Many of my clients have struggled in the past with training their fearful dog. Whether your dog is nervous on walks or whether they’re reactive, it can feel like you’re getting nowhere.

Part of the problem is that unless we deal with the emotions underpinning the behaviour, our training isn’t going to make much headway. It’s vital that we help our dogs feel better about the world in which they find themselves.

If you don’t, all you’re doing is trying to put training on the most shaky of foundations. You can read why here.

Essentially, if your dog doesn’t feel safe, the only thing that matters to them is safety. Food doesn’t matter. You don’t matter. Asking them to sit and face their fears doesn’t even register. If your dog feels like they can’t cope in the outside world, then nothing you can do will even register. It’s every dog for themselves.

And there you are, with your biscuits, hoping that teaching them to sit will make the slightest difference.

Sorry to break it to you, but you’re going to need a bit more than that.

Training can have miraculous results with fearful, anxious or nervous dogs. I wholeheartedly endorse Leslie McDevitt’s Pattern Games that you can find in Control Unleashed and I also thoroughly encourage you to follow Sarah Stremming of Cog Dog Radio. Both women are amazing trainers who use training to help dogs cope in the world in which they find themselves.

These methods work by creating a structure or ritual. That seems to work by predictability and routine. They seem to reassure the dog that, sure, we’re in a new environment… sure, scary things may be going on around us… but you and I, we have our thing. Having moved around madly these last four months, my dogs know that, as soon as the bed goes down, as soon as the blankets go down, this is where we are. This is home.

Wherever we do our routines, that’s our home. That kind of thing.

Many dog trainers can try to implement these strategies with fearful or nervous dogs with little success, however.

Partly, for me, that’s based on an over-reliance on training as the only way to make a difference to a dog. Dog trainers do what they know, and they feel less comfortable about other procedures, just as I would feel uncomfortable teaching all the bits and pieces for a Kennel Club award. I mean, I can, but I wouldn’t be as efficient.

How do we deal with the dog’s underlying emotions?

Here are ten ways that you can improve your dog’s progress and help them feel happier in the world.

#1 Medication or supplements

The first is to consider medication. While you may very well find some success with supplements and natural remedies, if you’ve got a dog who spends most of the day in a state of anxiety and then is hypervigilant outdoors, to the point that they won’t even pee outside, then this is a welfare issue, not a training issue. You may find some success with supplements, and certainly I’ve known dogs for whom they were effective, but if your dog is spending 16 hours a day in a state of nervous tension, trying to train them is more than likely to be completely inefficient.

If you are going to consult your vet, make sure you carefully document your dog’s behaviour. It can be very difficult for vets to see just how miserable your dog is. Make a diary, make videos and make sure you describe your dog’s behaviour objectively so that the vet can make the best decision.

#2 Lower anxiety in the home

If your dog is spending all hours of the day on high alert, they won’t be sleeping or resting properly. One of the easiest things to do is to reduce alert behaviours to noise outside the home and to add a little enrichment. I highly recommend Ali Bender and Emily Strong’s book Canine Enrichment for the Real World instead of feeding from bowls or forcing your dog to go out on walks that they clearly find distressing. Enrichment has other benefits: it focuses the dog’s attention on the good stuff and helps them block out the bad, even just for a little while.

If you’re aiming to add even just ten extra minutes a day, it can make a real difference. Anyone who suffers with anxiety will tell you that being able to immerse yourself in something – while it doesn’t treat the problem – as long as the ‘something’ doesn’t induce anxiety itself – can really help to give you a break from it. I always remember one time when I’d left my dogs with my dad. One of my dogs was newly epileptic. He was occasionally disoriented and I hadn’t heard from my dad all morning. I was in full on panic mode. However, I’d got a conference to deliver and that at least occupied me. By the time I’d delivered it, my dad had responded to my 53 messages and everything was fine. If I’d not been distracted by delivering a conference, I think I’d have driven 2000 miles back home just to check on them all. Doing stuff gives us a break from anxiety.

If your dog is alert and alarm barking all the time, you can also put this simple protocol into place.

#3 Make sure your dog is safe

Fearful dogs need to be safe. You can’t make them feel safe if they aren’t actually safe. Safety’s not some kind of illusion.

The first thing this means is stopping putting them in situations they can’t cope with, at least for a little while as you work with a trainer or behaviourist.

Because we often keep fearful dogs on the lead, it can run the risk that they don’t have a choice in where they go or what they do. If they weren’t on lead, they’d probably vote with their feet and go home. Having dogs in a crate or on a lead means they can’t escape from situations if they want to. As a result, it’s really important that we’re mindful of the fact our dogs can’t choose and therefore, we must choose venues and times for our walks that feel safer to our dogs. It’s all very well us thinking that our walks are safe, but it’s not our feelings that count.

This also means making sure your dog IS safe in the home, in the garden and on walks. Flat leads and comfortable harnesses are an absolute must.

#4 Make eating outside the home a habit

Many people assume that their dogs won’t eat outside because they’re in a panic or they’re not interested in food. Please check out this post and make sure you’re not just failing to teach your dog to eat in a variety of different places.

Since counterconditioning is very often done through pairing scary stuff with food, you do need a dog who’ll accept food outside the home. Eating is a habit. It’s a behaviour like anything else. When I think of how afraid Lidy is of strange people and being handled, or being at the vets and I know that she was taking paté from the vet, then I know that there is literally nowhere we can’t do a little work on her emotions.

If your dog won’t eat outside the home, however, it may not simply be that your dog is too afraid to eat (in which case, I’d say your dog was a really good candidate for #1 medication) but that your dog just doesn’t eat out of context. It’s a skill we need to practise, so rule out the common problems.

#5 Stop asking people to feed your dog

You can train very effectively without people giving food to your dog. Food is a positive thing. Scary people are a negative thing. When we give food to people to distribute to our fearful dogs in the hopes of teaching them that people are not so scary, it can really backfire. Your dog ends up bribed into the space of the scary human and when the food runs out, they’re often left in a state of ambivalence and ambiguity.

Keep the food yourself and use a training programme to help your dog that doesn’t involve this:

#6 Keep sessions short

Most of my clients have already tried to change their dog’s emotional state before they get to me. Most of them have tried to habituate their dog to the scary stuff by gently exposing them to the world outside.

