A client asked me a really good question in the week.

Should she teach other behaviours when her dog hadn’t mastered the one she’d been working on yet?

And why was it so hard to teach when he’d learned other things in a snap?

We’ve been working on mat behaviours so that her dog knows what to do when people move about. He’s also been working on recall when he’s barking in the garden. My client wanted to know whether she should persevere with one when he’d not quite got the other.

My answer was yes. I don’t know why but it’s kind of a myth that dogs can only learn one thing at once. I remember doing one behaviour at a time with Heston when he was a puppy, as if he couldn’t possibly have coped with the confusion of more.

There are lots of reasons, though, why it takes dogs longer to learn some behaviours than others.

#1 The complexity of the behaviour

The more we ask, the more challenging it gets.

Complexity can be about how many components there are to the behaviour. It might have lots of bits that need to be added together. There might be more muscle groups involved, for example, or there might be more parts to what they need to do.

For instance, if you want your dog to recall from the fence, it needs your dog to listen to your cue, to disengage, to turn away and then to come back to you.

If you ask your dog to sit, it just needs them to listen to your cue and plonk their bum on the floor.

Complexity is not just about the number of components to the behaviour but also other factors too. It may require duration. The dog may be asked to do the behaviour for a long time, like walking to heel or walking on a loose lead.

Imagine that you’d asked your dog to sit for 40 minutes and you can begin to understand why asking them to walk to heel for 40 minutes can be such an issue. Some behaviours like a retrieve require your dog to have loads of skills such as following, finding, picking up and then holding an item, carrying an item and then coming back to you to return it and then dropping it. No wonder it’s hard! It has at least seven different components.

Solution: train each bit separately and build up duration through training.

#2 Asking dogs to make complex choices

Some behaviours are easy to teach because we’re not asking the dog to choose between two complex things.

Learning to sit for a biscuit is not that challenging when you’ve got a choice of standing about and getting nothing, or sitting and getting a biscuit.

Learning to recall is hard because they can involve two competing situations. Do I go and sniff? Do I come back?

It’s all about how valuable those two competing situations are. Is sniffing that important? What’s in it for the dog if they come back?

Everything we know about behaviour says that dogs do the thing that has been most rewarding and most rewarded in the past. Each choice of THIS or THAT involves subconscious processing about the desirability of what consequences there have been in the past.

Dogs probably aren’t involved in complex decision making where they’re actively and consciously weighing up the benefits of one action over another. It’s not like me in the grocery store with a five-pound note deciding which coffee will be a better choice. Should I go for flavour or quantity? What does £3.60 for 500g work out in comparison to £5 for 750g?

Even without this level of complex, active and conscious reflection, there are still calculations being performed. The answer is always the same: Dogs Do What Works, as educator Jean Donaldson would say. Or, Dogs Do What Worked More For Them In The Past And Is More Likely To Work To Get Their Needs Met Right Now.

Not as pithy, I admit.

But if the dog isn’t feeling particularly curious or in need of investigating smells and sniffs, calling them away to give them a treat is going to be less challenging than if they really, really, really want to get to that smell right now.

Take yesterday. 300 delegates in a room. Lunch the day before had been a long and arduous process and there hadn’t been enough food. Some people didn’t even get to eat and had to queue for 30 minutes even so.

What happened at 1.30? A huge rush to the buffet.

What if I’d called one of those hungry delegatess back to do paperwork?

Perhaps I’d have found that selective hearing we complain so much about in dogs…

There can be competition between two good results: do I sniff or do I come back for a biscuit?

There can also be competition between a good result and a bad result. Do I go sniff or do I go back and get my lead clipped on?

There can also be competition between two bad results. Do I stand at the fence shouting at this dog which feels bad or do I go back and get reprimanded by my guardian?

How does our behaviour choose?

Firstly, by doing the thing that is most rewarding or doing the thing that is least unpleasant.

Our behaviour also chooses by doing the thing that meets our needs in the moment.

Do you think there would have been such a rush to the buffet table yesterday if we weren’t so late for lunch?

And what about people like me who’d had too much coffee? Toilet first or food first?

We do the thing we need most, all things considered.

So do dogs.

The same is true of many canine behaviours. THIS or THAT? Walk on a loose lead or pull to get to a smell? Come back from shouting at the fence or stand there making a racket? Chase the pheasant or come back to my guardian. Drop the dead pigeon and get a biscuit or continue carrying it about?

Dogs Do What Worked More For Them In The Past And Is More Likely To Work To Get Their Needs Met Right Now. Remember that.

Solution: when you’re training a new behaviour, make sure there are as few competing choices as possible.

#3 Owners not being aware of choices

So often, we don’t even realise that our dogs HAVE a choice to make, let alone that they are making a difficult choice.

It doesn’t cross our tiny, selfish, egocentric minds that it MIGHT be more fun for a dog to sniff a crow feather than come back for praise.

Also, we don’t make it easy on the dog because we ask them to choose at the moment the choice is more difficult. We rarely ask them for loose lead or recall when the going is easy. We rarely reward them for these things when the going is easy. We ask when the going gets tough.

When did I ask for loose lead this morning? When my incredibly predatory cat-attacking dog had just seen a cat run behind a bush.

Many guardians are then despondent because we don’t think we can compete with the other choice. Loose lead or stalk cat? I mean, it’s like if someone asked me to do twenty burpees or eat cake. Literally it’s like that.

BUT we fail to understand that it’s not about the size of the potential reward but about the frequency the behaviour has been rewarded in the past.

Why did Lidy choose to walk to heel and eat biscuits instead of lunging at the cat this morning?

Because chasing cats is NEVER rewarding (because she’s always been controlled around cats with a lead for the last two years) and walking on a loose lead past distractions has been FREQUENTLY and HIGHLY rewarded in the past.

Because I know just how thrilling it would be to chase cats and because I have practised and practised, Lidy chose to walk nicely and to eat biscuits.

We need to understand that walking on a loose lead will never be as rewarding as chasing cats UNLESS… we make loose lead walking frequently rewarding and chasing cats never rewarding. That means management and paying out.

Sadly, many guardians seem to have a mental block on both. If chasing stuff is sometimes rewarding because they sometimes get to do it, and if loose lead walking is never really rewarding because we don’t pay out much, then we shouldn’t be surprised that our dogs will choose one very rewarding option over the other.

Solution: understand what your dog really wants and how that balances out with what is on offer.

#4 It involves significant cognitive processing

The more involved the dog is in doing whatever they are doing, the tougher it will be to ask them to remove their attention from it.

For instance, if they are very involved in following a scent trail, then asking them to come back to you needs them to be able to disengage as well as then choosing to do a less rewarding thing.

This involves significant cognitive processes. First, it requires them to have a brain that is ‘online’ for inhibition. That requires two components. They need to be at points in their development where that the bit of the brain that has oversight over inhibition is functional. If you’ve got a young puppy or a teenage dog, then that will be a significant challenge.

