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The best in health, wellness, and positive training from America’s leading dog experts

Aggression

Counter-Conditioning and Desensitization for Reducing Dog Reactvity

Counter-conditioning involves changing your dog’s association with a scary or arousing stimulus from negative to positive. Desensitization is starting with a very low-level intensity of aversive stimulus until the dog habituates to (or changes his association with) the aversive, and then gradually increasing the strength until the dog is comfortable with the stimulus at full intensity. The easiest way to give most dogs a positive association and to help them become comfortable with a stimulus is with very high-value, really yummy treats. I like to use chicken – canned, baked, or boiled; most dogs love chicken. Here’s how the CC&D process works.

5 Ways to Break Up a Dog Fight

A dog fight that goes beyond a brief scuffle and doesn’t resolve quickly is frightening to behold. In fact, it’s one of the behavior scenarios most likely to result in significant injury to humans, not to mention the dogs. The first, most important thing to remember is keep yourself safe. After that, here are five things to do to try to end the conflict as quickly as possible, with minimal bloodshed.

How to React to a Dog’s Bully Behavior

There’s nothing like a good dog-pack hike to give our canine companions an opportunity to have fun with their peers and run themselves into a happy state of exhaustion – provided there are no canine bullies in the group. Just like human bullies on a school playground, canine bullies take the fun out of the game, put everyone on edge, and bring to the party a real risk of physical as well as psychological damage. A dog who is bullied, especially at a young age, can quickly develop a negative association with other dogs and become defensively aggressive as a result.

What To Do if Your Dog is a Bullying Victim

So, what should you do if your dog is the victim of a canine bully? Intervene, by all means. Here are some of the signs to look for that tell you that you need to step in and break up the interaction.

Comments on “Alpha” Dominance Theory

There is a growing body of information available to anyone who wants to learn more about why dominance theory is so outdated and incorrect. Here are 10 resources to get you started...

Doggie Daycare Can Be a Wonderful Experience: But is it For Every Dog?

The term "doggie daycare" has become a panacea in recent years for all manner of canine behavioral ills. Does your dog engage in destructive chewing? Nuisance barking? Rude greetings? Poor canine social skills? Mouthing and biting? Separation anxiety? Just send him to doggie daycare, and all will be well. You hope. I'll admit I'm as guilty as the next trainer of suggesting a daycare solution for a huge percentage of my behavior consult clients. The fact is, many of today's canine companions suffer from a significant lack of exercise, stimulation, and social time with their own kind. A good daycare provider can go a long way toward meeting those needs.

Understanding Aggression in Dogs

Aggression. It's a natural, normal dog behavior, but it's also a scary word that evokes images of maulings and dog-related fatalities. The term aggression" actually encompasses a long continuum of behaviors

Constructional Aggression Treatment (CAT) Can Improve Behavior

Aggressive behavior in their beloved companions is an incredibly challenging and upsetting problem for most dog owners to deal with. The problem is painfully public -and the public is equally free with accusations and advice for the hapless owner of a reactive dog. Many training solutions" that people try are inhumane

Solutions for Reactive Dog Behavior

At some point in our lives, some of us find ourselves living with a difficult dog, one whose behavior challenges our patience, and exhausts our training knowledge – and opens our hearts and eyes to a new, better way of training. This is the story of one such dog and her very knowledgeable dog owner. Together, they reached an entirely new and higher level of dog training skills, thanks to the owner’s life-altering experiences with a reactive dog who wasn’t fit to compete in the career intended for her: Flyball. Flyball is not the sport for everyone. It is a relay team event, which means you have to commit to training and competing with your dog and other dogs and dog owners as a team, and you have to have an appreciation for over-the-top dogs and the resulting cacophony of sounds. In flyball, a team of four dogs race, one after the other, leaping a series of hurdles, throwing their bodies against a spring-loaded box that ejects a tennis ball, snatching the ball, and hurtling their bodies back down the row of jumps to where their next teammates strain to be released for their turns. The fastest team wins.

Modifying Aggressive Dog Behavior

That loud buzz you hear is the sound of the dog behavior and training community discussing a controversial new approach to modifying aggressive behavior in dogs. The developers of "Constructional Aggression Treatment" (CAT) claim that the shaping-based operant protocol produces stronger and much faster results than the classical counter-conditioning process widely used by training and behavior professionals today. CAT was devised and tested by Dr. Jes¨²s Rosales-Ruiz, a behavior analyst and associate professor of behavior analysis at the University of North Texas, and Kellie Snider, a board-certified associate behavior analyst. Snider completed her MS in Behavior Analysis at UNT in 2007 with Dr. Rosales-Ruiz as her graduate research advisor and the CAT procedure as the topic of her thesis research. Canine behavior experts frequently use classical conditioning techniques (including counter-conditioning) to help change how dogs feel about and respond to the stimuli that triggers their aggressive behavior. In other words, classical counter-conditioning changes the dog's emotions in order to change his behavior. In contrast, CAT utilizes "operant conditioning," where the goal is changing the dog's behavior in a way that will likely produce a subsequent emotional change.

Agility Games for Managing Dog Aggression

Owning an aggressive, fearful, or other type of special needs" dog is stressful. When your dog overreacts to other dogs or just the stimulus of being out in the world by barking

Is Your Dog Bullying Other Dogs?

You can find them everywhere – at dog parks and doggie daycare centers, in dog training classes, in your neighbor's yards ... perhaps even in your own home. They" are canine bullies – dogs who overwhelm their potential playmates with overly assertive and inappropriate behaviors

Latest Blog

Sorting Through My Books

Keeping my book collection to only three tall shelves has taken ongoing effort. At least once a year, I’ve had to give the shelves a critical pruning, throwing away titles that contained either incomplete or poor information and donating to my local library books that were of good quality, but not something that I planned to refer to again and again.