Where I find most surprise from clients is that our first session might literally be 5-6 minutes long and only have 5-6 exposures to the scary stuff.

Pavlovian conditioning (pairing the scary stuff up with food) shouldn’t take hundreds of exposures for the dog to learn to associate the food with the scary stuff. If you follow #7 to #9 properly, the dog should make the association really quickly.

I often hear a lot of apologists for poor methodology from the dog training community. ‘Oh counterconditioning won’t work for me!’ they say, using cities or frequency of triggers as a reason.

I make no apologies for saying that I’ve counterconditioned dogs in one of France’s largest shelters where dogs have been surrounded by all the stuff they’re scared of and want to chase. You think your city is bad? Hello??!

Cars, wheelbarrows, hundreds of dogs barking, colonies of cats darting in and out, passers-by, would-be adopters, dogs coming in and out, vets on site, queues of people waiting for the vet with animals, well-wishers, volunteers, staff members, kennel stench, infernal noise, pound vans coming in and out, delivery vans arriving with food and kit, children wandering around, babies in pushchairs, then the wildness of national forest with teams of hunters, loose scenthounds, wild boar, deer, snakes, hedgehogs, badgers, squirrels…

If I can countercondition in a shelter environment in 5-6 trials, something is wrong with your methods, dude.

As Ginger Rogers reportedly said when asked how it was to dance with Fred Astaire, ‘Darling, I did everything he did… just backwards and in high heels.’

Working in a shelter is a bit like working backwards and in high heels. I don’t care where you’re working on your counterconditioning. It’s most likely much less stressful than a shelter and you can probably make better use of your environment. I’d love it if trainers stopped blaming their tools. I’m a very, very ordinary trainer and if I can make the pairing in 5-6 trials in 5-6 minutes in a shelter, I’m pretty sure anyone can do it. But you’ve got to be good at your craft.

That means doing less and making the pairing crystal clear. Choose a good set-up and make sure you’ve done your bit on #1 through to #5 and you’ll have a much better chance.

#7 Choose your time and venue carefully

If you want to be able to do #6 properly, you’ll need the right set-up. A set-up is just a carefully chosen area for where you’re going to make that pairing between food and scary stuff. It means working far enough away – sometimes 500m or so, but usually much less if you can organise or stage your venue carefully enough.

Sometimes that means using vistas as you’ll read in #8. It also means keeping counterconditioning sessions short and finishing on a win. Don’t keep going until the dog fails.

Another thing you can do is make sure you use time of day properly. Last week, I was staying at my mum’s. Turns out 5.30am in her neighbourhood is busier than 12.30pm. There were loads of people walking dogs before going to work, cats returning home from a night on the tiles, paperboys on bikes weaving in and out of driveways, people dropping in to the paper shop… it was mayhem. Here, at 5.30am, it’s me. Me and my dogs and a handful of cats. There’s a mass exodus of workers just before 6am and so there’s a few people moving about in high-vis jackets, and there’s cars, but there aren’t people walking shih tzus on flexi-leads, which is our worst nightmare. If I wait until 11am, then there are hundreds of crabby little shih tzus barking at everything they see.

So choose your time carefully.

At the shelter, I did make the most of this by doing sessions at 1.30pm when French people are mostly still in lunch mode. I didn’t do sessions on Saturday afternoon when 5-6 minute training sessions would be filled with 500 triggers. Take it easy on yourself and your dog and stop thinking you need to walk your dog when everybody else is too.

Get your set-up right and you can do almost anything.

#8 Go for vistas, not panoramas

If you’re forced by the universe to work closer to triggers than you’d like, being able to screen off much of the approach and retreat will help you keep exposures to triggers neat and precise. If the scary stuff is only in view for three seconds so you can open the food bar and close it in a very precise manner so the dog is absolutely clear on what’s causing food to rain from the sky, you’ll get much further.

Create a vista and watch counterconditioning become a cinch of a sprint rather than a torturous marathon. Work further away than you would normally think of doing and keep the dog under threshold if you can.

#9 Keep your clickers and marker words out of it for the beginning

Most people over-complicate counterconditioning. All you need is the scary stuff, the dog and something good to eat. You don’t need clickers or markers. If you’re using them, you’re doing something else entirely. That’s fine, but if you’re marking behaviour, you’re moving into operant training and that is something altogether different. I do use these, but not in my first three trials or so. Counterconditioning does not need a marker word or a clicker. Be silent and spend the time watching your dog, not adding more things in for them to cope with. Your voice gets in the way of them learning to pair up the scary stuff with the good stuff. It’s just noise. Literally.

You don’t need to cue the behaviour either – at least, not until later.

Keep your voice to yourself. Go zen. Be silent.

#10 Keep the dog moving

I will never understand why people stop with the dog to countercondition. All you’re doing is giving the dog a massive, massive cue that scary stuff will start. You’re telling them to be on the lookout.

Being still is the absolute opposite of what we need.

I know why – you might miss the triggers passing by. Standing still, even if you don’t ask for a sit, means not missing the trigger.

But so many times I see trainers making it harder for themselves, it’s because they’ve asked for a static behaviour. I can’t understand it. You might as well get a great big sign out that says to the dog, ‘The show’s about to start, buddy!’

Your standing still can be the biggest cue that triggers anxiety or fear. Worse, asking them for a sit and you’re not only telling them that zombies are about to appear, you’re asking them to sit through it. Not so much a show as a living, walking nightmare on legs.

Imagine if I did that with a human person. You know… You’ve got a fear of bats or something. I take you into a room, I ask you to sit down, I bring a load of bats in and then I ask if you’d like some cake.

Next time I take you to that room, I ask you to sit down… well, you’re going to know bats are next on the agenda. Do you think my cake will work?

There’s a very strong argument that cues can actually make aversive experiences less bad. Surprise dentistry or appearance of bats, spiders or snakes can actually be more scary than knowing that you’ve just got to get through it. Knowing when and where they appear can make it less scary.

So there’s that.

