USA Dog Behavior Podcast
Are you struggling with a dog that is anxious, fearful, or aggressive? You’re at the right place. In this audio podcast series, Scott Sheaffer will explore insights and strategies to guide dog owners, veterinary practices, and dog trainers in overcoming these issues using scientific and humane methods.
USA Dog Behavior Podcast
How to Walk Your Reactive Dog Starting Today: Treating Your Dog's Fear and Aggression
Ever feel like you're at the end of your leash with your reactive dog during walks? I'm Scott Sheaffer, and in today's Grumpy Dogs podcast, I'm going to share the third step in the process that will change the way you and your pooch experience approaching dogs and/or humans while out on a walk that get your dog revved up.
Get ready to discover how observing your dog's body language, rewarding their calmness, and keeping them moving can transform your tense strolls into much more peaceful jaunts. We'll tackle the approach and detour steps, ensuring you know exactly how to handle those moments when your furry friend starts getting worked up, and I'll show you how the powerful 'circle' technique can help you both navigate the tricky terrains of reactivity.
This episode isn't just about managing those triggers in the moment; it's about training for a calmer future for you and your dog. By maintaining a safe distance and utilizing positive reinforcement, we'll work on breaking the line of sight to potential triggers and reinforcing your dog's calm behavior. It's all about creating those positive associations and aiming for trigger-free walks. So, leash up and let's turn those growls into grins on another insightful episode of Grumpy Dogs.
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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.
Hi, this is Scott Sheaffer, your host for today of the Grumpy Dogs podcast. This is part three of a 12-part series on helping your dog with their reactivity, in other words, your dog's over-arousal and or fear and or aggression to dogs and even humans as you pass by these things on your walks. In today's episode, I'll give you specific instructions on what to do when this occurs. Stay tuned.
Speaker 2: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. My name is Scott Sheaffer and it's my mission to help you better understand your dog's behavior. If you have a dog that's reactive when other dogs or humans walk by barking, lunging, growling, as they go by, pulling like crazy toward them.
Scott Sheaffer:I bet you've always wondered, or you've thought about it, what do you do when this happens? It's kind of embarrassing. Your dog's out of control. You're not really that happy with your dog at this time and, like I said, it makes you feel funny, especially if other people are around and they are, if they're walking by with their dog. You wonder what do you do? And there's lots of information out there about this. Well, today I'm going to take you through the three simple steps that you're going to go through to handle this appropriately. It's going to make your dog be more manageable and it's actually going to help them with some of this reactivity. It's going to help improve the situation, especially over time.
Scott Sheaffer:What we're wanting to do is to slowly acclimate your dog to these triggers, while making a positive association with the trigger by giving them treats as we go by. Let me take you through the three-step process to handle this, and the three steps are approach, detour and circle. One, two, three, approach, detour and circle, and it's really fairly simple and I'm not going to make it overly complex. Let me just give you the mechanics of what you need to do essentially. First, the approach. You know that if you have a dog like this, when you see the trigger, they immediately go into full attention. It's called hypervigilance, and so what I want you doing at that point, as you're approaching the trigger on the walk, is to watch your dog's body language, and we covered that in the first two episodes of this 12-part series. Look at your dog's body language. They will tell you if they're getting nervous and how nervous they are. And you're looking for things like head popping up, the root or the base of the ears coming up, mouth closed, hard, stare hard, body, whole body comes up as a matter of fact, kind of do like this, the tail will come up like this. It's telling you that I'm really getting nervous, or I'm starting to get nervous, and that's going to lead us into our next thing, which is the detour to second one.
Scott Sheaffer:What I want you doing during this approach is, every time your dog looks at the trigger and is reasonably calm in other words, hadn't started doing these behaviors I want you to give your dog a treat, a food treat. So every time they look when I say look, I don't mean in the general direction, I mean specifically at that trigger. When they look, I want you giving your dog a treat, all right, and that's it. Look treat, look treat, Look treat. And it'll happen fairly rapidly too, by the way. So then what? Well, as you get closer and I know you've seen this a million times as you get closer, your dog starts to get a little agitated. Right, they will go to barking, lunging, growling, barking, pulling. They'll do all that stuff. Well, well, before you get there and you know what the body language is, right that you're looking for we talked about just a second ago you want to do this.
Scott Sheaffer:Well, before you get into that too much, what are you going to do? You're going to take a detour approach. What are you going to do? You're going to take a detour right approach detour circles. This is the detour part, as you're approaching right. When your dog first starts to do these things, of course you're looking. I'm sorry, when your dog is looking, you'll be treating too, but when your dog first starts to do these behaviors that make him look nervous or her look nervous, you're going to take a detour. And what's that mean? You're going to turn right or you're going to turn left and you're going to circle around. But the main thing I want you to think about now is that turn. So you're approaching, your dog is starting to get kind of nervous. This is while you are treating them, when they're looking, but they're starting to get kind of nervous and you're going to go right or you're going to go left, okay, and you're going to keep moving. By the way, one of the most important parts of this protocol, this simple protocol, the one, two, three step thing is that you keep moving, never stop, never stop.
Scott Sheaffer:Now I know there's a lot of advice out there that says make your dog stop and sit and look at the trigger as they go by. This is a very bad idea. You still want to do that. Your dog is already overly aroused, nervous, anxious. Why would you make them sit there and endure that? They can still look at the trigger, but keep them moving. Moving is so much easier for scared dogs. Let them keep moving. They're still gonna be looking, but for heaven's sakes, don't force them to sit there and be scared and watch it as it goes by. Keep moving. So, right or left, there we go, everything's good. I think we've got that done.
