Treating Your Dog's Fear and Aggression: Turn the Leash Walk Into Therapy

We've changed the name of the Dog Aggression Answers podcast to "Grumpy Dogs: Overcoming Your Dog's Fear and Aggression." In addition to changing the name, we've added a YouTube channel if you'd like to watch me on video. See us at https://www.youtube.com/@grumpydogschannel.

Today we are unveiling a transformative 12-part series addressing the fear and aggression your four-legged friend might be grappling with to other dogs or humans. In this first episode I'm going to show you how you can change your dog's daily leash walks into a powerful behavioral therapy session to treat reactivity toward other dogs and/or humans.

Episode Link(s):
Watch video on leash skills needed for leash therapy.

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Resources:
Scott Sheaffer's Free & Premium Training Videos
Scott Sheaffer's Dog Behavior Articles
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About Scott Sheaffer
Scott Sheaffer, CCBC-KA, CDBC, CPDT-KA, is a certified dog behavior consultant who has worked with thousands of dog owners and their aggressive dogs. Scott specializes in the assessment and treatment of fear, anxiety, aggression, and phobias in dogs six months and older. For more information about Scott, see USADogBehavior.com.

Disclaimer
If your dog is aggressive toward humans, consult an experienced, certified canine behavior consultant immediately and ensure your dog cannot harm anyone. This podcast is for educational purposes only and does not replace professional guidance. Scott Sheaffer and USA Dog Behavior, LLC, are not liable for outcomes resulting from the advice provided.

Transcript

Scott Sheaffer: 0:00

Hi everyone, welcome to Grumpy Dogs overcoming your dog's fear and aggression. And for those of you who have been listening for a while, you sure have noticed the name change. It used to be called dog aggression answers and what we found is some people were kind of getting a little confused about what dog aggression answers meant and what it means and what the focus was. So we changed it to Grumpy Dogs the new name, new logo overcoming your dog's fear and aggression. That's kind of worked out a little bit better. So no other changes. Everything's pretty much the same as it was before, except for one cool little thing that we just started doing. We've added a channel on YouTube so you can see these podcasts and me on video and my guest, future guests, and all you need to do is just go to at Grumpy Dogs channel and you'll see us there, all right. Well, today's episode is kind of cool because it's the first one of a 12 episode series on addressing the primary types of dog aggression, the main ones that we see in dogs, the common ones. The first three episodes, of which this is the first, are about today's topic, which is using your daily walk with your dog to treat fear, reactivity and aggression to other dogs and even humans. Here's what I like to say. You have to walk your dog anyway, or you should, I guess. Why not change how you walk the dog so that it becomes behavior modification? In other words, it's kind of a twofer, isn't it? Well, stay with me as we get into that topic today. Are you struggling with a dog that is anxious or aggressive? You're at the right place because in this podcast series, we educate dog owners, veterinary practices and dog trainers on how to overcome dog fear and aggression using humane methods.

Scott Sheaffer: 1:56

My name is Scott Sheaffer and it's my mission to help you better understand your dog's behavior. Why does your dog whine, growl, lunge, pool and bark at other dogs or humans when you walk by? The umbrella term for this behavior is reactivity. Well, there are really three reasons, and it always distills down to these three reasons Fear, arousal and frustration. It's always a blend of all three of these and sometimes it's one or two of these and a little bit of the third. Sometimes it's mostly one, sometimes it's equally distributed, but there's always a component of fear, arousal and frustration when you have a dog like this. Usually let's talk about those Fear.

Scott Sheaffer: 2:50

Fear is usually the main ingredient. Normally it's seen as your dog pulling toward the trigger Again, that would be a human or a dog. When you're walking by, pulling, whining, barking, lunging as you go by this is an offensive defense, also called posturing what the dog is doing is saying, hey, I'm really scared of this thing coming by, dog or human, so I'm going to really amp up my aggression, or what looks like some types of aggression, to try to scare that thing away. The second one of fear, arousal. Frustration is arousal and it just simply means your dog is having a panicky response, including adrenaline. So remember, arousal doesn't mean good or bad, it just means I'm really hyper-focusing, paying attention and guess what other species. This is exactly like Humans, even the hormones, the adrenaline is the same. And the third component is frustration. Fear, arousal, frustration why your dog is doing these things, and frustration points to the fact that your dog is not in control. So think about it. Your dog is scared. Going by, there's fear and arousal, but they're tethered to you on a leash and so they're being forced to move toward the dog or human it doesn't like or it's a little bit scared of. That would be the frustration part. So fear, arousal, frustration is always why your dog does those behaviors as they walk by a trigger on the walk. So what do we do about it? We kind of have a basic understanding now. So what do we do about it? We expose your dog slowly to these triggers dogs and humans so that they can acclimate to these triggers.

Scott Sheaffer: 4:42

The technical term for this is called desensitization, and you can look this up on Wikipedia or whatever. The concept is exactly the same with animals as it is with humans. We do this primarily. We do this desensitization thing primarily with distance. We keep your dog at a distance from the trigger that they can tolerate. So as you walk by, you're going to and I'm going to show you this in upcoming episodes how to do this you're going to keep your dog at it just the right distance so that they're a little bit tested, but not so much, not too much and we expose them in a scheduled kind of way. It's a very planned, slow way, and I'm going to show you how to do that in upcoming episodes.

Scott Sheaffer: 5:30

The technical term for this is called threshold distance. That's the distance that we're playing with. It's called threshold distance. So this concept if I also make a quick analogy here this concept is really exactly like teaching a kid not to fear the water by starting at the shallow end of the pool and over time slowly moving deeper as the kid can tolerate it. And let me say too, just a little point here, that not only children are afraid of water. Sometimes I know a lot of adults that are afraid of water, and the reason I even mentioned that is because adult dogs can carry these fears, obviously into adulthood, just like adult humans can carry a fear of water into adulthood. But the technique is the same Art at the shallow end of the pool and slowly walk them deeper.