But there’s also a lot of evidence that when animals have learned to be afraid of things, often the cue itself can be enough to generate fear that’s as bad even when there’s none of the scary stuff. In laboratory experiments where scientists have deliberately created fear in dogs, they sometimes put a tone before shocking the animal. Even in experiments where there was no shock for hundreds of times, the animal acted as scared of the tone as they were of the shock. I’m not engaging in some melodramatic exaggeration for rhetorical effect, I literally mean hundreds of times. Three scientists in the 1960s paired a tone up with footshock 10 times. Then they just played the tone. The dogs in the experiment acted as fearfully as if they’d actually been shocked. That behaviour lasted hundreds of repeats where the dogs were just presented with the tone and not the shock.

In other words, stop telling your dog there’s going to be scary stuff. You’re just making the way you announce it – usually stillness – into a giant cue that scary stuff will happen.

Obviously, the best way to change your dog’s emotional response to scary stuff is to see a good trainer or behaviourist – one who does #1 to #10 without even thinking about it. But it’s more than feasible for everybody if you’re clued up on what you’re doing. Quite frankly, if you can follow the rules, you’re probably going to be 99% more effective anyway.

Don’t overlook the simplicity and effectiveness of counterconditioning to change your dog’s underlying emotions about things. It’s not hard. It doesn’t take months of work. It shouldn’t be complex or challenging… you’re literally letting your dog see the scary stuff and then giving them food. That’s all there is to it. Maybe that’s why I like it so much. It’s so simple.

But you do need to do some other stuff alongside it to make the pairing of scary stuff and food clear to your dog. Most dogs I work with, shelter or not, get it by the third repetition on the first day. Two minutes. They’re savvy.

That’s not an accident though. It’s because I know how to maximise my efficiency. I say often that I’m a lazy trainer. I really am. But that’s because I know that giving my dog a treat at the right moment on our daily walk, and doing that five times at the opportune moment, is a hell of a lot easier than spending eight months making no progress whatsoever. It’s not just easier, it’s more efficient.

Why do it the hard way and make life more difficult for both you and your dog? You’re adding months if not years on to your training plan and it’s bound to cause you nothing but frustration and disappointment. Be simple, be clear and be precise and you’ll be getting that head snap when you see the scary stuff within three or four trials.

Ultimately, as neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp reminds us, being aggressive or being fearful are not nice ways to feel. If we’re offered the choice between feeling nice and feeling rubbish, we’ll take feeling nice. Our bodies are desperate to feel safe. When we work with that knowledge and we keep our training clean and efficient, our dogs very quickly learn to do the stuff that feels nice and avoid feeling afraid.

Next week, I’ll look at ten ways you can improve your training with dogs who like to chase livestock, pets, wildlife, machinery or people.

I also have a book out! It’s over at Amazon. It’s pretty good, if you’re a dog trainer looking to get more out of your work. I would say that, wouldn’t I?!

Whether you live with barky, lively, bouncy dogs or you live with anxious or reactive dogs, you may find your daily walk to be a bit of a problem. You may even find training sessions to be impossible. You know that sinking feeling when you realise all the food in the world isn’t going to help your dog cope…. and you’re just hoping your dog won’t go TOO nuts, won’t bark TOO loudly, won’t panic TOO much… just because some paperboy is coming full pelt towards you. 

The thing that helps me best understand my clients’ problems walking their dogs is living with two dogs who are a bit of a challenge on walks. To be fair, Heston is only a challenge in that his meds make him less focused than he used to be, and his seizures aren’t the best way for the brain to keep hold of all the things he’s learned in the past nine years. Lidy, though, she runs the gamut.

Fearful? Got that. Full on panic attack because someone left a shopping basket on the pavement this morning.

Predatory? Got that. Cats, pigeons, livestock, wildlife… it’s all game for her as far as she’s concerned. Let’s just stick cyclists in there as well shall we? And cars sometimes.

Reactive? Got that. She’s suspicious of any people or dogs we see or smell on our walks.

If it moves, it’s a potential trigger. If it just lies there, out of place, like that lost shopping basket, then that’s a potential trigger too.

Many of my problems are solved simply by the time I walk the dogs and where I walk them. I don’t walk in busy places and I know that too many triggers are just overwhelming.

In all honesty, I don’t do as much training with her as I’d like to, simply because I don’t leave Heston home alone if I can help it. I’d never forgive myself if he had a seizure and I wasn’t there to help if he didn’t come out of it quickly enough, or if he injured himself. My intentions are good: I’d happily train Lidy for hours to help her. But life has other plans. I suspect most of my clients are in a similar boat.

And that’s perfectly fine.

Yet there are times when I’ve worked with her or I’ve worked with a client’s dog and the situation has just been too overwhelming, even though we had time to train.

Clients often tell me that their dog won’t eat on walks. Eliminating all the problems related to food that you can read about here, I usually find that the dog is just hugely over threshold.

Yet where we live or how we need to work our dogs isn’t easy. Some dogs are over threshold the minute they’re out of the door.

How can you work with dogs who are so fearful or so excited?

How can you even manage dogs who are so fearful or so excited?

The easiest way is to understand about vistas, panoramas and flats!

Knowing about these three things can help you manage your daily walks better. They can help you improve your counterconditioning or desensitisation no end, and they can also help you improve your training. If your dog is that over threshold, however, and you haven’t got any variation at all – there are absolutely no moments at all from the moment you go out of the door to the moment you get back in, and you are taking all the usual precautions, you need to think about behavioural medication and see a vet. Your dog is panicking and it’s a welfare issue.

I find, however, in most circumstances, that walking when there are fewer people and dogs about, even driving from your usual environment to do so, and spending time actually practising the habit of eating outside are the three things that mean there’s a little variation in the way the dog behaves at least. There are calmer moments.

If there are calmer moments, then we can work.

I also find however that people who aren’t getting the results they want are working in panoramic settings where the dog is visually triggered by any change at all. That’s why and understanding of vistas, panoramas and triggers can make such a difference.

Honestly, understanding these three things is the difference between successful behaviour modification that can happen in minutes as opposed to trying diligently to change your dog’s feelings about stuff in ways that takes months and months.

When people tell me, for instance, that they’ve been using counterconditioning for months and it still hasn’t made a difference, or that they’ve been trying desensitisation for weeks without seeing any progress, or where things have got worse, I can almost guarantee it’s because they’re being hindered by the environment rather than being helped by it.

Let’s first define our terms.

A vista is a long, narrow view, as between trees, cars or buildings.