That point of development will also affect how much they want to do the other thing instead. Ask a human teenager to make a choice between a boring family occasion or going out with their mates, it’s a literal no-brainer for a teenager, whose brains at that period in their life are wired to be more stimulated by peer contact than familial contact. Stupidly, sexual maturity comes before social maturity in both dogs and humans, and therefore teenagers of both species are interested in non-familial interactions, not family ones.

To ask dogs to switch on the override switch at these times in their life is tough.

Likewise, inhibiting your own behaviour requires skills. Take people who are dieting, give them a hard sum, offer them the choice of an apple or a cake afterwards and watch their willpower crumble.

And that’s human beings, with their huge neo-cortexes and enhanced brain power for inhibition!

It requires practice.

Take for instance cars aquaplaning or going into a slide. It takes a lot of practice to do the opposite of what your basic, primitive brain is telling you to do. Your foot is telling you to brake and steer out of trouble, where your inhibition is telling you to simply ease up on the accelerator and hold back on steering out of danger. Often, we make situations worse because we have to have training to do the opposite of what we think we should do. Why do drunk people often not break hands and wrists when they fall, even if they would when sober? Because alcohol impairs your reflexes and inhibits your impulse to put your hands out.

Inhibiting the very thing a noisy, shouty part of our brain is telling us to do is very hard. It takes being at the right point in development and it also takes conscious, controlled practice.

Impulse control and inhibition are fundamental parts of why dogs will sometimes struggle to do one behaviour and not another. One behaviour simply needs less brainpower than the other.

Solution: stop expecting so much from puppies and teenage dogs, and set them up to succeed.

#5 Some behaviours meet needs more easily

I like trick training. I like cued training. I think it’s important that dogs respond to things we ask them to do. But we need to acknowledge that sitting for a biscuit doesn’t really meet any specific need.

Sure, it’s nice to get a biscuit or a treat. That’s great. But if it compares to ringing a bell to go out for a wee, well one of those behaviours will be easier to acquire because one meets a need. The dog needs a wee. They don’t need a biscuit.

In the past, this has led some trainers to deprive dogs of food in order to make them more motivated by food. Programmes like Nothing in Life is Free operate on this process, where unless the dog ‘works’ for their food, they don’t get anything. If we manipulate those things to train behaviours we want, like asking dogs for a sit-stay before they get fed, then we may find that they learn those behaviours more quickly because the stakes are high.

It can also make it very difficult for the dog to understand that they should still do the behaviour outside of that context. They may struggle for example to sit and stay when it’s not mealtimes.

Sadly, this then makes us think our dogs are stupid or stubborn, instead of understanding that we’d simply got a good behaviour because the dog needed what we were withholding more than at other times.

Often in behaviour work, the dog wasn’t doing anything for food in the first place. A dog barking at the neighbour’s dog is not doing it for Scooby snacks. A dog jumping up on guests isn’t doing it for food.

Thus, when we try to use food to teach different behaviours, it’s not so easy because the dog needs to do the other behaviour more but whatever we’re asking, not so much.

Solution: use what the dog really wants as a reinforcer, making sure you don’t deprive them of it.

Now put your knowledge into action

These five reasons can make training some behaviours much more complicated. Training behaviour is often simple in theory but much more complex in reality. Sure, it looks easy on paper, but a lot depends on what we’re asking dogs to do.

Most of the time, we don’t even have to think about why some behaviours are more challenging to teach. In fact, it can also work to our advantage where behaviour consultants are simply teaching guardians what the dog needs, then training the dog a behaviour that gets their needs met.

These five reasons can also be reasons why dogs sometimes fail to respond to our signals.

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At the moment, the UK media seem to be filled with accounts of bites and deaths as a result of dog bites. In fact, several French news agencies have picked up on hospital numbers in the UK, coupled with several tragic deaths of children and are reporting it higher than ever.

But are we really suffering an epidemic of dog bites as the media would suggest?

And where does breed-specific legislation fit into all this?

Breed and bite

In the past month, yet another study about breed-specific behaviour was published. Morrill et al. (2022) found that there was limited evidence of a link between behaviour and breed.

This report comes on the back of 90 years of research that shows that behaviour is much more complicated than simply ‘breed’.

Yes, there are genetic components to some simpler behaviours, and yes, there are genetic components to some traits and aspects of personality, but behaviour is so much more complex than that.

When we talk about genetics, the most important genetic factor is species. Our dogs have canine behaviours. Then it’s about parents. Our dogs inherit much that their parents give them. But not everything.

It’s also about pre-natal stress. It’s about maternal nurturing. It’s about early socialisation. It’s about how the dog lives. It’s about learning history. It’s about relationships and it’s about how the dogs are kept.

What we know from all of this is that behaviour is complex.

The demonisation of specific breeds also complicates things. In France, for example, the dogo argentino is not a breed subject to legislation. Unlike the rottweiler, the Tosa, the Boerboel and the American Staffordshire, the dogo argentino is free to live a life without restriction on who can own them, who can walk them, how they should be walked and where they should live. I have met and known a great number of dogo argentinos – all great dogs despite some of the hideous things that have happened to them.

Yet in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the dogo is a banned breed.

More interestingly still, in Ireland, the dogo is not a banned breed, or one subject to legislation. Thus, in one place, you can own and walk your dogo argentino only metres away from a place where they are legislated against.

I’m not sure what happens when you cross the border…

In fact, if you look at legislation across Europe, you’ll find pockets where governments decided the dogo argentino was a dangerous breed, and other governments who decided the dogo argentino was no more dangerous than any other breed, all of them cheek by jowl.

Unlike the dogo, some dogs are legislated against with more consistency. The Japanese Tosa is one of those breeds. The Tosa has yet to become popular in the same way as the dogo argentino is, and certainly has a long way to go before they compare in numbers with other breeds subject t legislation. Despite widespread evidence of their behaviour, the non-pedigree pit bull and the pedigree American Staffordshire Terrier are widely legislated against, if not banned.

All this when there is no evidence in Europe or the UK that pit bulls or dogo argentino or rottweilers are more or less dangerous than any other dog…

In fact, the idea of danger also complicates things. Often, there are few bite statistics that relate to breed. Where there are, they have relied on the victim identifying the breed. Just to give you an example, one case I worked recently, one local paper reported that the dog was a malinois. The other reported that the dog was a pit bull. The dog was actually neither. One paper’s source was the victim who had misidentified the husky as a malinois, and the other paper’s source was a police statement from a witness who identified the husky as a pit bull. I kid you not.

There’s also the fact that, unless the bite results in hospitalisation, little data is collected on breed anyway. This is complicated by the fact that certain population groups are more likely to seek hospitalisation because bites are often more severe for them. The same dog biting at the same strength will do more damage to a child than to an adult, for example. It’s also complicated by the fact that smaller dogs don’t tend to hospitalise people. I always joke that the dog I know with the most prolific bite history is a Shih Tzu, followed by a miniature pinscher. Neither sent anyone to the hospital despite biting people three or four times a day for many years.

Sadly, this does mean that large dogs biting small or fragile humans tends to make the news whereas small dogs biting able-bodies adults tend not to make the news. This skews our perception of dog bites and breed, as well as dangerosity. It doesn’t help when vets put out viral posts that say they won’t treat large dogs any more because large dogs won’t submit to coercion! Large dogs are held to much higher standards and even a single non-injurious bite in a ten year period can be a death sentence, where smaller dogs are often held to much less exacting standards even if they injure someone.

