Jun. 28th, 2014

deborahjross: (croning)
We’ve started the Reactive Rover class given by Sandi Pensinger of Living With Dogs, in order to help Tajji with her reactivity to dogs and, to a lesser extent, people she doesn’t know. The first two sessions were watching videos about reading canine body language and specific relaxation techniques. We’d recently seen both, as Sandi invited us to attend the “classroom” part for a previous class that was full. Because the dogs work individually in the “fieldwork” part of the course, each class limited to four dogs. So watching them this time was a repetition.

We felt Tajji had made progress on her walks. She’d gone from barking at pedestrians to looking at them and walking by. Although she still reacted to other dogs, even at extreme distance, we were piling up more times when she came away with us readily, sometimes with a bark or just a huff. There were even instances where she was able to look at the other dog – the old black Labrador who shuffles very slowly up and down the street and then lies down in the sun, in particular – without barking.

So when Sandi, our teacher, said to not give our dogs any opportunity to “rehearse” reactivity, we thought we were doing pretty well, anyway. The idea is that the more times the dog reacts – barking, lunging, (heaven forbid) biting, piloerection (that’s hairs standing up along the spine), etc., the more deeply that behavior gets “etched” into the dog’s brain. She compared it to a road, where each passage digs deeper and deeper ruts, ruts that become more progressively difficult to jump out of. While we are creating new, positive behaviors, we want to not give our dog the chance to “rehearse” the old ones as well.ExpandRead more... )

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Deborah J. Ross

November 2020

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