Here’s one vista: trees on either side and a narrow path down the middle.

Here, you can see how the walls block out much of the view, so all there is left is a narrow little window at the top.

A panorama, on the other hand, is one of those wide sweeping views.

Flats are the name for mobile things on a stage that can be used as screens to block off various bits and pieces.

Flats can help make vistas out of panoramas. There’s a sentence I bet nobody has written in the history of ever. Certainly nobody talking about improving your work with anxious, sensitive or excitable dogs.

You may now worry I’m encouraging you to make portable screens. I am not, but I’ll explain how the world throws us screens that can help us.

Dogs who like chasing things like livestock, wildlife, domestic animals, joggers, bikes and cars, or dogs who are fearful of things like people or other dogs struggle most in panoramas.

I’ve said before that long-nosed dogs have a binocular advantage over short-nosed dogs. Their whole head is designed to see a wider panorama. Greyhounds, podencos, collies, German shepherds, Beauceron, Belgian shepherds and even little dachshunds are designed to see life in wide angle. Short-nosed dogs are designed to see straight in front, like a vista.

That’s the first thing.

The second is that some dogs – those who are herders, for example – have a horizontal streak of light-detecting cells across their eye, just like wolves. Other dogs have light-detecting cells scattered all over the retina, like we do. Those dogs who have a horizontal streak are literally motion detecting dogs. They may not be good at colour vision like we are, but they can see up to 700m with ease.

Don’t believe me? My one-eyed 16-year-old malinois could see cars moving 400m away. She had a cataract in her one good eye as well.

So where people tell me their dogs aren’t trainable, that they’re chasing things, wound up by cars or by cats moving, or they see people moving 400m away, I absolutely believe them. The problem is that most people also then start trying to train their dog 20m away. The dog couldn’t be more overwhelmed.

The problem is that most of us don’t think how these panoramic views can contribute to our dog’s problem. Of course, if they see something 400m away and that thing is going to take 2 minutes to get to you – or more! – then the dog is going to be reacting. It’s inevitable. Whether they’re overexcited and wanting to chase or whether they’re fearful and now they’re starting reacting aggressively or panicking, the time things take to move across a panorama or move towards you causes real problems.

If you’re trying to distract your dog, that leaves you with two minutes to try and do so.

If you’re trying to do counterconditioning, then you’re going to have to feed-feed-feed your dog for two minutes.

If you’ve got a panorama behind you as well, make that four minutes for distraction, counterconditioning or training.

If you’ve been in that situation, you know that those minutes sometimes seem like hours.

Vistas make life much easier. You remember I said my one-eyed malinois could see things 400m away? She’d react to cars that far away 100% of the time. Yet stick a vista in there and we could work at 50m. In fact, most of the time, we could work at 5m.

Once, when walking along this road, a deer hopped from one side to the other. Because it was a vista, she came and went within seconds. I’ve been in so many situations like this where the trigger has been in view for a couple of seconds, maximum.

Another time, a family of wild boar ran across this lovely scene. It took them almost ten minutes to get from the small coppice on the left across the fields and into a small coppice about 2km to the right of the photo. Ten minutes of trying to distract four giddy dogs who were watching wild boar over 300m away run in a broad arc across this divine panorama.

Which scenario do you think was easiest to cope with?

If your dog wants to chase, then every moment the trigger is approaching is adding to their anticipation. If your dog is fearful, every moment the trigger is approaching is adding to their fear.

That’s as true with the trigger departing too. Every moment adds to an excited dog’s frustration. Every moment adds to a fearful dog’s concern.

If you have a dog who has been specifically bred to control the movement of livestock, then you’ve got all that time to try and cope with their frustration of not being able to do the thing they were created to do: control the moving things.

If you’ve got a dog bred to protect lifestock, then you’ve got all that time to try and cope with their frustration of not being able to do the thing they were created to do: keep stuff away from the group.

Well done, guardians of mainland European shepherds. You’ve got a heady mix of both! And you wondered why your dog was reactive!

Maybe you’re looking at my countryside photos and thinking how ace it must be to be able to access such vistas and panoramas… it is as long as your dog isn’t mad about wildlife and livestock and distant cars which are all really much more salient because everything else is pretty still.

Towns also provide their fair share of vistas.

On Thursday morning, I walked my dogs at 5.30am. Mainly, this is because Heston’s bladder won’t go much longer and he’s awake at 4am. I draw the line at walking excited dogs at 4am unless it’s summer. At 5.30am, we had 5 dogs to cope with, 3 cats, 2 random people walking to the bus stop, 2 buses, several cars, 3 paperboys on bikes, 2 men leaving the shops and a guy who seemed determined to follow us around the whole estate. 18 things, at least, that Lidy hates. At one point, we had a big dog coming up behind us, a barking spaniel in front of us and a cat in the garden next to us.

How did we cope?

By narrowing the vista.

We tucked ourselves up between two large conifers, I stood facing the trigger, so the dogs were facing me. We ate our biscuits while a dog went past less than 5m away. Did Lidy react? No. To be honest, not sure if she saw the dog, but I know Heston did.

That was a particularly bothersome walk. I had to pop into one ginnel*, stop between two parked cars, nip up a side street, go up one person’s path, tuck ourselves in against a fence and a car. All I was doing was creating a very narrow visual vista in which the troublesome trigger was in view for seconds, not minutes.

Did my dogs see the triggers? Of course. I’m all about sneaky in-situ real-life training. We had biscuits and the vista meant that the situation was neatly and perfectly controlled. Although Lidy will react to things hundreds of metres away, using life’s visual screens meant that I wasn’t trying to train her for five minutes.

We can’t expect our fearful or excited dogs to control themselves for five minutes.

But a few seconds?

That’s manageable.

And if I want to make it tougher, because we’ve made progress? We get closer to the opening of the aperture. We can also choose places where the trigger moves more slowly across the gap.

Maybe you live in one of life’s places full of panoramas and no vistas, Idaho or Norfolk, for example.

You can use flats to help make vistas. I’ve used two parked cars before now. I’ve also used portable windbreaks, like you get for the beach, and I’ve even used umbrellas. Life tends to provide us with these portable flats that turn panoramas into vistas: parked cars, fences, bushes, crops. I’ve even used baled hay before now to tuck ourselves in against.

