Your dog suffers from it and that has strong impact on your life. Your dog has behaviors you want him to stop. However, whatever you have implemented, no matter how much you have teaching him, he either continues to behave in certain ways or he switches to other behaviors.
In fact, as long as his motivations, as long as the underlying emotions, are present in him, he will express behaviors linked to his fears, to his anxieties.
Your dog suffers from separation anxiety
Your dog is uncomfortable with his fellows
Your dog is afraid of men, of women
The reactions he has are then panic attacks, strategies to cope with what frightens him.
Imagine your are in a room with one or two spiders while you are arachnophobic, with a hornet while you are apiphobic, on a glass bridge while you are acrophobic, in a stopped elevator while you are claustrophobic.
Just because the room isn’t full of spiders or hornets, for example, doesn’t mean you feel better. You may feel not as scared with two creatures as with ten, but that’s a long way from saying you’re comfortable.
The first help you can give your dog is to recognize that if his behaviors are triggered by fear, he may opt for other strategies, not for other emotions if he is not supported towards those emotions. Supporting your dog will not motivate him to feel more frightened. He does not decide one morning to be afraid of a garbage truck at 11:52am because you reassured him the day before, nor to be anxious watching you getting ready for an evening at the restaurant that was planned at the last minute. Reassuring him will help him calm his fears.
What he feels may have been given rise to by various causes : a lack of familiarity, emotional contagion, sensitive genetics, a negative experience, fragile health, aging...
To help your dog, at K9 Voice, I respect his pace. This means that if during an exercise where we mean to get closer to dogs for example, if it turns out to be too difficult for him to have a distance of 5 meters, I'll leave him at 5.5 meters. Some dogs will have physiological reactions that can be strong and last several hours, even several days. I prefer a dog who takes his time to reduce the distance, who maintains good physical health, and remains motivated to keep making efforts and progress. You will not see me putting your dog in the middle of a river, even if he is within his depth, with a muzzle in case he struggle, just to prove to him there is no danger in the river. Potentially, I can stop the behaviors he had before by doing this. Still, have I treated what motivates them? Have I gained his trust?
Comments