. Lidy likes leaping on things in bushes. Leaping on things in bushes seemed to be massively reduced through playing the ‘slow treats’ game, and I often use it to calm her if she gets a little manic. Not being impulsive is a learned skill: dogs aren’t born with it. That’s especially true for certain breeds hardwired for dopamine fixes.

This is another Deb Jones one, and most of you will be already doing things like waiting for your dog to chill out before going to their bowl. Don’t overlook this skill though: it’s important for what comes later.

So you’ve done ‘no mugging’, you’ve done ‘slow treats’, you’ve done ‘zen bowl’… you can then start ‘chuck the cheese’ for dogs who are very chase-oriented. Tony Cruse’s activity is great to build up from the slower activities you’ve already done. You don’t need to do with with a collar hold – you can also put a bit of pressure on their chest.

Deb Jones also teaches ‘Get it!’, as do I.

You might overlook the importance of ‘Get it!’

Jane Ardern of Waggawuffins and Smart Dog makes the very valid point that we don’t want our dogs to get most things in the universe. If we teach ‘Leave it!’ on its own, then all we’re doing is setting ourselves up for a lifetime of ‘Leave it…. Leave it…. Leave it… Leave it….’

Isn’t it better, she says, if we teach ‘Get it!’

Honestly, I think dogs need both. When you understand ‘Get it!’ and ‘Leave it!’ then you have parameters… what’s out of bounds and what’s allowed. Along with ‘Wait!’, you’re teaching your dog what to get, what to leave and what to leave for a little while if they’ve got impulse control. I’d be remiss if I didn’t put Susan Garrett’s It’s Yer Choice in here.

You can, of course, make it as complex as you wish then. Instead of asking for their name or a sit, you can ask for any other behaviour. If you want to practise heeling around a pile of biscuits or toys, that’s your choice. Fill the space between the exciting thing going on the floor and you saying ‘Get it!’ with whatever your dog can manage. You can shape progressively more challenging behaviours and longer periods between the placement and the ‘Get it!’ You can clearly play this with toys as well.

Leslie McDevitt uses a flirt pole with her dogs in Pattern Games, and Kristen Crestejo uses one here too.

Of course, many of these things are seen as typically obedience-based or manners-based. But for dogs who do not make good choices under pressure, like Lidy, then learning to stop and voluntarily control your behaviour is a much higher-order brain skill. I find that with a lot of these impulse control games, the dogs are learning to space out what they want to do with actually doing it so that you can add direction or so that they can make better choices. It’s a core element of gundog training and works heavily on the Premack Principle. Premack basically pairs up a behaviour the dog would do less with one they would do more of. Make the favoured behaviour a consequence of the less favoured behaviour. Sit, and you get to run. Wait, and you get to chase.

Once your dog has control over themselves and they’re coping better with frustration, you can then add in something I refer to as ‘Mother, May I?’

When I was a small thing, I did a lot of those activities that get your parents some time alone. We also spent an inordinate amount of time out on the street playing with everyone else in the neighbourhood to the extent that I’m surprised I’m not entirely feral.

One of the games we played in Brownies and out on the street was one called ‘Mother, May I?’

Basically, one person plays Mother. They stand about 10 or 20 metres away from the rest of the kids. The aim is to get to Mother. You think of a way to get closer to her, like hopping, and say, ‘Mother, May I take five hops forward?’

Mother may say yes. She may say no. If you don’t ask nicely (Mother, May I?) you go back to the beginning.

Basically, it’s a permission game. Ask nicely. I may say yes, I may say no.

This is another really easy one to do with dogs.