Much data about breed is also based on the most severe cases, where individuals die. This gives us good data about fatal dog bites, but very little data about the ordinary experience of being bitten by a dog that doesn’t end up with such a tragic end.

Whatever we think we know, we really don’t.

And what we do know says that everything about breed specific legislation is wrong.

The failure of breed-specific legislation

Its first failure is that there is no real link between breed and aggressivity. It is therefore based on fundamentally flawed information.

The second failure of breed-specific legislation is that it has not protected the public. The opposite in fact.

Although the numbers of people owning dogs has stayed relatively static, dog bite statistics seem to have increased. This may not, in actual fact, indicate there are more dog bites. The better societies get at capturing data, the more it seems to increase from days when data wasn’t kept. Some bites are reported twice, for instance if the person is transferred from one site to another. So even the numbers of bites is not accurate.

Certainly, though, on a superficial level, dog bites have increased.

Third, for the dogs who are involved in fatal attacks on humans, those breeds who have been legislated against rarely figure. Perhaps that is to do with better safety, since many breeds are supposed to be walked on leads and wearing a muzzle at all times, if they have a legal right to exist at all. But given the number of non-muzzled off-lead American Staffordshires and pit bulls I see, I can’t think that these measures are taken particularly seriously.

Fourth, legislation completely fails to address the social issues behind people’s choice of breeds. Ban pit bulls and find people buying cane corso. Ban cane corso and find people buying Neapolitan mastiffs. Ban Neapolitan mastiffs and find people buying Dogue de Bordeaux. Breed-specific legislation turns some dogs and their lookalikes into coveted breeds, adding to their commodification and value.

Ironically, as someone who has worked with dogs who have bitten for seven years now, I’ve never worked with a breed that has been legislated against.

What dogs have bitten that I’ve worked with? Cocker spaniels, beagles, golden retrievers, labradors, malinois, German shepherds, bichons, Shih Tzus, Jack Russells, miniature pinschers, doberman pinschers, Airedales, huskies, malamutes, collies, cattle dogs, Australian shepherds, dachshunds, Chows, Yorkshire terriers, Japanese Chins, French spaniels, German Wirehaired pointers, German shorthaired pointers, lhasa Apsos…

Breed-specific legislation fails our dogs. It both popularises and demonises certain breeds and their lookalikes. It fails to protect the public from dogs who might injure them. It leads the public to think that certain dogs are ‘safe’ but others are dangerous. In fact, given the recent comments on a post involving dog bites, where the media failed to report the breed, there was a frenzy of enquiry and speculation about whether it was a pit bull or not. It wasn’t.

So what would work?

Firstly we desperately need better data. That has to include accurate information about the dog and the victim. It needs to also have a way to include bites that did not result in hospitalisation. If there are lines of dogs within breeds or even families of mixed breed dogs who are struggling to cope, then that matters hugely.

Second, we need to understand risk better. Jim Crosby identified crucial risk factors in fatal bites in the USA which should inform further research, but has not.

We know that dogs who live external to the family come with a high risk. We know that it is rarely family members who get bitten, and nor is it strangers: it is often children who are visitors to the property. We also know that many of the dogs who killed fatally were tethered or on their own territory.

This involves education at two levels, and perhaps even legislation. Firstly, it’s going to necessitate the end of dogs living chained outdoors. That in itself is complex because it involves cultural and societal behaviours from groups that are often marginalised anyway. For instance, disenfranchised and marginalised young men often have dogs like this removed from them and their behaviours are frowned upon if not legislated against. Compare that to, say, footballers, who buy £40,000 trained protection dogs to guard their mansions. The difference between those groups? Income and the cost of the dog for a start, and a whole load of social issues for another. The difference between a rottweiler guarding a travellers’ site and a rottweiler guarding the home of the rich is nothing other than money and social norms. It will also mean changing policing procedures. That will mean accepting that the rural and urban poor deserve both protection and policing, rather than being left to their own devices.

What we do need people to understand is that once a guard dog has missed the vital socialisation that facilitated their skills, then the likelihood of those dogs going on to accept another family or someone entering their territory is low.

We also need people to understand another fatal aspect: the education of young children. From my own experience, I know how hard it is to keep young, confident, dog-loving children away from dogs even if you’ve done everything you can to keep them separate. It reminds me of a situation in a neighbouring area where a toddler was killed. The dog had been locked away for the evening and had spent 4 hours ‘safe’. As the evening wore on, the adult guests had more and more to drink, and the children got more and more bored. It only took two minutes of passive supervision late in the night for the children to find the key and let the dog out. It took little longer for the night to end in tragedy.

Thus, the education of guardians and the education of children is vital. When we’re raising properly socialised dogs who have learned bite inhibition because they’ve had hundreds of opportunities to engage with other dogs and with humans of all colours, shapes, ages and sizes, then we’re less likely to have the kind of fatalities that cross the desk of investigators like Jim Crosby.

For me, I think we’re much less likely to have even the hard bites that hospitalise. It’s not just about socialisation. It’s also about helping dogs learn to control their actions and behaviour as well as learn how to manage frustration. Perhaps the worst bites I’ve ever seen have not been as a result of anything you or I might class as aggression, and that is also very tough to understand. Dogs raised in family homes during their formative weeks and months, rather than shunted out to a yard do not, in my experience, bite as hard. That involves educating breeders and completely outlawing puppy farms. If municipal authorities were then to offer low-cost or even free high-quality, regulated puppy classes in vulnerable geographical and economic pockets of their communities, we’d be more likely to raise dogs who can cope better with whatever life throws at them.

Instead of all the money spent on legal trials for dogs who have literally never put a paw wrong, those funds could go into the community. Instead of spending thousands on kennelling innocent dogs for months or even years, those funds could support education programmes at a grassroots level.

There has to be a cultural push though to end puppy farming and to end legislation that is ineffective. We can also push for landlords to have to provide for dogs so that fewer dogs need to change hands – it’s often in that change of hands that fatal bites occur. If people didn’t have to get rid of their dogs because they can’t find rented accommodation that accepts animals, then we’d also have fewer issues. I saw a charity in my home town appealing for landlords who accept cats this morning. The more legislation exists to protect landlords and not renters, the worse the problem will become. People will still own dogs but then be able to keep them instead of rehoming them if they need to move. Transient lifestyles do not lend themselves to secure homes for dogs.

That would mean, though, that governmental, federal or municipal authorities have to open their eyes and see the problem holistically, rather than taking a knee-jerk reaction that actually makes the situation worse.

We also have to understand that there are many things in life more dangerous than dogs. That list includes DIY, swimming pools and cars. If the media were to take a more responsible approach to reporting and stopped reporting on ‘epidemics of dog bites’, it might go some way to stopping the pearl-clutching panic and demonising particular breeds.

I can dream!

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Many dogs really struggle to cope when walking past homes where a dog is loose in the garden.

In fact, there are two dogs struggling here.

