#reactivity

Found in a 120 year old time capsule.

and so the learner (the person) is now predisposed to all kinds of weird behavior: lashing out at either their own dog OR the other dog (the predictor of the aversive stimuli); avoiding certain locations or times; carrying massive amounts of shame and resentment about their dog; avoiding walking the dog entirely; applying their own series of aversives to the dog to try to suppress the screaming (...never mind that they are themselves under a P+ learning paradigm and it's clearly not making anyone feel better...)

You beg and plead this person to do better. Not only for the sake of your connection to them, but also for their own sake. You feel the tension from each one of their intense emotional states. You find yourself struggling to keep yourself away from old, unhealthy habits.

Do you have any suggestions or thoughts on working on reactivity in older dogs? I have a 10 yr old that a farm dog for most of her life and has always been anxious and reactive around other dogs and some people. She's been around other dogs on trails and we live in an apartment complex with other dogs, but she seems to be getting more reactive as she gets older. I've debating looking for a trainer to work with but I also worry that it won't do much since she's been like this for so long.

Hi! I'm not a trainer so I would highly recommend talking with someone qualified who can look at your situation and make recommendations based on your specific dog.

Here are some thoughts based on my experience - this is not a substitution for talking to a trainer.

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Emily Wolf & Libby Felts (Hosts) + Sarah Stremming (Guest)

Canine Adolescence is the transition from puppyhood to adulthood. This fascinating conversation with Sarah Stremming, who is a dog behavior coach and the host of the Cog Dog Podcast, addresses this pivotal age of young dogs. Sarah, Emily, and Libby discuss adolescent canine behavior and how to most effectively observe and address behaviors to nurture confident, healthy dogs. They also discuss:

How dogs’ responses to environments and caregivers can change during this transitional period

Some of the difficulties this transition period can create for adolescent dogs

How to best support the dog through these transitional changes

How we can work with dogs experiencing threat

Sarah’s approach to using food when a threat is present

Breed-specific behaviors in adolescents and how they can express under stress

The top skills we need to teach adolescent dogs (or puppies moving into adolescence)

To speculate or not to speculate on your dog’s prior experience

Everyone else is there with their (presumably) dog friendly dog and expects all the other dogs there to be friendly as well. Obviously we can go back and for the about the harm dog parks can cause, but that’s not really the point. I’m all for shaming uncontrolled off leash dogs, but don’t take a severely reactive dog to a place you know will almost certainly have off leash dogs.

Half the comments are usually people applauding the uploadeder for “advocating” for the dog by cussing out the approaching dog’s owner. Call me crazy but I think advocating for your dog would be not putting them in a situation you know they will end up highly over threshold.

It's Throwback Thursday! Today, here is a picture from five years ago of Badger's mean mug. Badger has been with us for almost eight years now. She was picked up by animal control as a borderline-feral stray living under a condemned trailer, and was heavily pregnant. She dug a burrow at the Bibb County Pound to have her puppies in, and when I saw a post from the pound reaching out for a rescue offer before she whelped, I felt a connection and busted my butt finding her a rescue placement. She had her puppies the day after I pulled her from the pound.

I did not anticipate that Badger would ever become my dog. However, she quickly demonstrated some severe and ultimately dangerous behavioral issues, starting with biting the ACO who removed her from the burrow. What we hoped was a fluke from stress and fear unfortunately turned out to be a temperament issue. She racked up a serious bite history in foster care, and also demonstrated extremely severe resource guarding, as well as dog reactivity. The rescue's last straw was when she mauled one of her own weanling puppies for attempting to eat from the same tray; they told me if I did not want her, they would euthanize.

If I did not have the means to safely work with, contain, and manage this dog, euthanasia would have been the correct choice. At ACS, we recognize that behavior euthanasia, while deeply tragic, is sometimes the only way to give a dog peace and protect others from harm when a dog can not function safely or happily in the human world. Badger is inarguably a dangerous dog, and I go to great lengths to balance keeping her happy with keeping myself and others safe. The good news is, she has not had a single bite incident under my care, she has come a LONG way with resource guarding, and while she still dislikes most dogs, she does like Bolt. She is generally a happy, silly dog, but she will never be a trustworthy one, and having a constant awareness of and respect for that is how we ensure she is safely managed.