Position a lot of interesting items around your garden when your dog is not present, or use an empty field or pathway. Make sure there is plenty of space between the items, and include stinky things as well as food. Put your dog on a lead, preferably using a long line where you’ve given the dog 2m or so of the 10. If they try to pull forward, stop dead. Your dog may then choose to do something else, like come back. In that case, you can let the lead out and say your marker word like ‘Get it!’. Whatever your dog offers may be the basis of a really nice ‘Mother, May I?’ request. Some dogs look back. That’s fine. You can use ‘Get it!’ if you want to shape and build that behaviour. Some dogs come back. That’s fine too. Some dogs slack off. Lidy sits. Ideally, what you want is some engagement with you. You’re the one with the lead. I’ve been shaping eye contact from Lidy. Sitting for permission to go chase cows doesn’t cut it for me.

At first, you can navigate the course with ‘Get it!’ cues. Then you can add in ‘Leave it!’ cues (you don’t get to get it at all) and ‘Wait!’ cues (you can have it in a second).

What you have are parameters and a dog who knows to ask if they can go forward and that lunging does not work. Technically, you’re replacing lunging with a ‘Mother May I?’

Dogs who have frustration issues will find this insanely hard. That’s why you absolutely have to start with the simple stuff like ‘no mugging’ and to make sure they’re really good at waiting and leaving items. You can also add in other cues like ‘Go Sniff’.

Using these isn’t a matter of a robotic military drill on a walk…

‘Heel… Leave it… Heel… Wait… Heel… Get it… Heel… Go sniff…’

You’re not a helicopter parent micromanaging their every behaviour.

What happens though is impulsivity slacks off. It is not rewarded in any of these games. Patience is rewarded. Waiting is rewarded. Checking in is rewarded.

The other day, a bird flew out of a hedge right near Lidy’s head. Did she leap on it? No. Did I have to say ‘Leave it!’. No. She moved forward as if to leap on it … and then she stopped. She didn’t sit and look at me as if I am a cruel beast for not letting her try to chomp birds. She just went back to what she was doing. The bird didn’t set off her primitive ‘leap on it now!’ brain circuitry. Well, it did a little. Then her fully exercised self-control and thought muscle kicked in. No point chasing a bird who has gone. The moment was over.

What you find with impulse control activities is that your dog is building up some space between thinking and action in order for training to kick in. They’re also learning to defer to you if they don’t make good decisions. For those of us trying to break superstitious behaviours where the dog impulsively barks or lunges and we can’t make headway because we can’t break the link between the thing appearing and our dog lunging, impulse control often gives us the wiggle room. This is so important for dogs who are impulsively aggressive or reactive. The big, slow neocortex can kick in and take over with its ability to rationalise and to control voluntary movements, rather than the zippy limbic system and reptilian bits of the brain making impulsive decisions first.

If you want to move from impulsive actions to a zen calm, teaching your dog about parameters is essential.

Dog Training Secrets #1: there are no magic bullets.

You want to make money? Market a product for dogs that claims to solve problems instantly. By the time you get caught out, you’ll have made your money and be sitting at a bar surrounded by palm trees somewhere much warmer and less muddy than you are now. Better still, design five products and sell them a couple of years apart from each other. Pay a world-class marketing team and your job is done. Sit back and watch the profits roll in. Warning: this is not a job for you if you are at all afflicted by a conscience or any sense of shame.

It seems that everyone on social media these days is after the magic bullet, the panacea, the cure-all, for their dogs’ behaviour.

The Quick Fix is everything.

You’d have thought we’d be wise to snake-oil salesmen by now, but it seems Barnum was right when he said there’s a sucker born every minute – if he said it at all. And we all know fools and their money are soon parted.

Sometimes, we’ve sat back and watched our dog’s problems develop over months if not years. We’ve let them grow and grow. Perhaps we tried to ignore them and that made things worse. Those problems fester and metastasize. Sometimes, that’s just because life got in the way. Jobs got busy. Kids took priority. Pandemics ran rampant. One day, we wake up and we find that the itty bitty problem we had months ago is now a colossal beast and our dog’s behaviour is seriously impacting everyone else’s well-being, including their own.