One is your dog as you valiantly try to get past. The other is the dog struggling to cope with other dogs outside the property.

There are lots of people who are trying to find ways to stop their dog barking at pedestrians and dogs outside the property. If you’re on the inside of the fence, you can use my alert and alarm barking protocol.

This ten-step protocol will make a difference, I absolutely promise you. There’s no way I could live sanely in a densely populated area with a very large number of dogs around the neighbourhood who bark periodically if I didn’t have this protocol in place. It’s been a sanity saver, if not a life saver.

If you want to know how to stop your dog barking when people pass by with their dogs, bookmark that page and follow it to the letter!

I will say one thing: if every guardian where I live had this in place, there wouldn’t be a struggle trying to get past.

The big question for those of us with dogs who react as they walk past fences is: do you avoid, do you hurry past or do you try to do some training to help your dog cope?

Avoiding the home with the dog barking behind a fence seems like a cop-out. We don’t thnk our dog is learning anything. We know we’re not helping our dogs out if we don’t help them cope.

Hurrying past is also a huge challenge. I know dogs who freeze when dogs behind fences start barking at them. One person I know has to then pick his dog up and carry him – all 20kg of dog – past the offending barker.

As someone who has 60kg of dog on a lead, trying to get past when they’re lunging and barking at the fence is a nightmare, let me tell you. I’d love to hurry past! It takes me at least three times as long to get past these houses as it does to get past a normal house.

Even so, slowing down to do training with a dog while a dog outside a home is going nuts is not without its problems.

So which is the best option to take?

When to avoid homes where dogs are barking behind fences

Humans feel a surprising aversion to avoiding places where there are dogs running fence lines and going nuts.

It’s almost like it’s our superior human right or something.

I say this as I was once asked to do a webinar to a triathlon group about what to do if dogs attacked. I explained a lot about territorial behaviour. One man said that he’d been repeatedly attacked by the same dogs as he rode his bike past them every day. He explained that they were unfenced and he wanted to know if pepper spray would be enough to deter them.

I explained that pepper sprays are notoriously unreliable and dependent on wind conditions – he was as likely to get a face of pepper spray as the dogs would. I asked if he had any other route to go. Yes, he explained.

Why didn’t he take that route instead?

Because it was the way he wanted to go.

The detour would have taken him a couple of minutes. That’s all.

He’d rather have got bitten than change his route.

Unlike this gentleman who had a pathological hatred of both dogs and their guardians, as well as a sense of his God-given superiority over animals (although he admitted he wouldn’t ride through a field with a bull in it…), you’re a dog lover. At least, I hope so!

One of my neighbours had a Brittany spaniel who spent most of his day in a fenced yard. The dog had an (ineffective) bark collar. The dog would bark, whine, bark, whine, bark, whine… all while throwing himself against the fence.

Now I don’t know about you, but I am not at all a fan of giving other dogs shocks. I’m certainly not a fan if it’s actually not making a stick of difference.

So, I didn’t go that way.

I also had a neighbour whose dog had an invisible perimeter shock collar. Now that mostly kept that dog from getting out of the garden, which was also surrounded by a couple of horse fields with electric fencing. I say mostly because… once when we walked past, he decided to go for it anyway. He got zapped by his collar, zapped twice by the high-voltage electric horse fencing itself and we very luckily avoided a fight because I was able to secure my own dogs quickly.

So I did not trust that home or that invisible perimeter shock collar. I did not trust that high-voltage electrified fencing either.

It is not some crushing defeat to choose another way. It is not a crushing defeat to wait until the dog is inside. If avoiding their home also avoids penalties and punishments for the dog who lives there, and you have other routes to go, put your human superiorities and foibles to one side. Do yourself a favour and take the easy route.

And, just because there are no shock collars or shouting owners who come out and punish the dog, it doesn’t mean that you have a green light. Sure, you can possibly train the dog who lives there to accept you going past by throwing them treats or whatever, but you also have to consider if the dog has allergies you don’t know about.

Also, even if you were to change your passing into an event that caused paroxysms of joy, you may well cause just as much jumping up and barking which is just as difficult for your own dog to cope with.

When to do training outside the home of a dog going nuts behind a fence

Never.

I’m guessing you’re hoping the fence is secure.

Again, your dog may well be able to cope with it, but you have to consider that the other dog cannot.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not so selfish that I’d stand there in front of a fence with my own dog eating biscuits driving another dog nuts.

You know how I judge my dog-walking neighbours?

By what they do when they go past homes with dogs barking in windows and at fences.

You know when I fell in love with my neighbours and their Frenchie? When the dog was dawdling a little and his guardian said, ‘Come on. You’re winding those dogs up!’

You know when I realised the two women who walk their dogs were not my kind of people? When they stood outside a home gossipping for ten minutes while the dog inside was losing his mind. Plus, they also didn’t bag up what their own dogs left behind… said it all.

Take heed. You’re judged on your choices by mean old ladies like me.

You may feel like you’re doing your own dog a favour and teaching your own dogs how to cope, but please remember that to do so comes at the expense of the other dog’s peace of mind. It’s not their fault their guardians don’t know about the alert and alarm barking protocol.

Also, it’s likely to be highly aversive for your own dog.

When to hurry past

If there’s literally no other way you can go and you are safe to pass. If it’s a regular spot, either change your route or change the time you walk. Sometimes, it’s just that the dog is out there at particular times. In rural France, there are plenty of places where dogs live outside in permanence, and that can make it tough. If your dog is likely to lunge and bark too, then it’s definitely time to give it a miss.

I’d be tempted also to hurry past if the dog only has a very small area where they can see you. If you’ve got to try and hurry past a dog who is racing 300 or 400m while you try desperately to get your own dog past, you’ll know it’s much easier to get past a solid stone wall that has a 1m wide ironwork gate and you’re not going to cause either dog distress for long.

‘But there’s no other way we can go!’ or ‘I want my dog to be okay in case of emergency!’

There are those of us who would never be able to get out of our homes if we avoided every other home with a barking dog living permanently outside. Not all of us have dogs who are happy in cars. Not all of us have cars. Not all of us want to use our cars just to get our dog in and out of the neighbourhood.

There are also those of us who have relatively peaceful neighbourhoods, and then the odd time there’s a dog outside.

The first thing to realise is that if you are trying to work with your barking and lunging dog as they’re fence-fighting with another barking dog, you are asking far too much of your own dog.

What you want is for your dog to be able to work with you in a structured way around distractions. It shouldn’t matter what those distractions are, but you will have to acknowledge that walking past a home with a large, ferocious dog fence-running and barking for 200m is the pinnacle of focus work.

One important thing can be to have a dog that can walk on both sides of you. If you’ve got a narrow pavement between you and the dog, if you can’t cross over the road or you don’t have much space, being able to keep your own dog away from the fence is an essential. Although you are not much of an obstacle, it’s better to position yourself between your dog and the fence than it is to have the two dogs separated only by the fence.

Having a dog who can u-turn under pressure is also an important skill. Trying to move any dog around who’s already in the process of yelling at another through the fence is not the easiest.