It doesn’t have to be person height, just dog height.

You may be asking how you can use very small things like a hay bale to break up a dog’s visual fixation on an incoming target.

Move around it!

This was a very unfortunate moment… This lovely (albeit tiny in this photo) couple had turned onto this path I was walking two of my dogs up. The path is about 800m so I could see them even though my dogs hadn’t clocked their rather giddy malinois. I could see them hesitate as well so I knew they were about to bring their bonkers dog straight down a path towards my bonkers dogs and that all of the bonkers dogs would clock each other about 400m and then there’d be two people trying to hold on to three bonkers on a path that’s less than 3m wide.

What did we do? We moved behind a hay bale. All the dogs saw each other for a few seconds as the couple passed, and I completed my very slow 180° trip around the haybale. We started with it between us and the dog, moved round as the dog drew level and then moved round the third side as the dog went past. No fear. No frustration. No pulling, growling, barking, lunging…

This morning as a guy in black walked past us? Same thing. This time with a conifer.

The aim of using the world to create more narrow vistas is not to distract your dog. Our dogs aren’t learning anything if they can’t see the trigger. We have no idea if they can cope better than they were. The aim is that the dog is exposed to the trigger for a very brief moment in time, that food arrives or training happens, and then it is over.

This narrow time and view doesn’t just make it more easy for the dog to cope, it also makes training more salient too. It’s hard for guardians to pair up triggers with food if the triggers are in sight for 5 minutes. I mean you literally have to be feeding the dog for 5 whole minutes. It’s much more salient for the dog if it’s a simple 2 second blast. What I mean by this is that it’s more obvious to the dog: ‘Ohhhhhhh…. THAT happened and then you gave me sausages??! Right!’

One other thing really makes the difference…. keeping the dog moving. I simply have no idea why people ask their dogs to sit if they want to chase or flee. It’s aversive in both cases. You’re asking your dog to perform a behaviour that is not only impossible but also making them feel unpleasant. If I see Keanu Reeves with a bundle of beagles, ask me to sit and wait and see what happens. You expect me – a rational human being with an amazing neocortex designed to help me control my impulses – to sit and wait? Really? And then you think a dog – more emotional and responsive with a tiny bit of brain dedicated to impulse control – if they can do the same when they want to chase wildlife or livestock or machines? Insanity that way lies. It’s aversive and it’s too big a thing to ask.

Likewise, if I see zombies walking towards me… you want me to sit and wait? Ok then.

Let’s stop asking our dogs for static behaviours when they NEED to move. Not only that, it becomes a massive cue that bad stuff will happen. My dogs sit and wait when cars go past because neither of them is bothered about cars. Cars predict biscuits. But if I only ask for a sit – or I mainly ask for a sit – when something exciting or fear-inducing is going to happen? Well, you’ve got a nice cue there for your dog to become excited or fearful.

Not only that, if you ask after the dog is fearful or excited, you’re much less likely to get a sit.

You’re training the impossible. Keep the dog moving.

Counterconditioning should not take weeks and weeks. If you don’t have a snappy head turn as soon as the trigger appears within five or six trials or so, your dog doesn’t know what you are doing. Get your set-up right and your dog will get it in those five or six trials. Pavlov wasn’t still trying to pair up metronomes and salivation 6 months in to his trial. The thing that annoyed him was that dogs made those associations quickly. If it’s not happening quickly, then that’s because the pairing isn’t clear to the dog.

How can we make the pairing clear to the dog? By being snappier and cleaner in our pairing. How can we do that? By narrowing the time the trigger is in view and limiting the other things in view. That also takes the emotional sting out of things and makes it easier for dogs to cope.

It also means we can train nearer the trigger. I don’t like training Lidy 3m away from young guys walking past us. It’s far too close and the risk of her reacting is huge. But life is like that. People are going to get 3m away and I’m going to need her to be able to cope. If she’s got to have people 3m away, I’d rather it’s for 5 seconds than 5 minutes.

The good thing about practising this method is that it works. Practice builds the habit that sometimes, you’re going to step into doorways or between cars or haybales. Sometimes, you may stand near a tree or a street bin. Once, Lidy and I ducked into a small pathway and she ate paté as dogs and people went past in both directions. That was at the shelter with all that this entailed. She coped. I coped. No reacting, no lunging, no barking. All that made the difference was me not expecting her to cope with scary stuff approaching her for five whole minutes while she tried to work out a strategy about how to cope with it. If I can countercondition dogs in a shelter environment, you can do it wherever you are. I’m a barely average trainer. I’m lazy. I’m sloppy. But you can make it easier by blocking off visual access to stimuli until the time they’ll be in sight for is seconds, not minutes.

The other thing is that high school maths is in your favour. The further away from the vista you are – that narrow aperture where things are in sight for a milisecond – the less you’ll see. The closer to the vista you are, the longer things will be in sight for. It’s really easy to adjust the exposure. That makes it much easier to keep the dog under threshold yet also create a programme of gradual exposure. I get around being sloppy and lazy by picking the right spot for my training and using vistas and flats to help me create it.

I’d also say you need to add one other tool to your kit beyond your ability to look for life’s vistas and use flats to help create them: get savvy about evacuation points.

Evacuation points are just places you can get off the main drag if things are approaching you while you’re walking or training. Nothing is harder for dogs than having to face things that are coming up on them – whether that’s in front or behind. If you’re on a road with high walls on each side and you’re busy watching cars go past 10m away, but then a car is coming up behind you and is going to be less than a metre away, you need an evacuation point. These temporary escape hatches where you can slot yourself will really help. Shop doorways, alleyways, driveways, sidestreets, spaces between parked cars… all can be temporary escape hatches.

Instead of trying to work with your dog where they can see everything for miles and miles, where cars are in view for minutes before they pass you or where joggers are visible from 500m away, narrow your vision and let the environment take the sting out of the things that bother your dog. Whether you are managing your dogs, whether you are just doing some on-the-spot in-situ training as you go, or whether you are setting up a full training programme, you’ll find it a lot easier when you work with the environment rather than against it.

PS. If you’re a dog trainer, I’ve got a book out. You should buy it. It’s really good. Even my dad says so.

* a ginnel is a beautiful invention from the north of England, a passage or alleyway between two buildings. 