Most of my calls and contacts come from people who can’t live with problems any more. Maybe they thought the problem would work its way out eventually. Rex would stop jumping up on guests, surely, when arthritis set in? Rover would stop barking like mental at the neighbours playing football, surely, by the time deafness and blindness took over? Lacey would stop biting people if we took her to a café, surely, by the time all her teeth fall out?

The trouble is that this is not what happens. Dogs don’t grow out of problems. They grow into them. They get better at the behaviour. They can do it for longer. They specialise. They do it in ways that get results more quickly.

For whatever reason, the behaviour works. Like an ugly and unwanted weed, it flourishes. It sends down roots that make it hard to unseat. It sends out shoots. It blossoms. It sets seed and raises a family. By the time clients get in touch with trainers, what they often present us with is an enormous triffid of a behaviour that is swallowing up all their energy.

What the snake-oil salesmen promise is a scorched earth approach to those problematic behavioural weeds. Burn it. Zap it. Concrete on top of it.

The trouble is that, like DDT, some of these promises are dangerous. Some of them destroy everything else too. You know… the important stuff like trust and friendship, choice and agency. Others don’t work. The fields around me are lurid orange right now and smell like burning rubber. I wouldn’t mind, but whatever this vile stuff is designed to kill seems to be effective for about five weeks. That’s what a lot of these Quick Fixes you can buy from any number of companies do. They work for a while and then the problems come back with a vengeance. Not only that, you’re left with a nagging feeling that what you’re doing isn’t good or right, but if the company says lurid orange rubber-smelling herbicide is what works, they must know?

And sometimes, the behaviour is resistant to those promised cures to all problems. Sure, it might work for a short while, only to find new ways to spread, to mutate, to find a way to flourish.

Anything in the dog world that promises you instant results is a bit like all those other ‘instant’ products we fall for, so reliably and so credulously. Great abs in 8 minutes a day. Five kilos weight loss in a month. Quick house sales. Immediate happiness. A better job in two weeks. If the aim is improvement, someone somewhere is making a profit out of the gullible fools who want instant success. You buy in. It fails. You leave 0 stars on their feedback and the company bosses cry into their margaritas in Tobago.

The truth is that we want a magic bullet. We want jumping up to stop immediately. We want our dog to instantly stop barking at the post van. We want our dog to stop pulling on the lead right this very minute and never pull again.

The reality is that there are no magic bullets. Hard work, repetition, creating good habits, building foundations, they all take time.

After all, the problem didn’t usually happen overnight. It’s not going to disappear overnight either.

So what can we do, other than give in?

In her book Plenty in Life is Free, Kathy Sdao talks about something she calls SMART x 50.

SMART simply means, see, mark and reward training. In other words, every time you see the behaviour you want instead, mark it (say ‘good!’ or ‘yes!’ or use a clicker) and reward.

She tells us to reward our dog fifty times every day for doing something useful or cute. If you have heard Kathy speak, you’ll know right away that’s her speaking. I’d settle for rewarding them for anything they’re doing better. Remember: rewards can be anything the dog finds valuable at that moment in time. That could be food, toys, praise (if your dog finds it rewarding at that moment) petting (likewise) or even functional rewards like being able to move forward on a walk. You are not advised to use fifty sirloin steaks. But small cubes would be just marvellous.

I do a lot of my own dog training this way. I don’t even know what they’ll do well that day. I’m just ready to mark and reward it when I see it.

Mostly, my dogs have it nailed good behaviour in the home, car and the garden. They stop barking when I ask and bark hardly at all any more. They’re patient and calm. They don’t stress when I’m getting food out. If I say “tea time!” they trot into the kitchen and they hang about quietly and unobtrusively when I’m doing my bit. They travel perfectly. They sit waiting for me if I need to nip into a shop. They’re happy to be groomed and have nails trimmed and take all the tablets I throw at them. I still reward them for ignoring the various comings and goings of my neighbour and his joyfully barky pointer. They are the least amount of effort of any dog ever born and I get to be the laziest dog trainer that was ever born.