Finally, having a simple and reliable set of small, easy, predictable behaviours is also useful. I use ‘find it!’ and ‘1, 2, 3’ to use treat placement to help my dog move forward quickly as we move away (find it!) and to keep behind me as we approach (1, 2, 3). You can see these in more detail in this post.

You may also want to keep them moving with a hand touch. Amy Cook has her lovely ‘Magnet Hand’ where she has a hand full of treats that she keeps just in front of her dog’s nose as a lure in case of emergencies.

Whatever you do, though, will need some thought and practice in a variety of contexts, including around other dogs and other fences where there are dogs less bothered by your presence.

It needn’t be a complete trauma to get past your noisy neighbours, but a little bit of preparation will definitely help you out.

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Some of my clients struggle when it comes to getting their dog to focus on them outside on walks. That can make their real-world training really tough.

I just can’t tell you how helpful it is to have a dog who’ll take food when you’re trying to teach recall, loose lead or even when you’re trying to work around challenges like wildlife, livestock, cars, humans and other dogs.

The first thing to do is rule out these ten reasons why your dog might not be treat-oriented:

#1 You’ve been using low grade food – break out the good stuff!

#2 You haven’t yet trained an ‘eat anywhere, anytime’ habit

#3 Your dog is anxious, overstimulated or overwhelmed

#4 Your dog is sick or unwell

#5 They’re not at all hungry

#6 You’re asking too much and not using a gradient for distractions

#7 You don’t have a training relationship with your dog

#8 You’re using your hand as a plate when your dog is miles from you or focused on other things

#9 Your training is too hard

#10 You’ve wrecked food for your dog and they don’t trust you

Today, I want to look in more detail at number 8. Where and how we deliver the treats is absolutely crucial!

These three secrets from the world of professional dog training can really skill you up.

#1 Know WHEN to deliver from your hand*

*AND also know its drawbacks

When you deliver food from your hand, you’re asking your dog to do a lot. First, this needs them to break their focus on whatever it was they were doing, whether it’s sniffing or staring. Then it needs them to turn away from whatever it is that is invariably better than whatever you’ve got in your hand. Then it needs them to move away.

This demands a huge amount of control and inhibition.

Imagine my lovely Lidy this morning as we came around a corner to find two young cats, frozen. Lidy finds cats immensely exciting. She has attacked cats before she came to the shelter and of all the other animals, cats are the one that give her the biggest thrill.

Can you imagine if I ask her at that point to come back to me, to eat from my hand?

‘Here, Lidy… yes, I know those cats are IMMENSELY thrilling and you would very much like to jump start them into motion and chase them. Please refrain from doing THAT and come and eat this stale old ball of flour from my hand.’

1. Stop looking at them. 2. Turn around. 3. Come back to me. 4. Eat a stale biscuit.

Hmmmm.

In cases like these, using your hand as a plate while you feebly try and cue your dog is likely a lost cause.

Delivering from your hand as I’m doing here is BOSS level mastery of skills. It requires training. It requires practice. It requires focus.

Those are its downsides.

It demands a high level of cognitive control from your dog. It’s tough. It requires patience to teach. Of all the places I deliver food on walks, from my hand is the hardest.

Why would anyone ever do this?

It can be really good for avoiding things that you’ve detected and your dog has not. If your dog is not ready to distract themselves from interesting or stressful things yet, then you’ll need to provide the support.

You do this BEFORE things hit the fan. If I would 100% guarantee that my dog will not cope without me supporting them, then I will use a cue to get them to come back and then I will keep them looking at me while I survey the world on our behalf and keep the dogs busy with my hands.

The best way to get it? Find a behaviour that involves your dog targeting some part of your body and then consistently deliver from your hands. They can use their eyes to target (like ‘Watch me!’), they can use their nose (like ‘Touch!’ where they touch their nose to your hand) or they can use a body part (like ‘Lean!’ where they target their shoulder to your leg).

Start small in the kitchen or home and scale up.

Delivering from my hand has helped us avoid deer, joggers, cyclists, hedgehogs and cats. When I see something and my dogs haven’t, I step up. This also requires a couple of behaviours where food reliably comes from your hand. I cue ‘touch’ because that always means the food will be delivered from my hand, and I cue ‘watch’ which means the same. Don’t vary where the food is delivered from and pick a behaviour that your dog is enthusiastic about. Lidy loves hand touch. Heston loves spin.

Delivering from your hand is a great way of stepping up and supporting your dog if they need help distracting themselves.

This is a video I’d made as part of a series on loose-lead walking. What we need to realise is JUST how hard focusing on a human can be when there’s a lot of environmental challenge, and that eating from the human’s hand requires a high degree of control. This control *will* need scaffolding and you *will* need to build up to it.

#2 Know WHEN to go to the dog and feed from your hand

When I’m working on paired learning, I quite often feed from my hand. I don’t do much respondent counterconditioning, where we’re changing the dog’s feelings about a conditioned stimulus using food as a way to elicit an incompatible physiological, emotional and behavioural response, but I’ll quite often stick it right in with a massive great big jackpot when the dog does something I want to build on.

For instance, yesterday, Lidy was calmly watching two lambs moving and also watching their mum who was staring at us. I went to her and I fed her a huge jackpot of about 10 great treats. Today, she came back to me instead of me going to her. She’s smart. She knows who has the treats.

To have asked her to disengage, to turn around, to come back to me and do some voluntary behaviours rather than everything her instinct was telling her to do was too hard. She could eat, but the other bits were too hard. I went to her. She needed to do nothing than open her mouth and chew. That was hard enough. She kept her eye on the sheep and she didn’t change anything about her own position or posture. She just ate.

Going to the dog and feeding from your hand is a useful step in scaffolding behaviours that will eventually become voluntary disengagement and u-turns.

Too many of us, however, expect the dog to listen to our cue, to disengage, to turn around and to come to us. Much easier if you’re working on a lead or long line if you go to the dog. If your food reward is big enough, you should find that within two or three trials, your dog will disengage to eat.

This intermediate step shouldn’t take very long if you put aside your inner Grinch, pay up and pay out a jackpot. You might only need to do it once before you can then start shaping those moments when your dog naturally turns away to see why the food is late.

It can be very useful if your dog will eat but the other bits that you’re asking are just too hard.

#3 Make the food move so that the environment pays up

So many guardians aren’t making the most of their dog’s specific talent. If you’ve got a dog who visually fixes on things, make the food move visually by rolling it or throwing it so that it catches their eye and they have to visually track it.

This makes it much more fun for the dog and stops you fighting against all their inner urges. What did Lidy want to do with the cats this morning? Watch them run, catch them and grab them.

Food can do this if you make it. It moves fast, it can be caught and grabbed.

No, a bit of ham or cheese is absolutely not the same as catching a cat. But Behaviour has this helpful friend called Habit. Dogs do what has reliably been reinforced in the past. If it’s a small dose of the stuff they enjoy, so much the better.

It can also be used to break up a dog’s visual fix, keep them moving and keep the pace up.

If you’ve got a dog whose nose is to the ground and enjoys scentwork, using longer grass can give their nose a work out as well.

