When dealing with dogs who have behavioral issues, there are a few essential ideas that are crucial to understand. The three most significant of these are listed below. The things I describe below may appear straightforward, but in reality they aren't. When we are angry with our dog, it might be difficult to put these axioms into practice. Additionally, they may seem counter-intuitive.
What do these three ideas mean?
The quick response is: Calmness, Monotony, and Separation.
Let me go into more detail about these following.
TRANQUILITY
Working with dogs often doesn't go well for people who aren't calm and collected around them. How can we handle our dogs calmly?
As a reminder, dogs cannot hear spoken language from humans, therefore we must speak to them in relatively gentle tones and with few words. Dogs can become stressed out by harsh remarks and a constant barrage of stimuli (i.e., instructions).
Your relaxed, non-jerky body movements will also help to calm your dog. This is referred to as having a “soft body.”
Dogs experience more stress when their leash is micromanaged by owners. In order to prevent stressing out your dog, it's crucial to only apply pressure to the leash when necessary and to never jerk the leash.
Finally, it's critical for the handler—the person holding the leash—to move purposefully and slowly in order to foster a calm environment for the dog. Note that I did not say hastily, angrily, or abruptly. A handler who is assured of his or her command of the leash communicates to the dog at the other end of the leash that the handler is assured and in control. Dogs enjoy it.
MONOTONY
The idea of tranquility described above is understood by the majority of people and is reasonable. Monotony is less visible, though. Dogs with behavioural problems frequently require desensitisation and counter conditioning as part of behaviour management. Desensitization is the practice of gradually exposing dogs to the things they are afraid of in an effort to lessen the anxiety the dog feels around the trigger.
Dogs with fear disorders may experience fear before fully processing what they are seeing when they only encounter a trigger. This is referred to as a conditioned reaction and is learned over time. In order to reduce this conditioned response, counterconditioning aims to shift dogs' associations with the things they dread to more positive ones.
Exercises for desensitisation and counter conditioning should be positive, absolutely uneventful, and plain boring when used with dogs. Even if these activities go smoothly, the dog and the handler will undoubtedly find them tedious and dull. The trigger starts to bore the dog to tears.
Consider this: the goal of this kind of behaviour change is to lessen fear. Similar to humans, dogs are not frightened by uninteresting things. Sometimes monotony is a good thing.
SEPARATION
A survey of 2,500 dogs revealed that nearly all agreed that being separated from frightening objects helps them become less frightened of them. Since we can't genuinely poll dogs, the survey is fictitious, but the section about separation is 100% accurate. Distance is how dogs respond to things they dread. They feel more at ease the further they are from things that frighten them. In fact, you can use the amount of space needed to keep a dog calm around a particular object to determine how scared they are of it.
Dogs get this distance by either using aggression to push the dangerous thing farther away or by utilizing avoidance by avoiding the trigger. Each of these actions causes the dog to move further away from the frightening object. These actions are referred to as distance-increasing behaviours as a whole.
When dogs face situations that make them anxious, separation or distance is a crucial strategy to use. One of the most crucial tools in the behaviour consultant's toolkit is separation, which can be used to gradually desensitise a dog to a trigger. By gradually reducing the distance, it enables us to gradually increase dogs' exposure to a trigger over time at a rate they can tolerate.
CALMNESS, CONSISTENCY, AND SEPARATION
These three ideas can help dogs with their behavioural issues in a big manner. If these methods aren't used, behaviour adjustment may be challenging or even impossible.
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