Walks are different. Heston likes chasing stuff and he also has previous where it comes to barking at joggers, hikers or cyclists. He’s still prone to pull from time to time towards powerful smells. Lidy seems to divide things into ‘Can I kill it?’ and ‘Can I eat it?’. I’m not massively sure it’s a division as such. There seems to be a lot of crossover. But when my little firestarter first arrived after three years in the shelter, she had a lot of previous. If it moved, it needed to be dealt with. Her pulling was shocking. She walked like a small velociraptor on a lead randomly pouncing on things in bushes.

For a year, I walked her by herself. Frankly, she was pretty manageable as long as nothing surprising happened like we saw an unpredictable crow or a random cat. Then, when my old girl died, Lidy and Heston got walked together.

That first walk in new territory with the two of them terrified me. I forgot how sensitive Lidy is to novel stimuli and environments and how long she takes to acclimitise. I joke about her behaviour but in all seriousness, there are moments where I know that it’s taking everything I’ve ever learned to give her some quality of life without jeopardising the lives of other animals or risking injury to any humans she comes across. She pulled constantly for 4km. Less velociraptor and more Tyrannosaurus Rex. If we’d have come across anybody or anything, I ran the risk of losing control of her completely.

Behaviour like this doesn’t have a magic pill to cure it. I could have thrown everything that’s ever been claimed as a magic pill at her arousal levels and it still wouldn’t have been enough.

So where do you start, when it’s all wrong?

It reminded me of that saying: ‘how do you eat an elephant?’

‘One mouthful at a time.’

How do you solve what seems to be an insurmountable problem?

One small step at a time.

Kathy Sdao’s SMART x 50 is how we’ve been doing it.

If she pulled less, ‘good!’ and treat.

If she gave me eye contact, ‘good!’ and treat.

If she did a u-turn when I asked, ‘good!’ and treat.

We did other stuff too. I don’t want to make it sound as simple as all that.

But most dogs are not as complicated as all that.

And simply through that ‘one mouthful at a time’ approach, I think I’ve managed to at least eat a good bit of that elephant.

There are other tips too. Setting your dog up for success where they can do little but succeed is one of those things. Eliminating as much of the unpredictable while you embed new behaviours is another. Cherry picking the very best of what the very best trainers have to offer is another. We have a bank of five core skills that we practise every day.

This weekend was tough. Saturday was miserable. There were hunters literally everywhere and by the time I found a sensible place to walk without getting shot at in mistake for a boar, we’d been in the car for almost thirty minutes. Between the floods and the hunters, we’re a bit stuck. We got out. We played a few games. I used up some of those 50 rewards simply by playing some games and helping everyone chill out (including me).

And then… a muscular guy clad entirely in black lycra came running up to us. Not jogging. Like a serious, hardened runner. In terms of PREDATOR level of threat, this is surpassed only by a team of muscular guys clad entirely in black lycra running at you. We got out the way, we played some more games, I watched Lidy. Every time she watched him without anything more worrisome than a stare, I marked it and fed her from my hand at my side. If she went back to watching him, I said ‘yes’ and gave her her treat. Watching was fine. Lunging and leaping and grabbing and flopping about like a great white shark on a fishing line are not fine. That would have been my failure to work at a safe distance. We had watching and deciding and marking and rewarding. All was well.

Needless to say, a lot of my rewards got used up on that jogger. And that was fine.

As if this weekend couldn’t have been more challenging, yesterday, we saw two deer leap across the road. To be fair, they participated in my set-up perfectly. They were just far enough away to keep her under threshold and just in view for a lovely, narrow time so I could reward copiously without having to deal with watching them for 5 whole minutes.

This time, we played ‘get it!’ and ‘catch!’. The first allows her to visually track a moving treat. This is kind of like playing a cheap fair shooting game compared to going after big game, if that’s what floats your boat. No, it’s not the same. But it’s better than no shooting at all. I’m pretty sure Lidy would be one of those individuals posing proudly with some giraffe she’d killed. Here I am asking her to have a go at a fairground shooting gallery. ‘Get it!’ is the only way at that moment that she’ll get to chase and catch anything.