Scott Sheaffer:Before I go on anymore, I just want to mention here real quickly and I've mentioned this in the past. If you'd like to contact me directly with a question or comment or a future episode idea, please go to grumpydogspodcastcom, where you can easily leave me a voice message or a written message. I'd love to hear from you, always like hearing from listeners. All right, let's continue.
Scott Sheaffer:We've talked about the approach. We've talked about the left or right detour. Now the third part, the circle. Approach, detour, circle. So we've made our right turn or we made our left turn. What are we going to do now? We're going to do a circle. Here's what it looks like. We're going to.
Scott Sheaffer:Here comes the trigger. We're coming up like this and we're going to just circle around. Okay, we can circle around this way, circle around this way, but be very careful that this circle is far enough away from the trigger that your dog doesn't become reactive again. We can turn it exactly the right time, but if we don't keep this distance from this distance right here from the trigger, they're going to go over threshold. Can't have that. So, as your dog walks by, they will be looking, of course, but they won't be barking, growling, lunging, pulling toward the trigger. Okay, they'll be a little bit excited, but they'll keep going. All right, now, as you go around in this circle, remember to keep treating Every time your dog looks at the trigger. You want to keep treating Look treat, look treat. All right, I think we've got that one down.
Scott Sheaffer:We've talked about the approach, the detour left or right, and now the circle. And what do you do at the end of the circle? You just go on. So here comes the trigger again. That's this hand right here, and here we go around like this, okay, and go on Typically about right here, your dog stops looking at the trigger. Okay, because the trigger is moved on, the dog stops looking at the trigger. Okay, because the trigger has moved on, the dog stops looking at the trigger. Why is that? Because you've gotten enough distance that your dog feels safe again and it's going to just look forward and let that other dog just walk on down the street. What do you do if you can't get enough distance needed? In other words, what do you do if there's a wall or something and you can't get enough distance away from the trigger to keep your dog calm? What you want to do is hide your dog behind a barrier like a parked car. Those work great, bush shrub wall fence.
Scott Sheaffer:What you're trying to do is disrupt the dog's line of sight to the trigger. Because there is one thing I have learned after working with thousands of dogs on this is this is primarily a visually triggered thing. Noise, sound and smell have a little something to do with it, some in more dogs than others, but it's maybe 5% of the problem. 95% is in the scene. If you can remove your dog's line of sight to that trigger, you're going to pretty much close the switch on the reactivity, especially if you do it soon enough.
Scott Sheaffer:What do you do if your dog suddenly goes over threshold? In other words, what do you do if everything is going well? You've approached, you've clicked and treated, you're circling around the trigger. As they go by, everything seems to be fine and all of a sudden, for some reason, your dog just starts to bark, lunge, growl, pull toward the trigger. It's going to happen sometimes, because guess what? Your dog has a vote in what happens during these walks. It's not all 100% our control. We're going to do a lot, but sometimes your dog will decide eh, I didn't like what that dog or that human just did. When that happens, you're going to give your dog what they want, and what is that? They just want distance. They want distance from these scary things. So you're going to calmly move away, and directly from the trigger, let the trigger pass by and then resume. When you calmly move away, it removes your dog's line of sight very quickly and then starts increasing that distance right away. This works 100% of the time.
Scott Sheaffer:And I want to say right here it's absolutely important that you use the good leash handling skills that you learned in the first two episodes. So the body language skills are super important and you can see why today. And the second thing is those leash skills have got to be good. You've got to be cool, calm and collected. As you do this, that really comes down to your dog, down the leash, to your dog, and can make things so much worse.
Scott Sheaffer:That's it, number one, the approach. As you approach, you're looking for your dog to look directly at the trigger. When they do, you're going to give them a treat, making sure that they don't get too aroused or fearful or anxious. You're looking for that body language. At such time your dog is beginning to show the first signs of getting a little nervous about approaching this trigger, you're going to take a detour, either left or right. You're going to keep those good leash handling skills. You're going to keep moving. You're going to go left or you're going to go right. Number three the circle. You're then going to keep a good distance away from the trigger as they pass. By continuing to give your dog treats as they look at the trigger, you are, by doing this, acclimating your dog to these triggers very slowly and making a new association for them with the treats. In other words, you are introducing your dog to these triggers in a nice and slow way by using distance and you're making it a positive experience, specifically looking at the trigger, by giving them treats.
Scott Sheaffer:What's your immediate goal? To be able to walk by the trigger on the other side of the street with your dog, just looking at the trigger and walking by, and this is an extremely important point I'm about ready to make. You can gauge your progress on how this is going by observing that the distance required is shrinking over time. In other words, you're approaching and then you take that detour left or right. That detour left or right is going to get closer and closer and closer to the trigger as your dog acclimates to this trigger. It's really great how it works until you reach the point where you can walk by on the other side of the street with your dog just looking as you go by. If you'd like to drill down a little bit more on this, there are some free and premium videos on my website on this very subject. Just go to grumpydogspodcastcom and select the video collection Between now and the next episode. Here's your assignment Start walking your dog in the manner that we just discussed Approach, detour, circle.
Scott Sheaffer:Don't walk where there are too many triggers either. In other words, I don't want you seeing 10,000 triggers. You're looking for a very small handful of triggers to walk by, like three to five, and you can control that. By the way, by when and where you walk, you could get a little bit of a handle on how many triggers you're about to see. But we don't want to throw your dog in the deep end by exposing them to all kinds of triggers, nor do we want to do that to you, but we do need to see a few for this to work. First, approach, second detour and finally, circle.
Speaker 2: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.
