The "Ah Ha!" Moment

"Management before modification." - Steve White

"Any time you and your dog are together, someone is being trained." -Jean Donaldson

These two concepts, as simple as they are, simply floored me. It was an "AH HA!" moment.

Those of us with issue-y dogs often jump right in and try to modify behavior. We try to modify fear reactions, modify behavior, all without a thought to managing it first. Or we manage for a few days, a few weeks, a few months, then move on to modifying without benefit of managing anymore.

While this may not have disastrous results with shy dogs, undersocialized dogs, it can have devastating effects on aggressive or reactive dogs.

Lesson number one: Treat every issue-y dog as if it is reactive/aggressive and manage all social interactions accordingly. This gets you into the habit of always managing your dog's area, your dog's interaction, judging his/her comfort level. This teaches you to watch your dog, be aware of your dog, and not push your dog.

Why do I say this?

Well, if my dog is shy and not aggressive, I may be tempted to let "one more" person pet her, one more dog sniff her, walk one more block. If I manage that shy dog the way I would manage an aggressive dog, I would never, ever risk over facing her or going outside her comfort level.

Lesson number 2: Create an emergency "recall" word. This means you'll be conditioning your dog to hear a certain word as a certain awesome item is fed. (For example: I'm going to say "boo" to Brandy each time I feed her chicken liver. Pretty soon, when I say "Boo" she's going to run to me in search of that chicken liver. For her, chicken liver is the best thing on earth.) This creates a huge, strong, positive association with that word and it has been shown to help stop aggressive or shy tendencies when used in potentially damaging situations.

Lesson 3: Our dogs are always learning. Be an active participant each time you interact with them. Whenever you're together, someone is being trained and it may not always be your dog. This is yet another place consistency gets pulled out. If you want X behavior, insist on it. You can never be too tired, too stressed, too anything to insist on X. Or the dog learns X is not always required.

One time is enough to solidify something in a dog's mind if the reward is big enough. For those of us with counter surfers, we know that if the dog is rewarded 1 time out of 100, they will persist. Well, it goes to follow that if we insist a dog do X 99 times out of 100, that one time we don't is enough to reward him/her and keep them from being totally reliable.

Lesson 4: Dogs are dogs, they are not machines. While we all pray for 100% reliability, it's not going to happen. Be satisfied with 80% reliability. And before you test a new behavior, remember you only get 50% of that behavior in a new situation. So if you want to be able to nail a novice course at a trial, be sure you can do 28 obstacles in practice. This is true of police dogs, this is true of almost every dog. When the situation changes, so do the results of trained behaviors.