The second, ‘catch!’ allows ‘grab-bite’ behaviours on a moving target. Again, not in the same league but at least it’s catering to the same bits of her reward system and answering those primitive needs.

So it’s not just about SMART x 50.

It’s about how and when and where you use those rewards. You can use them to encourage focus by getting the dog to come back to you for the food or toy. You can use them to meet primal needs of being a dog, namely chasing and grabbing stuff for Miss Maligator 2015. You can use them to disrupt visual locking and fixing on a target (which is what I did) or you can use them to disrupt olfactory locking and fixing on a target. The latter is what I do with Heston when he’s nose-down-tail-up in a scent. What do I want? To disrupt the lock and fix on the scent. Throwing him a treat to find in the grass can do that, and caters to his olfactory needs. Or disrupting and rewarding from my hand is a good way if his tracking is in danger of pulling me into a bush.

By rewarding the behaviours we want to see little by little, day by day, we get so see unwanted behaviours die out. We’re starving those weeds of anything nourishing. No, it doesn’t happen overnight. No, it’s not a magic bullet.

Well, not one that works in 24 hours.

Over 12 weeks, sure.

Now we’re 12 weeks into Lidy’s SMART x 50 outdoor training and I’ve bags more focus and less arousal. She listens more and recalls more. She pulls much less, sometimes going several hundred metres without a tight lead, and she almost never lunges. Because her arousal levels are lower, she’s less predatory. She’s less likely to pounce on birds in the bushes, or mice in the hedgerows. She’s stopped alerting on distant cars and vans. Is she ready for the next steps? Sure.

The question then arises about where we stop. It’s not my aim that Lidy becomes super docile and passive, that she copes with Venetian costume parades and Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Chasing the impossible would be an exercise in frustration and futility. I just want to know we can go for walks and she will cope. Next up is livestock, because they’re much more of a challenge for us and our walks are severely limited because she seems pretty willing to show me you can eat a full cow in one sitting despite my telling her it’s one mouthful at a time.

Variety is not just the spice of life. Variety in behaviour gives us something we can capture and nurture. But I can’t do that if I find myself treatless and unprepared. The worst behaviours are those that never vary. But as Lidy demonstrates, even if you can pull at one constant pressure for 4km, there’s still hope. The thing is, it’s never one constant pressure, not really. Where we have variety, we have the potential to coax evolution. And if we can do that, we might find that our weeds turn out to be flowers after all. Capture that variety when it’s at its best, and you might find that Death By A Thousand Cuts is more effective at killing off problem behaviours than some Magic Bullet anyway.

You don’t have to have a specific goal in mind. My lovely, perfect Mr Heston is lovely and perfect. I’m just rewarding him for the lovely stuff he does. With Lidy, I dd have a specific goal in mind. I wanted her to learn to walk, not trot (and heaven forbid anything faster!) on lead. I wanted her to check in with me unprompted. So every time she walked a couple of paces on a slack lead, I said ‘good!’ and gave her a treat. Every time she checked in, I said ‘good!’ and we moved forward to sniff the bushes. Now, walking is what we do, and checking in if we want to go sniff is also what we do.

So tomorrow morning, pick up your treat bag and count out your treats for the day. Every time you catch your dog doing something you like, mark it and reward it. What gets rewarded gets repeated. Very soon, those great behaviours will be default behaviours because it’s ‘just’ what we do now.

Run interference (phrase):
American football: move in such a way as to cause interference
Informal: intervene on someone’s behalf, typically so as to protect them from distraction or annoyance.

One of the toughest stages of training can be proofing, where you put your training to the test. You know the score: you’ve done the groundwork and the drills. You know it’s important to gradually reintroduce your dog to the situation that caused trouble in carefully planned and managed steps.

