Reactivity strategies
In addition to working the reactive dog program this session was about bullet pointing the key elements to handling reactive situations when training doesn’t go as planned or life throws you surprises.
If you have not spent time in the reactivity modules and/or find yourself stuck at the CC/DS part of the program, remember that is just the piece to get our foot in the door of the reactive brain. We need to have strategies and plans of how to replace the reactive emotions with doing something else. DOING something else, we need to have action plans of how to help our dogs mitigate stressful situations and need to be actively working on what we want our dogs to do when they see triggers.
This is Butters with us on a rock climbing trip to Smith Rock, one of the busiest and hardest areas to navigate with a reactive dog. We saw almost a hundred dogs that day, and many were on tiny narrow trails. Butters was the most reactive dog i’ve ever known to this day, and his reactivity was not ever really gone, but no one would have known that because I used management to navigate those moments when I could see he was heightened.
THE NUMBER ONE ISSUE I see with most people’s reactivity work is they under estimate their dog’s threshold and they spend too much time trying to work when the dog is already too heightened to thing well. We tend to rate “reactive” behavior by only the end explosive result, rather than recognizing the more subtle signs a dog is over threshold. If your dog cannot look away from the trigger they are already over threshold. Watching is ok, but if they cannot also look somewhere else, they cannot recognize food, they cannot reorient to the environment, this tells you they are fixated on the trigger already and cannot think of anything else, so move further away if you can.
I built the reactivity program on the website and then immediately built the engagement course, because these two things go hand in hand. If your dog cannot play with you, cannot engage with you and have fun out in the world you will struggle to make it over the harder pieces of reactivity. Play and engagement can be a much better barometer for gauging a dog’s mindset than food. Many dogs will override lower levels of fear to eat than they will for play. Those dogs do exist, many border collies and working dogs are the flip opposite and will play and not eat. This is often a good way too assess if a dog’s reactivity is fear or over arousal, as many dogs when frustrated or aroused will channel that energy onto a toy, but can’t slow their brains enough to eat. This is also a good hint to which you should use, if my dog will play but not eat, then their ability to eat would be a good indicator for me for their mental state. And if my dog will eat but not play, than their ability to play becomes a good indicator for me to their mental state. Obviously taking into account if we have built a relationship with those reinforcers outside of the house.
The session is recorded and on the recorded zoom playlist. I’ve uploaded the notes for you:
The workshop will be offered again on a Saturday Morning in November
for those who couldn’t do the weekday options.