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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Many dogs struggle to cope with all kinds of stressors in life. Often, I see strategies that focus on reducing stress in day-to-day living. Good quality sleep, exercise, mental stimulation and nourishment are a vital part of that. However, sometimes we run the risk of thinking that we can turn a highly sensitive dog into…
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Our dogs are never a blank slate. One of the hardest parts of being a canine behaviour consultant is explaining to guardians that life hasn’t given their dogs the qualities to be a Café Society Dog. Their dogs may always struggle with guests. They may always struggle with strangers trying to pet them. They may…
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Many of the dogs I work with lack resilience. They also face difficulties in managing their emotions, sensing threat everywhere. Anxious and fearful dogs are often very sensitive to situations where they’ve experienced danger before, even if they’re not dangerous now. Often, they fail to downgrade situations from CRITICAL to NON-THREATENING. Not only that, anxious…
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