* Ball, not balls. That’s different. See a vet.

When I watch videos of free-ranging dogs, you don’t tend to see them all glazed-eyed, barking at passers-by to throw them a ball. They’re not the dogs you see on those cutesy videos of dogs dropping balls at the foot of statues, hoping for a game.

What does this tell us?

Compulsive behaviour with balls is most likely both a product of pre-programmed hardware and also a product of software we’ve installed ourselves. Simply put: genes and learning.

How can genes be at work, you may well ask.

Well, have you ever seen a streetie fixated on a ball?

Why on earth would humans put compulsive tendencies into dogs when they were breeding them?

More likely, the dogs were bred for other behaviours, and compulsive behaviour kind of hitched a ride with the other predatory behaviours and appetitive behaviours that we used to create a handful of western breeds. Compulsion is a full-blown version of things we might call ‘motivation’, ‘desire’, ‘trainability’ and ‘focus’ or ‘tenacity’ and ‘endurance’. In other words, it benefited humans to have dogs who’d work hard.

From my own experience, this seems to be very much focused on an even smaller handful of breeds within the 400 or so recognised breeds. You know, the kind you find in airports as sniffer dogs or ones we pride as having constructs like ‘high drive’. There are probably only twenty breeds or so who really fit into this list, and then an even smaller handful who regularly produce such ‘driven’ dogs that ordinary guardians find themselves with a nightmare on their hands.

So, not scenthounds, on the whole. Mostly because life doesn’t give them an opportunity to play with stuff as a puppy, but many new guardians of our adopted Anglos, beagles, Ariègeois, Poitevin and Gascon Saintongeais are more likely to complain of another fault: not being interested in toys much at all.

And not pointers and setters. I mean, you want them to point at birds or set. You don’t need them much to retrieve them.

Good luck getting setters to do much work other than run and be incredibly lovely anyway. They’re often dogs that guardians tell me aren’t motivated by food or toys. I’d like to see setters at work in airports, galloping down the baggage carousels, ignoring the desperate pleas of their handlers.

And not terriers, either. Let’s face it: to terriers, everything is a toy. Shoes, remote controls, pens, packages, carpets, small furries… or sometimes their own tail if they’ve been deprived at an early age. Bull terriers? They’re a bit special, and English bull terriers can certainly develop compulsive behaviours, but it doesn’t usually involve balls or other portable toys.

And not mastiffs or livestock guardian breeds. Because… important resting to be done.

That leaves us with some gundogs such as spaniels and retrievers (though not the pointers and setters on the whole) and lots of herding dogs, including ones from the British diaspora (including collies and Aussies) and from mainland Europe (including Malinois, Beauceron and German shepherds).

You know, the kind of dogs that you do find in airports doing actual work, hunting for missing individuals, tracking down drugs or the kind of dogs you find herding sheep for eight hours a day.

Borderline compulsive behaviour around toys can be useful for the working dog. Or, more to the point, useful to the guardians or handlers of working dogs. Not so useful for the average guardian.

Fairly occasionally, I find compulsive behaviours pop up in these breeds even if they weren’t bred to work. Sure, your cocker spaniel may look like a perfect show champion, but there’s no reason mum and dad show champs can’t throw out a working-dog-under-the-hood every now and again. That’s how genes work.

Just as, likewise, every line of working dogs can throw out a completely ‘lazy’ mattress-backed dog who has zero desire to get out of bed of a morning, let alone go sniff suitcases in return for a ball.

So that’s genes.

They account for why I’ve had two toy-obsessed malinois.

I mean, around 7pm, she even starts the glacial shift of toys from the toy box to the bedroom. There are literally more toys than space for a very small dog. It’s like living with a Disney-obsessed five-year-old with very generous relatives.

When Tobby arrived, he only put his toy down to pee or eat. When he died, he’d dropped his favourite toy somewhere in the garden and when I found it three weeks later, I wept for hours.

But there’s also dogs like my lovely girl Flika who never had a toy in her mouth and didn’t seem to care. Mouths were for cake and sandwiches, not toys. Probably more a case of never having been taught as much as lacking normal malinois genes. That said, the number of shelter-related behavioural problems with shepherds that can be fixed with toys is higher than you probably imagine. Spinning in circles, destructive chewing, biting the lead, nipping volunteers getting them out of kennels, self-mutilation… much of this can be stopped in our shelter simply by giving the dog a toy to carry.

We also have to understand that compulsions can be different. Malinois and German shepherds, for instance, seem to just like holding the item. Lidy sits next to me for about an hour sometimes, just holding her stuff. She’ll look at me and her head nods as if to say she’s on duty and ready for work. ‘Alright there? I’m just holding this plushie for you…’

For retrievers and flushing/retrieving dogs like spaniels, however, that can be very different. For them, the chase is the thing, not the grab-bite or hold. I’ve found that herding breeds from the UK diaspora (mainly collies) can also be addicted to the chase and collection. This pseudo-predation which mimics some aspects of how canids hunt in the wild, has been steadily strengthened through breeding in order to make the dog good at their job. It doesn’t take much to awaken that inner need. Toys for many dogs function as self-reinforcing, leading to a neurological cascade that dogs find very rewarding.

I’d just like to make an aside to point out that dopamine isn’t a ‘feel-good’ neurotransmitter as some people might try to have you believe. It’s simply one that tells the body what to find rewarding or not. Being rewarding and being pleasurable don’t have to be the same thing. I pick at my nails and compulsively bite the inner bit of my cheeks because something in my body thinks it’s rewarding. Neither of them are pleasurable experiences. Dopamine drives all kinds of behaviour from learning and memory to addiction, so it’s a bit facile to dismiss it as ‘feel good’.

It may very well feel good, but we can’t ask the dogs and they can’t tell us. If it’s a compulsion, I’m pretty sure there are lots of moments that don’t feel good at all. I also notice that a lot of dogs lapse into compulsions when they are stressed, as a kind of coping mechanism. We might even call this self-soothing behaviour, but again, that’s not to imply it’s pleasurable; I shout at politicians on Twitter when I’m anxious or not coping. It doesn’t make me feel any better. Lidy paces round in circles. It might fill a vacuum but I don’t think it feels good for her.

