Reactivity - What a simple counter-conditioning session should look like.

Something we have seen an increase in over the last few years is reactivity - whether from fear or excitability. We have a few different theories on why this has suddenly become more commonplace such as bad breeding, more shelter dogs, weaker leadership/ structure in homes, as well as too much focus on “socialization” and not enough exposure. Our blog on exposure is a great read on what we believe is the best way to introduce puppies and dogs to new things in a way to build them up and create confidence. (You can read it here.) 

Unfortunately, with COVID, we are predicting there will be even more reactive dogs in the future. We can personally say that we are seeing some of this in our dog Viking, whom we got the October before COVID shutdowns began last March. While we tried to still expose him to a variety of things the number of outings went WAY down as of the March shutdowns and his time around other people and new experiences were less than it needed to be for a breed such as his. All this means now is that we have to put in some extra work and be dedicated to helping to build his confidence and get him more comfortable around new people and things. 

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Every reactivity case is different and without background and knowing a bit about the dog we can’t give an exact blueprint on how to work on these issues. Some COMMON things that help with these types of behaviour problems are building confidence, teaching impulse control, counter conditioning, and establishing good engagement skills. Mindset and expectations are huge when it comes to our dogs. It is important that we promoting calm mindsets and teach our dogs how to make good life choices and teaching them there are consequences (time-outs, verbal correction, leash correction etc) to bad life choices. This is done by adding structure into our dog’s lives and having clear expectations. Don’t quite know where to start? Feel free to reach out to us - we would love to help. 

Here is a video of a session we recently did with Viking.  In this session, you will see us using counter-conditioning to work on changing his perception of people he does not know. This is a nice easy session that anyone can do to work on improving their dog’s behaviour. A few things to take note of in this video: 

• Training sessions should be short and end on a successful note, so choose your stopping point with that in mind, and do not push a session too far
  

• Reward the behaviours you want to see, redirect or correct bad behaviours
  
  • You will notice Viking is wearing his e-collar in this video but for the purposes of this session, we were not using this for correction as we were just working on rewarding the positive things we were seeing. Rewarding is only half of the process and there is a time when you will need to include a correction to teach them which behaviours they are exhibiting that are inappropriate (corrections can be verbal, spatial pressure, collar corrects, e-collar stim etc). In this video we are simply using verbal cues to redirect him and get him to sit, a command he really knows well.
    
  • Throughout the video you will see us rewarding when Viking is just looking calmly at the family outside
    
    • The whole point we are trying to achieve in this session is calm behaviour and teaching positive association to previously “scary” triggers
      
• This video is about 5 mins long to show the whole session for people going through similar issues (we did speed up about 1 min near the beginning, you can tell his panting is a little fast speed)
  
• My car is super messy, please ignore this