And then… Life gets in the way.

Let’s take some really common problem behaviours and look at where they can run into teething troubles.

1. You’ve been working with your dog to stop them barking at people who arrive at the property.

2. You’ve been working with your dog to stop them jumping up on guests or on people out on walks.

3. You’ve been working really hard on your dog’s recall.

4. You’ve been working to stop your dog chasing _______________ (fill in the blank!).

5. You’ve been working on loose leash walking skills with your 50kg dog who you’ve switched to a harness after years of trying to control him with prong collars and shock collars, but you’re not confident enough yet to take him out in places he might lunge.

6. You’ve been working hard to help your dog cope in the vet surgery but they still get a bit overwhelmed by the noise and the other animals.

7. You’ve been working with your reactive dog to stop them lunging and barking at other dogs.

8. You’re rehabilitating a dog with serious aggression issues.

We can all find our best laid plans going massively astray the first time something goes wrong and our dog resorts to their previous problem behaviour.

You know how it goes. You’ve spent 6 weeks teaching them a new behaviour, controlling and managing the situation so they don’t get to practise their old behaviour. You think you’ve got it cracked when BAM, right out of the blue, your worst nightmare rears its ugly head and your dog goes right back to jumping, barking, chasing, ignoring you, pulling on the lea, lunging or fence fighting.

What you need is someone to run interference for you! Someone to take out all the people who threaten to derail you. Someone who can block any distractions and stop them so that you can get on with what you’re doing.

None of you are old enough to remember the days when self-propelling machines needed men with flags to walk in front of you, I’m sure. You have probably heard of these apocryphal tales, however. What you need is a red-flag-waving person to help you out.

Having a team-mate to run interference when you’re training your dog can be so helpful. This is someone who’s read the game plan and knows your aims. They know how you intend to carry it out. They know your plays and your purpose. They know you’re trying to stop your whirling dervish pointer from headbutting everyone they see when they’re running off lead. They know you’re trying to turn your whistle training into rock solid recall. And this is as true for serious misdemeanors as it is for the things most of us just try to cope with: serious fearfulness, reactivity or aggression when out in public.

The purpose of this team-mate on the pitch is to clear your path and help manage the environment so you can reach your goal. They’re going to work with you in the same way in real life too. They’re going to stop any potential obstacle derailing your progress so that you can reach your dream goal, be that the dog who keeps all four feet on the ground or the dog who can cope with off-lead dogs romping around without feeling the need to tear their face off.

Let’s take each scenario and see how a team player might help you out.

The alert barker

You may well be implementing the plan from the previous post and your dog may be coping admirably with things that pass by or make noise outside the house, be they tractors, pedestrians or neighbourhood dogs. But what happens when those threats stop outside and ring the bell? Under normal circumstances for planned visitors you may well be controlling visitors by putting the dog in another room with a few food toys. What happens though when some random Tuesday lunchtime, a guy stops to ask if you want your roof tiles cleaning or your paving re-laying? If you’ve not yet moved on to pairing up the doorbell or a knock with the good stuff, having someone who can step in and keep playing games with the dog while you go out and deal with the uninvited guest is a good way to deal with it. Either you send them out to deal with the unwelcome and unplanned arrival while you play games, or you go out while they play games, if they know what you’ve been doing. You can keep your dogs at a distance and they can deal with what needs dealing with.

Use your team mate to ring the bell and knock at the door when your dog’s got used to the ‘thank you – retreat – treat’ protocol from last week. A few trials a day and you’ll have a dog who lets you know someone’s at the door, but who stops barking when you ask.

And if you’re home alone or live alone? A Manners Minder or automatic treat dispenser that you’ve introduced your dog to well before the event can be set to a variable rate of spitting treats out. You can go out and your dog can keep getting paid while you’re not there.