This is another video where the environment is reinforcing the dog, not really me. The movement of the food, finding the food, sniffing it out if necessary – those are all ways that we can make training more fun for a dog. It’s much more dynamic and fun for the dog.

Where I wouldn’t use this method is with dogs who are in an environment where they need a bit more support and direction. Of course, this can also require dogs to disengage from one target and fix on another so it’s not as easy as it looks from the dog’s brain’s perspective.

Using food from the environment also takes the pressure off dogs who are sensitive to humans or who have a fear of human hands. It’s useful for dogs who are overcoming guarding and distrust with their guardians but also for dogs we’re not familiar with.

Lidy here models one way people can use food to encourage closeness from dogs without adding the pressure of making them approach a scary human.

I very often use Suzanne Clothier’s Treat and Retreat with dogs, but with nervous or shy dogs, it means you have to throw the treat and that gesture in itself can be something they struggle with. Here, they’re encouraged to move in by two things: the food AND by the human moving away.

By the way, this is also great for recall and loose lead practice. Simple, easy and reminds the dog that being near you comes with benefits.

#4 Added bonus: use the food delivery position to test whether the dog still wants to engage

When Lidy first arrived, I had a hell of a time grooming her. She would bite the brush, grab my hand and generally do everything she could not to be groomed. I’ve worked with some malinois who are so excited by human hand movement and contact that they bite and grab straight away. Throwing the food away from you and the brush gives them a chance to reset AND if they want to come back, they will.

Throwing the food away from you and letting the environment cough up is a good way to reinforce at the end of muzzle training, mat training, platform training, training the dog to stay in their bed. I even use it to teach loose lead. When the dog has walked near to me for a planned number of paces, I mark their success with a marker word ‘good!’ and then the treat goes away from the dog. When they come back and get in position again, that shows they truly understand what it is that’s getting the treat. It also ensures that they’re consenting.

Here, you can see me do it with Lidy and her brush. You can also see me do it with Heston as we practise some loose lead walking skills. Yes, I know we have no lead. You don’t need a lead to teach loose lead skills!

Allowing the environment to pay up is an ideal way of testing whether the dog is comfortable with what you’re doing and the position you’ve asked them to take.

Ultimately, you can really make a difference to your dog’s engagement with what you’re asking them to do by considering where you will deliver the treat, and how.

PS Many people worry unduly about dogs eating anything from the floor. Heston’s treatment with phenobarbitol for his epilepsy has meant that he is a constant scavenger. Cat poo and roadkill are particular favourites.

One thing I do NOT find is that food going on the ground increases their likelihood of scavenging; In fact, rewarding from the hand when they choose to ignore a likely pavement food source is a great way to work through this.

On our walks, there is one cat who never buries his turds and who always goes at the same spot. This is quite attractive to Heston. I reward from me as we walk past this place and he deliberately chooses to disengage. This has stopped him fixating on that place and pulling to get to it each morning. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush as they say. Or, a treat from the hand is worth two turds on the grass, perhaps.

Now, as we get to that place on our walk, he comes to heel without cuing and I feed every three paces from my hand until we’re past.

No other dog I’ve ever worked with, including a very large number of beagles, labradors and spaniels who are often life’s natural scavengers, has ever started scavenging as a result of dropped, hidden or thrown treats. If they were scavenging before, feeding from the hand can help them if they need structured support to disengage and has actually diminished their scavenging. Because of the training history and habit, they’ve been much easier to call away from things they might pick up.

It matters how and where we deliver food for our dogs. We can use those factors to our advantage if we’re sensible and improve our training success. In the home, garden, shelter, kennel or car, remote controlled treat delivery systems can also remove the need for throwing. They’re much neater too!

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In the last three posts, we’ve been thinking about regulation.

Regulation is a term that is more and more frequently used by dog trainers these days. However, without a shared understanding of what regulation is, many dog trainers are just using it to mean the dog can follow rules and be calm.

Regulation is so much more than that.

Regulation means the way in which we modulate our physiological reactions. For instance, that might mean how quickly we calm down after a shock or something exciting. A way we might see this in dogs is how long it takes them to relax again after a loud noise. Where dogs can’t modulate their physiological reactions, we might see them taking an extremely long time to recover from sudden noises like fireworks, or being unable to dial it down a notch in play.

Regulation also means how we modulate our emotional reactions, learning to cope with frustration, to channel our anger or excitement. We might see this in dogs if they choose to go and busy themselves with something else if they can’t do what they want. Where dogs are less able to modulate their emotional responses, we might see them engaging in intense behaviour or engaging in noisy or disruptive behaviour if they can’t have their needs met instantly.

It means how we modulate our behaviour according to the context. For instance, we learn that we can run outside but we are supposed to walk inside. We might see this in dogs if they choose to walk on lead rather than trotting or running. Where dogs are less able to modulate their behavioural responses, we might see them choosing much more intense behaviours than are required, such as biting if they can’t escape quite minor restraint.

Many dog trainers think that regulation is an internal process for dogs, rather than something that is social. Social regulation is an important part of being a social species. We learn because others help us shape ourbehaviour.

The arbitrary categorisation of physiology, emotion, individual behaviour and social behaviour can also be unhelpful. They are intertwined and often difficult to separate.

For instance, if my dog snatches a toy out of my hand when we’re playing, she is not moderating her physiological, emotional, behavioural or social response appropriately. To try and separate them from each other is like trying to separate the whites from the yolk when you’ve cooked an omelette.

We also need to remember that regulation is a developmental process.

Dogs aren’t born knowing how to manage their responses.

It’s also an interactive process, meaning that we learn through the support of others, not through some magical and astonishing appearance of these skills at some developmental milestone.

These skills are taught to children by parents, peers, other adults, by society and also shaped by cultural expectations. Just as an example, some American guests I had a few years ago were amazed by how quiet French children are in restaurants and how well they waited patiently at the buffet table. We forget things like noise levels are cultural constructs. Back in the UK, it takes me a while to adjust to how noisy British people are.

Because we forget how important social interactions and parenting are on the development of these skills in our own species, we sometimes run the risk of forgetting how important it is to scaffold and support our dogs in acquiring the ability to self-regulate. Sadly, we often overestimate how good puppies should be at regulating their physiology, their emotions, their behaviour and their social interactions. House training and coping alone are just two simple, basic activities where many guardians expect more of 10-week-old puppies than they are cognitively or physiologically capable of.

The same is true, though, of our adult dogs.

Just as an example, my girl Lidy finds sheep enormously challenging to be around. It’s my job as a guardian to help her learn to manage her own behaviour.

Unfortunately, some trainers who dislike coercion see support for regulation as an imposed structure. It’s important to remember that co-regulation is an essential step in developing the ability to do it ourselves.

Understanding co-regulation is actually an important step in working with dogs whose behaviour is sometimes less appropriate than required in the cultures we live in.

Co-regulation, where we vary the level of support we offer to our dogs to help them choose the appropriate response, is not some simple one-size-fits-all support. It happens when we share responsibility for regulating emotions and behaviour.

This support has layers and levels.