Scott Sheaffer: 6:23

In addition to doing that, where we just control this distance, we just give them this really formulaic exposure, which is pretty easy to do and I'll show you in upcoming episodes. We also pair the dogs looking at the triggers ie dogs or humans with a food treat as they pass by. More on all of this in the next episode. And, by the way, that little technique is called counter conditioning. I know we're using a few terms here Threshold, distance, sorry, come on, come on. Desensitization and counter conditioning. These are all maybe kind of fancy sounding terms, but the concept is pretty easy in execution and I'll show you how to do that it's a good science-based animal behavior training here. All right. Over time, when we do this, the distance your dog will need to pass by these triggers without getting all so reactive Wining, lunging, barking, growling to a point where they can walk by on the other side of the street with no issues at all. Maybe it'll just look as they go by, which would be normal, but there's none of those other things I just mentioned. Over time they can walk through, walk by and not react. And when I say over time, let me say something about this too, about time. This is a good point to talk about that, because it's the first of these 12 episodes Time.

Scott Sheaffer: 7:55

When it comes to these behaviors, this kind of dog reactivity to dogs and humans that fear aggression, et cetera, it's not something that can be fixed in two weeks. It just isn't, and a couple of reasons for that is one is every dog is different. You can't say, well, every dog is gonna be remedied of this in two weeks. Just not gonna work, can't do it. Furthermore, we're not really worried about those behaviors I've been listing. Those are behaviors. What we're worried about is the root cause, and the root cause is normally what we talked about. Now I really shouldn't even say. Normally it's always fear, arousal and frustration. It's gonna be one of those three things. So we know what this is. We know what causes it in your dog. These are known behaviors and they're pretty well understood.

Scott Sheaffer: 8:45

By the way, before we go on and we start talking about some specific things I want you to start doing with your dog, I just wanna mention quickly that you can contact me by a written text or voicemail by going to grumpydogspodcastcom. I'd love to hear from you. All right, let's talk about what I want you to do. The first thing you'll need to do is to ensure that you can walk your dog on the leash in a calm and humane way for the exercises that we're gonna be talking about in upcoming episodes. This is a foundational skill.

Scott Sheaffer: 9:22

What I don't want happening is and you see this all the time jerking the leash constantly. It's called micromanaging the leash. You know what I'm talking about, where people are doing like this with the leash all the time. It's called behavioral queuing, which is a fancy term, but what it really means is you're just making your dog real nervous. Okay, a nervous dog walker who is nervously walking their dog, doing all this leash stuff, and is talking to their dog, leave it. Look at me. All this kind of stuff every five seconds is making their dog a nervous wreck. It only makes the dog more nervous and what's worse is why we call it behavioral queuing. The owner always does that when the trigger is nearby, so that tends to start the cue, the behavior. So we gotta work on that and we're gonna talk about that here in just a second how we're gonna get that fixed.

Scott Sheaffer: 10:14

The same applies to someone who has little leash control. So it's one thing to be nervous on the leash. Now I'm gonna talk about someone who just the dog is all over the place left, right, front, back. Okay, so we're not trying to make a show dog here, but we do need to have some modicum of control of your dog. Okay, this will make your dog more relaxed. It's like, hey, this is what I want you over here, this is what I want you doing, and we're gonna do it the same way all the time and you're gonna get real comfortable with that and we're gonna remove that issue which tends to ramp up dogs as well when they're all over the place. Plus, you can't control them when you're trying to do some behavior modification exercises. In other words, the dog is just going in all different directions.

Scott Sheaffer: 11:01

Now that you have the basics down of what we wanna do, let's start working with your dog. Okay, we know what's causing the issue and we know the first thing we wanna do is to get the leash control done, and the way we're gonna do that is to have you watch one of my videos more on that in just a second and these leash skills. By the way, I'm not trying to make your dog a show dog. We're not gonna be entering your dog in Westminster, don't care about that. I just want a relaxed owner, dog Walker, dog handler that's in control of the dog and a dog that is relaxed and knows exactly what's going to be happening all the time. No surprise.

Scott Sheaffer: 11:45

So, as I mentioned, to learn this really essential first step, it's foundational skill. Please watch my 33 minute video on dog leash skills. I provided information with a link and a password so that you can watch this video for free. If you're watching this on YouTube, the link is below right. If you're listening on a podcast, it's in that podcast episode notes.

Scott Sheaffer: 12:12

This is an absolute, essential first step, these leash skills. I like to think of it as a basketball player, if you want to WBNA NBA. Until these players have the basics of dribbling, passing, shooting etc. Down, they will never be able to play the game very well. And that's exactly what we're doing here. These leash skills, which seem not that important, are foundational, very important In fact.

Scott Sheaffer: 12:42

Sometimes just getting these leash skills under control and it's not rocket science, by the way getting these under control go a long way for a number of reasons, to help your dog right away with some of these behaviors. It's not the fix you can't fix it with this but it's a good start. So go watch the video here's your assignment and start to implement these techniques in your daily walk with your dog. So I want you and the dog getting comfortable with this new technique that's calm and relaxed and very predictable for you and the dog. This, again, is a basic skill that we'll start building on in the next two episodes. So before we end today, I just want to remind you that Grumpy Dogs is available on all podcast players and is now on YouTube, and to find us on YouTube you're just going to go to at Grumpy Dogs channel. Thanks for listening. Thank you for joining me today. Don't forget to subscribe and share this podcast with other dog lovers. Stay tuned for our next episode, where we'll continue our dive into the world of dog behavior.