Got more than one dog and suspect a war would break out? Separate them with gates and give them all something to keep them busy while you go out to deal with the inconsiderate sod. And then ask your mates to drop around at scheduled times to play knock-a-door-run so that you can practise ‘thank you – retreat – treat’ with your dogs in carefully planned trials so that when a carpet salesman finally drops round, you’ll be all ready for them.

The over-enthusiastic welcome committee

For dogs who jump up in the house, having a team mate who can welcome guests in while you keep control of the dog to stop them practising is really useful in those early days. Your team mate should be able to explain to your guests that they’re not to give the dog any attention for jumping, but if the dog does a shoulder touch, a hand touch or a high five, then they can say ‘hi!’

While you make sure your dog is able to cope with the drama of new people, your team mate can make sure the new people are able to cope with the excitement of seeing a dog. A spare pair of eyes to stop your guests saying ‘oh good boy! hi!’ and accidentally reinforcing the jumping up won’t go amiss. I find that where things go awry, it’s when we’re overwhelmed, trying to look after our own dog, family and home and we’re not able to adequately manage all the complex pieces. Having someone who can take the dog to another room, play with them a little while you sort everything out and then bring the dog out when energies are lower is another way a team mate can really help you out.

And if you’ve no-one to run interference? Put the dog away with treats until energies have calmed down so that you don’t risk your guests inadvertently reinforcing your dog for jumping all over them.

Proofing your recall

You know the drill. You’ve worked on recall in your home, in the garden, in empty supermarket car parks, in closed fields and with a dropped long lead on quiet, clear walks. You’re gearing yourself up for the real tests when you take your dog to your favourite place, they race off before you and by the time you get round the corner, they’re frolicking with harassing a flock of sheep. Having someone who can go out five minutes before you on your exact walk and then send you a message with an all-clear is really helpful. It also gives you time to put your dog back on the lead should something happen.

Last week, I was working with a young gun-dog who has been charging up to people on walks and had knocked one of them over by jumping all over them. If there had just been someone running interference beforehand who could have been five minutes ahead and said ‘there’s people coming!’, the guardian could have put the dog on the lead way before the dog saw the wildly exciting new friends that he just had to jump on. The trouble was that the dog’s recall was great in most circumstances, but as soon as he saw anyone out on a walk, his recall failed completely. A team mate would definitely help with control and management here.

The diehard chaser

Most of the pedigree and mix-breed dogs in Western countries have been bred to chase to some degree, with the exception of a handful of lapdogs and livestock guardian breeds. From sight and scent hounds to gundogs, cattle dogs, herding dogs to terriers and bull terriers, chase behaviours have been selected for over many generations. This can be really tough if you’re proofing a recall or even if you’re walking a large dog on a lead. I still remember the time four dogs dragged me on my arse through a cowfield…

Having someone to go on ahead and let you know if there are deer, boar, livestock, ducks or wild-roaming joggers, hunters or cyclists can be a great way to make sure you’re not exposed to any unpleasant surprises and trying to live down a ‘Fenton!’ moment while your labrador rampages through the park chasing deer and heavily reinforcing themselves in the process.

The partially reformed lunger

Maybe you read my post about retractable leads a few weeks back and you’ve decided harnesses are the way forward. You’ve got yourself a great new lead, a solid harness and you’re weaning yourself off using a choke, shock or prong collar because you know it’s bad for your dog and it’s probably not even controlling them very much any more if they’re dyed-in-the-wool pullers. Maybe you weigh 60kg and you’re walking a dog who’s only just a little less than you. Perhaps you’ve got two smaller dogs who add up to some hefty tension.

Having a team mate to walk with you is ideal. Pulling can be socially contagious – it can be a bit of a competition to be the husky at the front. And it can be hard to walk two or more dogs and do some real training with both of them. It’s almost as bad if you’ve got a great dog who knows the ropes and one who needs a bit of work. It’s nigh on impossible to train two or more dogs simultaneously so if you need some one-to-one time, a friend is always welcome.