If you don’t understand these layers and levels as a trainer, you’ll not know, for instance, when you need to mark and move in BAT 2.0, or when you need Leslie McDevitt’s Pattern Games. You’ll not know when you just need to set up the right situation for the dog or when you need to offer a much more rigorous layer of support.

Understanding the layers of co-regulation helps me on a daily basis.

For instance, Lidy often struggles with all moving stimuli and any novelty. This morning she struggled to cope with a dropped tissue on our walk, for example. It took her a good two minutes of processing to make sense of it.

As her guardian, I need to know when she is going to really struggle. For instance, a horse and rider went past us less than 2m away the other day. That is too huge a trigger and at too close proximity for me to expect her to keep her cool.

I also need to know when to let her process things and when I need to help her move on. She struggles a great deal with impulse control and, as a shepherd dog, she’s had a lot of selection of behaviour to work in partnership with a shepherd. Some types of dog are more in tune with human behaviour and more responsive to human cues.

I would say that often, Lidy would make the worst possible choice, if given the choice.

It’s my job to help her learn to make better choices. At the same time, understanding the following four layers of co-regulatory actions can really help.

Distraction

Often, dog trainers and guardians think of distraction as a time when no learning is occurring. I know I’ve certainly advised guardians not to use training as distraction.

We might worry, for instance, that our dogs aren’t processing the environment if we’re occupying them with cues and keeping their attention on us. There’s a very strong movement in dog training to let dogs process the environment. Give them more time to process, the argument goes, and they’ll make the appropriate behavioural response.

The only problem is that real-life dogs aren’t always like that.

Giving dogs time to process is great when they’ve got a short behavioural history, where there’s space, where there’s sufficient distance, when you’re working with an independent dog and when the guardian has historically been putting dogs in over their head.

In fact, these trainers are suggesting you use a much more cognitively complex layer of co-regulation: reappraisal.

Many of the dogs I work with need more support than simple opportunities for reappraisal. They may have a long history of explosive behaviour that has worked perfectly to keep others away. They may be a dog who actually needs instruction and support.

Also, even if your dog is making better decisions when reappraising, there may be times when you need to distract even so. Like if you turn a blind corner and there’s a horse 2m from you. Expecting a dog to coolly reappraise in those circumstances is to overestimate a dog’s cognitive skills to voluntarily inhibit their responses, kind of like expecting us just to be able to stop hiccups simply by calming ourselves down. You know, sometimes I can do that with my hiccups. Other times I need to intervene. It’s the same with dogs.

Dogs ARE learning when distracted. They may be learning to focus their attention on other things. This morning, Lidy voluntarily offered her focus to me when we were right next to a field of nervous lambs and adolescent starey sheep. Distraction is a very underrated skill!

For instance, we may choose to distract ourselves if we’re anxious. I remember one time being away from my epileptic dog and having left him with my dad; I couldn’t get hold of my dad and I was in a mad panic worrying what had happened. I think I called him 50-odd times! What helped me manage my anxiety? Deliberately choosing to go and sit with a group of people and chat with them. Taking our minds off things is a crucial skill. It’s one I learned… with a clinical psychologist to help me manage my anxiety!

How many times with toddlers do we help them cope with excitement by helping them distract themselves? How many times do we help them switch focus?

What we pay attention to is not arbitrary. When we can regulate ourselves, we can have that extreme focus. It’s part of what top athletes learn. Imagine going out on to a football pitch and being upset by everything the opposition jeered?

But these skills are taught. They don’t magically just happen. Try teaching primary school on a snow day if you don’t believe me.

So as guardians, we need to help our dogs learn to re-focus on other stuff. We need to help them learn what to pay attention to, and how to shift their attention when required. We need to scaffold this process, so that we pass the baton for who controls their attention from us to them. We also need to know that at some times, it’s useful for us to pick up that baton to help them out.

Instead of thinking of distraction as some kind of avoidance of learning, we need to see it as a key coping skill that needs scaffolding through to independence. Asking for behaviour and focus on us rather than on vehicles, wildlife, livestock, strangers or unfamiliar dogs can be one way that we teach dogs to shift their attention. We can also help dogs learn how to do this voluntarily without cues or prompts.

If we play games like Find it! or Pattern Games like Ping Pong, it can also encourage dogs to disengage and refocus.

Some dog trainers see these as avoiding the trigger for behaviour. We might do better if we reframe it and think of behaviours like these as ones that help dogs learn to disengage and re-focus their attention.

Just as a caution, the more you expect a dog to do to distract them (like turn away or move away), the harder it can be. Amy Cook’s ‘Treat Hand’ or ‘Magnet Hand’ where she lures the dog with a handful of high quality food, is one example of a fairly undemanding behaviour that doesn’t ask much of the dog.

The harder the distraction behaviour we ask is, the harder it will be for the dog.

This is especially true if the behaviour we are asking for has a high level of demand. If the dog has to coordinate their body, override their instincts, move their attention away and also refocus on something else, that demands an awful lot of cognitive power. Ask something simple in easier circumstances and watch your ability to shift your dog’s attention increase exponentially.

Remember also that behaviours are habits: practice makes perfect.

The more practice you have at distracting your dog, the easier it will become.

Reappraisal

Many training programmes to help dogs cope with things they come across involve reappraisal. Grisha Stewart’s BAT 2.0 is largely reappraisal with some support through marking behaviour and moving when appropriate. Leslie McDevitt’s Look At That and LATTE are reappraisal AND attention shifting. This is partly why I love it so much. As with so much in Leslie’s Control Unleashed, it works on a gazillion levels and every single one of them turns out to reflect some core skill.

When we help dogs to reappraise threat, especially when we do so without requiring them to do anything, we help them learn that things are not so threatening. Sometimes, we just watch and reflect.

Lidy did that this morning with that naughty dropped tissue. I swear she stared at it for about two minutes. I just let her take it in and work out for herself that it is not a threat (or anything else). She was just working out what it was. As a guardian, my role is to distinguish between things she may need help refocusing her attention away from at times (like starey sheep) and things where she simply needs to reappraise (like dropped litter, or sheep eating or resting). I don’t always get that right. However, I don’t leave the deciding to her because she doesn’t have the skills yet.

Yet.

She’s learning.

Where dogs have highly impulsive behaviours or they are predatory in nature, reappraisal generally does not go too well. I mean, looking at a pheasant for a long time will usually just end in a reappraisal that, yes, that would be FUN to chase. Reappraisal is not a particularly useful strategy in that case. This is where we need to consider other layers of support. The same is true with most forms of chasing or excitement behaviours. It generally leads to frustration, because the dog can’t have their needs met.

Where reappraisal is really useful is where there isn’t any threat. For instance, that tissue was no threat at all. If your dog misidentifies inanimate objects as a threat, reappraisal can be really useful. Giving dogs time to think about stuff where it poses no risk or threat at all can be a great way for dogs to learn the skills they need to decide whether things are a threat or not.

Reappraisal is also particularly useful with superstitious behaviour, where the dog thinks (or, at least, the behaviour thinks) that what they do makes something else happen. For instance, if a dog who is barking and lunging thinks this behaviour keeps strangers and unfamiliar dogs away, when in fact, they’re just passers-by who would have gone away anyway, reappraisal is a very useful skill.