While I’m taking down myths, can we also stop talking about parading as why dogs like holding things?! No idea where this came from, but dogs don’t parade in my opinion. I’ll explain why. Firstly, complete dearth of information. I’ve seen one bit of ‘science’ that proponents suggest makes parading a thing for dog. It was a blog post about an observation of two village dogs in North Africa. Not science. Worse, it was a report from three years of research with only two incidences. Second, parading has no part in the general predatory motor sequence. Hawks don’t parade. Bears don’t parade. Wolf ethologists aren’t arguing to put ‘PARADE’ in the predatory behaviours of wolves. Literally no other animals do this, so let’s stop suggesting it’s a thing? Also, while I’m at it, it’d come after the GRAB-BITE when the dog has entered consummatory behaviours. If dogs don’t know how to dissect or consume a dead pigeon, that’s on domestication processes that have stopped them knowing what to do with it. That’s completely different than it being a motor sequence. Motor sequences should generally be true across most animals in the species. Parading isn’t. If it were, streeties and village dogs would also do it with the same frequency as your typical labrador. They don’t. My old boy Ralf once picked up a dead boar piglet and carried it about. He didn’t do that because he was showing it off or parading. He did it because he was a bit labrador, a bit shepherd and 100% dog, and his DNA said ‘pick up the bloody thing’ then didn’t tell him what to do with it afterwards no doubt because of domestication. Somehow, I reckon we’ll find out eventually that selective breeding led to the enhancement of appetitive behaviours designed to make us want to do things, and the truncation of consummatory behaviours, which is why most dogs are scavengers other than dingoes and singing dogs. It might also explain why some of our most ancient ‘breeds’ like Nordics and some Asiatic breeds can be found in the neighbours’ chicken pen. Most streeties and village dogs live by scavenging. If they don’t ‘parade’, at least regularly and reliably across the majority of dogs, then it’s not a motor sequence thing. Domestication processes seem to have involved dogs ‘forgetting’ at an ethological and neurological level what to do with prey or not needing to consume it. Parading is an explanatory fiction at best. It’s not an explanation about why dogs like balls.

Now those myths are out of the way… how do you know it’s a compulsion if your dog seems fixated or obsessed with a toy such as a ball?

Firstly, there will be physiological signs such as panting, dilated pupils and a wide grimace.

There may also be behavioural signs like jumping up at you to get the toy, grabbing or biting. The dog might bark at you if you refuse to relinquish the toy quickly enough. They may refuse to relax without the item. They might search for the item to try and access it themselves, or they might do something to try to make you get it for them, like whining or barking.

There can also be emotional signs, like frustration or loss of inhibitions. If your dog doesn’t normally jump or grab, but they do when you have their favourite toy, then that can be a sign that their normal inhibitions have no say in how the dog is behaving. They might appear sad or depressed without the item.

We can also see compulsions with what the dog does with the toy. Perhaps they’re constantly retrieving it and dropping it at our feet for it to be thrown again. Welcome to the world of retrievers, people! They’re getting internal rewards for doing what they’re supposed to do, just the same as I do for every word that forms on a blank page. Perhaps they refuse to relinquish the toy if they suspect you won’t return it. Perhaps they guard it or run away with it.

Much of this brings us to what the dog has learned YOU do with the toy. Do you always throw it again? Even if you resist for ages? Of course they’re going to bring it to you if that’s what they want.

Why is this problematic, you may well ask.

The first is that compulsions do not feel nice. They exist to fill a behavioural vaccuum when we’re anxious, but the adrenaline they produce heightens the anxiety they experience. Chasing is not comforting. If dogs are compulsive carriers, then why do they feel the need to get all their comfort from this source? Why do our shepherds have behavioural problems that are assuaged by toys? Because they’re stressed and anxious.

Second, compulsions can fuel behaviour that ends up being physically dangerous. Not just dogs following balls off cliffs or into dangerous rivers or tidal currents, but dogs who end up with repetitive strain injuries, with damaged cruciates, with joint strain. Pretty much every specialist vet who deals with arthritis or mobility issues will have posts on their social media about the dangers of ball throwers. The surface of some toys can damage the enamel of teeth. A dog who grabs a ball mid-flight can end up biting it and the toy getting stuck in their mouth… the horror stories are enough to make you wish you’d never introduced your dog to toys in the first place.

So what can we do?

The first two things are prophylactic. Don’t snigger.

More careful breeding of working dogs and show lines of working breeds is needed. We don’t need compulsions in dogs and the fact that these compulsions rarely happen in dogs who are responsible for their own reproductive choices tells us that it’s a behaviour we’ve built. It’s not ‘normal’. Of course, people may need dogs who work. No showline cocker spaniel needs to be bred to be that into toys that they are frantic and out of control. No golden retriever should be toy-obsessed when the heritability of musculoskeletal problems in Goldens is enough to make a geneticist weep. Breeding for beauty shows rather than behaviour is causing our dogs a lot of problems, if you ask me.

Second, if you have a breed that’s susceptible to chasing or carrying compulsions, make sure you work carefully with a good dog trainer from their earliest days in the home through their teenage times.

It goes without saying that they need a really good ‘drop’ – I suggest Chirag Patel’s method. Trade just is not enough, I’m afraid, and all you’re doing is getting yourself into a habit where they’ll only surrender an item if you have something of the same value to offer. That’s like a drug addict telling you that you can take their line of coke if you’ll give them another line of coke. That’s a recipe for disaster. I want a dog that will drop something they’ve decided is valuable with lightning automaticity and will also leave the thing they’ve dropped without drama.

Here’s Lidy practising.

She dropped a dead pigeon wing last week in return for a cheap biscuit, so keep working on your drop.

Keep their range of toys wide, make sure you build really, really strong cues for both the beginning and end of behaviours.

I also recommend you make sure you practise the following five activities:

#1

Go back in the predatory motor sequence.

Dogs who have compulsions often get ‘stuck’ at one particular point – often the point their breed was selected for. That’s to say spaniels may find the CHASE-GRAB/BITE aspect of the motor sequence more fun than the ORIENT – EYE – STALK bit. Collies might get stuck on the EYE-STALK-CHASE bit.

