The gold standard treatment for helping dogs who are fearful of things is gradual exposure. This is something most of us recognise for ourselves. Whether we’re trying to help our dogs get used to noises that cause a fear response, or to people who scare them, we understand that we are trying to help them…
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We all know that unpleasant experiences are not created equal. This is especially true for our dogs. If you have a dog who panics at the vet, you will probably have experienced this first hand. There are plenty of experiences in life that are not the end of the world, but our dogs categorise those…
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Is it important to distinguish between fear and anxiety in dogs? Can we even distinguish between them? Does it matter? Thinking about canine emotions can be very tricky. On the one hand, if we think of our dogs experiencing the full range of emotions in exactly the same way humans do, we misunderstand the canine…
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Many of us spend weeks, months or even years trying to help our dogs feel better about unpleasant situations. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that we’re putting dogs into awful situations. It’s just that there are things they’d rather not do. Vet visits, for instance. Grooming or handling sometimes. Usually these involve mildly unpleasant…
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A few months ago, I started working with a dog named Barley whose fears were increasing. It had got to the point where he’d freeze on walks and refuse to go any further. Some days, he wouldn’t leave the house at all. His caregivers didn’t know how to cope and it was increasingly overwhelming. Barley’s…
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If you’re anything like me, you may be reluctant to accept that training could make the difference for your reactive dog. It may whiff of women in tweed and brogues, completely at odds with how you want to live your life with your dog. You may also think that there’s not much benefit in doing…
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It’s not a surprise that many shelters, behaviour consultants and dog trainers see a lot of adolescent dogs. It’s almost inevitable that the perfect pup that seemed to have made such a great start with life then seems to struggle later on. This is more obvious, of course, if our dogs did not have the…
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Last year, one of my clients said something that made me really reflect. She had a ‘pandemic puppy’ and wondered how much this had been responsible for her dog’s behaviour around other dogs. She was almost weeping as she told me how she felt entirely responsible for her dog’s reactive barking and lunging. “I didn’t…
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In the this short series, we have been looking at the factors that contribute to an adult dog’s coping skills as far as life is concerned. We know that genetics plays a role in building emotionally stable adult dogs. Most people understand that parental traits can be passed on to puppies. It’s no different with…
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In the past two posts, we’ve looked at key components to resilience in dogs. Genetics plays its role. Stable personality traits like anxiety, pessimism, curiosity and optimism have heritable qualities. We also looked at the role played by prenatal stress. Unfortunately, with commercial breeding establishments and puppy farms, it’s more likely that looks are prioritised…
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