Marking and reinforcing self-chosen behaviours

Most behaviour works on an intake-output pathway. The individual senses something and then the central nervous system passes that information on to various motor systems and muscles to act upon it.

You know. Oh, crap! Tiger! Stand still, play dead or run? And the body prepares us for the course of action we’re about to take.

Distraction works on the sensory perception stage. Can you take your attention away from the thing?

Reappraisal works on the cognitive processing stage. Can you make better sense of the thing?

Marking and reinforcing self-chosen behaviours works on the motor stage. It is one of two strategies we can use that help the dog move to independent regulation without any of our support. Can you behave differently in response to the thing?

Marking simply means signalling to the dog that they have done something at that moment that, in your opinion, was socially appropriate. The mark may be a word like ‘good’ or something like a clicker. It also serves a way of letting the dog know that something reinforcing will arrive.

A reinforcer is something that makes the behaviour more likely in the future. They’re not the same as a reward, which has no effect on the behaviour itself. Rewards can be great, but it’s only a reinforcer if it makes the behaviour more likely in the future.

As an example, we might mark and reinforce looking away. You’ll know this if you’ve done ‘mark and move’ where you immediately acknowledge the behaviour you like, and then move away or move on. The potential reinforcer is moving away, which is often what many fearful or reactive dogs want.

If you do the engage-disengage game or Suzanne Clothier’s Treat and Retreat, you are also reinforcing behaviours you want to see, like engaging, and then using the place that the food is delivered to encourage disengaging.

We should remember that these are not cued or prompted. That’s to say we don’t ask the dog to do anything. We don’t encourage them. We don’t move them away with a lead.

We’re simply noticing what they do that we’d like more of, and we’re strengthening that behaviour, making it more likely in the future.

Kathy Sdao’s wonderful SMART 50 can also work really well here too.

An example of how I used this during the week was with the close encounter with the horse; I marked Lidy’s good choices and I fed her copiously. She chose the behaviour, to look and not react, and I let her know that this was great.

There’s a certain view that this is the pinnacle of enlightened dog training but we need to remember that we are in fact reinforcing alternative choices and we are extinguishing the dog’s preferred behaviour. It is only our very human view that the behaviour the dog chooses is ‘better’ or ‘more appropriate’.

It’s our decision that this is better, and that is loaded with bias and snobbery if we think that it’s ‘best’ if we shape our preferred versions of what the dog chooses to do. Just because we aren’t telling the dog ‘move’ or we aren’t telling them ‘leave it’ or ‘heel’ or any other thing doesn’t make it some virtuous and holy improvement on training where behaviours are taught and cued.

Just as French children are certainly more quiet in restaurants than British or US children because that will have been reinforced, or noisy behaviour punished, does not mean it’s somehow intrinsically ‘good’. No doubt some British or US people would find the quiet disturbing and coercive, just as some French might find noisy children wild and uncontrolled.

When we identify what we think of as socially appropriate behaviours, we shouldn’t think that taught and cued behaviours are any less coercive than ones we’re building without cues.

In any case, where snobby and saintly trainers have shared their work, they’re invariably using gestures or even their own body weight or posture to cue the dog’s response, like if I begin to move away and Lidy feels the lead pressure alter slightly or senses me move.

Cuing and reinforcing taught behaviours

The fourth skill we use when helping our dogs learn how to regulate is teaching them a taught skill separately and then cuing that behaviour. This can be really useful for dogs that get ‘stuck’ and need a bit of prompting.

As I said earlier, we shouldn’t be snobby about this and see it as inferior to the dog seeming to make their own choice (which is simply one we’ve decided, in our infinite wisdom is superior to whatever they were doing).

A cue might be a verbal cue, like ‘move away’ or ‘watch me’, or even ‘Find it!’

A cue can also be things like the movement of the lead or our own movement away.

It can also be something we do.

For instance, I sometimes lob a treat over Lidy’s head so it skitters on the floor. Though I don’t say anything, this cues her to break her gaze, to look to the floor and do something else like use her nose to sniff a treat out.

The delivery of the reinforcer itself (for walking and looking, not lunging) is a cue for her to break her gaze and disengage.

This little prompt encourages her to do another behaviour.

Sometimes these behaviours can be taught separately, like a u-turn or a hand touch, and then we can prompt the dog to engage with us in return for rewards which may then strengthen the behaviour.

In practice…

In practice, guardians who are supporting their dog’s emotional wellbeing will use a blend of all four support mechanisms. We will do so in a way that is appropriate for that individual dog in that individual environment.

There will be times when I appreciate how difficult the situation is for my dog. Lidy struggles to cope with cats, especially those who run. If I see a cat, I will use our training history to distract her and help her focus on something else. That might be me or it might be something else. For instance, I could cue a ‘watch!’ or a ‘follow me!’ or a ‘u-turn’. If I scatter food and cue her to find it, then I am helping her focus on something else.

There will be times when I give her time to reappraise, as I did this morning with a man and his dog. They were moving away from us and far enough away that I was sure she could cope. I also gave her time (!) to reappraise the clearly out-of-place tissue.

At other times, I shape behaviours I’ve decided are appropriate, like disengaging and walking on. Sometimes I do this with praise and sometimes food. I did that this morning as we walked past the starey adolescent sheep. They were static as they appraised us, so I knew that if she did not appear to be a threat, they would remain still or even go back to eating. I used praise and food to keep her from staring back and kept her moving forward without pulling.

There will also be times when I cue those behaviours. For instance, when we went past the gambolling lambs in the first field this morning, I told her to ‘find it!’ when she got a bit stuck, and directed her to do other things. In reality, this is also distraction too.

Knowing our dogs and when they need what level of support is the most important thing. As you can see, I did not talk about my other dog Heston who needs none of these things, even with the starey sheep. He looked. He disengaged. He’s regulating his own reactions and behaviour without my support. Though he loves chasing wildlife, he not only knows the rules about chasing livestock but he also doesn’t pay them any mind. He does not even pay attention to them. It is as if they are not there. I don’t know if Lidy will ever live without at least some support, but it’s not important. She depends on me to help her out when her behaviour would be dangerous or destructive, let alone socially inappropriate.

That’s what I’m here for, so she can lean on me.

Whenever we’re talking about regulation, it is so important that we do not forget the role of co-regulation. It is the behaviour of a supportive social group, not the imposition of an autocratic dictator. We also need to consider that regulation itself is not an individual thing. For social species, it is a a social thing. It’s not a sign of weakness that we sometimes need support for our own emotions and behaviours. It is a sign that we are a social species. That’s all.

Let’s not forget that dogs are a social species too, and that we are part of their support network. Also, let’s not assume that regulation just happens. It doesn’t. It’s our responsibility to help our dogs become more self-sufficient when it comes to regulation. It’s not the sign of a poor guardian or a poor trainer if the dog needs more support and guidance; it is the sign of guardians and trainers helping their dogs learn for themselves.

Thanks for reading! If you’re a dog trainer and you’re looking for ways to help your clients co-regulate (because they’ll need it too!) then my book will help to give you ideas.

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