Going back in the predatory motor sequence means focusing on earlier points of the sequence and building those up too. So for dogs who enjoy compulsive games of fetch, doing things like scent work can be really useful. It’s building up their other muscles. In fact, this is how working dogs work in artificial situations which use their talents. Sniffer dogs spend all their time sniffing… in return for…. a game of fetch or tug.

If you’re a dog trainer, whether you see this as Premacking (low-value behaviours being followed by opportunities for high-value behaviours) or whether you see this as respondent associations (chasing is great, and if sniffing/locating always precedes chasing, then sniffing/locating will also become great too by association) it doesn’t really matter to me.

Enrichment using earlier stages in the PMS can help your dog become a little more of an all-rounder.

#2

Go forward in the PMS.

If you’ve got a dog who is fixated on the appetitive bits of the predatory motor sequence – the acquisition bit – then add in some of the consummatory bits too. That’s to say put in some food toys. Dopamine dips when we acquire food sources. Eating in itself works on different mechanisms. Not only would I putting in some KILL/BITE stuff like games of Tug, but I’d also be putting in DISSECT activities and also chewing, gnawing and even just a little productive licking. Digestion is our sedative friend. Be wary of frustration with this but snuffle mats, pickpockets and even having to destroy items to get to the toy can really help activate a whole load of other predatory muscles.

When I look at my lovely Heston (50% shepherd, 25% labrador, 25% cocker spaniel) he’s a living, breathing genetic pool of CHASE – GRAB/BITE and we work every day to keep his pool of enrichment activities building up his other skills otherwise he tends to fixate on one single toy.

#3

Make the toy conditional on completion of another task.

When Heston gets a bit obsessed with his Kong Rugby squeaker balls, I bang in other toys first. A short game of tug (KILL/BITE) predicts a game with his rugby ball. A tennis ball precedes the rugby ball. A soft plushie precedes the rugby ball. A flirt pole precedes the rugby ball.

You’re using Pavlov as your friend here, using the other object to predict the appearance of the second toy. You can build up a much wider arsenal of favoured toys and broaden out the dog’s repertoire simply by using this pattern.

When you’ve got it, you can then make the play with the less favoured toy last longer than the play with the favoured one. Again, this is what working dog handlers do: the activities gradually grow as access to the reinforcer grows less and less. You can’t have a springer who sniffs one suitcase and wants you to throw the ball…. you want them to search the room full and then get the ball for a short moment. Because of Pavlovian mechanisms, the search in itself becomes as fun as the ball.

If you’re technically minded, you’re using respondent second order conditioning and successive approximations. If that means stuff to you, go for it. If it doesn’t, find yourself a trainer who can explain it and show you how to do this with your dog.

#4

Work on both their impulse control and their ability to tolerate frustration. Buy a copy of Jane Ardern’s book Mission Control. All dogs can learn to handle themselves but you need to understand the negative emotions that are usually the fallout of compulsive behaviours. You can also work with a behaviour consultant who knows how to help you understand whether your dog has impulse control issues through the use of diagnostic tools such as the Dog Impulsivity Assessment Scale.

#5

If it’s a true compulsion, there can often be underlying anxiety or lifestyle changes your dog needs to help them cope in a world that they’re ill-prepared for. See a behaviour consultant and also a vet. There are drugs that can help with impulse control issues, working on the dopamine pathways, and there are also drugs that can work on balancing the dog out emotionally.

You may feel that you want to try nutraceuticals first, and part of me says ‘OK then’. The other part says that if your dog is as fixated on fetch as an addicted person is with cigarettes, alcohol or drugs, then it is a stonking, huge, welfare issue for your dog.

There’s lots of evidence to show that addictions are in some part Pavlovian for both animals and humans. That’s to say they are very context specific and being in the place where we have habitually got our fix, so to speak, can cause us to feel the need for that fix. If you were always a social smoker or you smoked with a specific group of friends, then you may need to avoid that environment or those contextual factors as you learn new habits. Going back in pubs can sometimes be the trigger for a relapse.

Likewise alcohol and drugs.

Learners may need a fix simply by being in the environment where they learned the habit in the first place.

To train dogs not to be compulsively addicted to fetch, then, may need you to consider all the places your dog played fetch and to take that place or those circumstances out of your repertoire for a while, if not for good.

For instance, if fetch has always been a park thing, you may need to go to different parks in order to do #1-#4 on this list. That’s tough if you’ve got a dog who has learned that your garden is the place for the game…. I’m not kidding but I once worked with a labrador guardian whose dog was compulsively dropping balls to be thrown. The dog was in agony too. The family contacted me about 3 months before they were due to move because the behaviour had got worse. All the packing and the change in routine was contributing to the dog’s anxiety. A change of house and the dog stopped his fixation on the ball.

This might sound crazy or miraculous, but the new house hadn’t been the scene of his compulsion before, and his anxiety dropped after the move. This happens more than you might think.

Of course, house moves and avoiding the context of past addictions aren’t a solution to everyone. A medication schedule alongside a decontextualised modification programme working on new skills in new places that are then deliberately generalised and then finally reintroduced into the original scene of the crime is the way forward here.

If you’ve been an inveterate gambler for years, you don’t go back into the bookies unless you’ve absolutely nailed the earlier bits of your training programme and you’ve got a support mechanism in place to help you should you need to go to Las Vegas for the weekend.

This is also true for lab animals who’ve been forced into addiction by scientists. They too will be distressed and frustrated in the location where the drug was delivered.

The more intense the behaviour is and the longer the dog has exhibited it, the more likely you’ll need to add medications and also change location for your training for at least 3-6 months or so.

A little compulsion can be a good thing in training or in working with dogs. It’s not out of control to see Lidy collecting her plushies before bed. If Tobby wanted to carry around his pink wanger all day and it wasn’t bothering him or me, then fine. That said, there are so many dogs whose guardians are engaging in far too much physical activity to try and stem their dog’s compulsions, forbidding access to toys completely or even causing their dog a great deal of physical pain because they don’t know what else to do other than give in.

Dog trainers: if you’re interested in more than just training tips for working successfully with clients, or you’re struggling to communicate the damage that guardians are doing by indulging or even encouraging compulsions, hop on over to Amazon and snag yourself a copy of my book!

Client-Centred Dog Training: 30 Lessons for Dog Trainers to get Maximum Engagement from your Clients is available now.