Maybe you’ve done loads of work and they’re almost perfect except they lose their mind on one tiny but essential part of the walk… having a friend to help with another lead is so useful. I know there have been times at the shelter where we’ve got a dog who’s mostly great but who struggles to get out of the shelter grounds because it’s stressful. If you’re trying to manage 45kg of German Shepherd, having a friend to help you on the tough bit means you can put down all your aversive tools which weren’t working anyway. Sometimes, it’s just because it’s muddy and slippy that you need a helping hand. It might only be for 100m or so, but if that means you can get rid of the heavy weaponry, then it’s well worth it.

The not-quite-ready-for-the-vets dog

Maybe you’ve got a dog who you’ve been working so hard to desensitise to the vets, but that heady combination of other dogs, cats, smells, vets, chemicals, barking, squealing, grabby hands and long waits in tiny waiting rooms is likely to set them back six months in progress, having a team mate to run interference is just the ticket. You can stay in the car and do nice stuff with the dog. They can be your substitute in the surgery until your time is ready, and then can act as a great team mate running interference would do – keep their eye out for the old lady who really doesn’t have a good grip on her poodle – avert the very large mastiff-with-attitude standing in the corner and make sure you can get in and out without drama. Not only that, they can help you in the surgery so you can talk to the vet, help manipulate the dog and keep running counter-conditioning while you get the vital information and have grown-up conversations. Perhaps your vets take the dog from you… the same thing is true. Having a friend to run interference can be a dream way of getting into the surgery without subjecting your dog to the miscreants hanging around in there. Your team mate is your wing-person, helping you navigate the complex obstacle course with a cool head. By the end, all they might be doing is humming Mission Impossible music with your dog who had no idea what the bodyguard was for, but if it stops you having a bad experience in a delicate and fragile stage of your progress, all well and good.

The almost-reformed reactive rover

So you’ve been working through a programme to help your dog cope with reactivity. You’re just about ready to go and spend your first five minutes proofing it in the toughest conditions: outside the dog park or at the cani-cross rendezvous site. It’s Murphy’s law that someone won’t have control of their overly-social Donald Trump of a dog who races over to subject your girl to a bit of light humping and who sets you back to square one in your training. A team mate can either take your dog and walk away while you occupy the offender, or you can walk off leaving them to do the same. Given that you will need to practise in some challenging conditions before you are truly able to say your dog can cope, knowing you can do so without derailing everything you’ve done is a true gift.

Truly effective rehabilitation

When you’re working with a dog who has bitten a member of the public or another dog, even if it was only a nip or a grab, it can be nerve-wracking to take them out in public. So what are you supposed to do? Keep them in forever? One of the hardest things to do is build up really positive experiences and make sure you’re keeping people and their animals safe. A team mate who goes out before you, runs interference with stray dogs and wandering humans, who acts as your spotter and your guide, who can help you work through the awkward bits, well, they’re invaluable. Of course, you may have had to use them as a stooge too at the beginning, so that your dog gets used to them. But if your dog is such a risk that they’d bite any person they see, then you definitely, definitely will need some friends who can act as a stooge so that you can control what they do, how they move and where they go. It’s no use trying to rehab your dog using unsuspecting members of the public. That’s a huge liability.

You may, of course, have partners, parents, adult children, neighbours or friends who are willing to help out. If not, don’t worry. There’s an army of professionals who can help you, from dog walkers and trainers to behaviour consultants. I can’t tell you how useful it is to pay a dog walker a tenner to let you know their schedule so you can follow them around for half an hour every day and desensitise your dog in a low risk situation. There are many professionals who might help out if you bung them a bit of cash. Maybe you know exactly what you need to do. Maybe you’ve been working with a great behaviour consultant and you just need some people to practise on who don’t charge quite so much.

In any case, find yourself a team mate. They won’t just inspire you and challenge you, but they’ll also enable you to bridge the gap between ‘nearly!’ and ‘touchdown!’