Looking at dogs

People are still trying to make sense over whether to deal with aggressive dogs with all positive means, or whether to correct, correct, correct. Both camps can say that the other method will make the dog worse.

The only real progress you will ever make with clicking to calm is if you are clicking when the dog is truly calm. This is the biggest challenge that dog owners face.

We are either too hopeful, too impatient, or just are unable to actually identify truly calm behavior. Even people who should know better. We are usually looking for really obvious signs of aggression or anxiety. Most of the time we are pushing our dogs into situations before they are ready. We don’t get that the anxieties that dogs feel when even close to the situation is probably more aversive than most of our corrections.

In just about all cases, you have to train your dog to be calm on cue. Otherwise your dog doesn’t know what you are asking for. You can’t train this while your dog is otherwise distracted or around any of his triggers that cause him to be exited or worried. How can your dog learn unless he is able to attend to what we are trying to teach them a 100%? Its only when you have your dog “performing” reliably 80 - 90% of the time can you start introducing distractions - and I am not even talking about things that make him aggressive or worried.

This is the work most dog owners have not been encouraged to do thoroughly.

The issue between punishment and positive-only techniques are confusing because both can have “results”. Punishment - when done properly - can suppress behavior in some cases quickly. It is the speed in which is works which is a powerful lure for people to use it, trainers and owners alike.

But speed is not necessarily the best way to treat the behavior long term. And yet speed is what some owners so desperately need. True progress, real change for the positive - can be time consuming. Of course it must be. Simply imagine ourselves being “corrected” out of a phobia or generalized anxiety where you have a feeling of uneasiness most of the time.

But what do we do when we need a quick fix because we are at the end of our rope? If someone can promise that a change will occur in the behavior through punishment-based techniques, and we even start to see it happen, are we not fools for jumping at the chance if it means our lives will improve? What if we are facing putting down our dogs?

The problem is that the situation is complex - often too complex for owners to grasp it all, especially when they didn’t sign up to take a science degree, especially when they are already stressed and preoccupied, especially when all they want is for the problem to just go away.

Punishment tells the dog nothing about what he or she *should* be doing. For the most part aggression is like a coping strategy for the dogs. When the dog is punished and the behavior appears to disappear, the dog still has not “unlearnt” anything. Studies in neuroscience confirm that nothing gets erased in the brain, you only learn something new - in this case, the dog is learning to fear punishment. The behavior only decreases as a way to avoid the punishment - when it works. Because most aggression is rooted in anxiety, punishment does nothing to treat the underlying cause of aggression.

The real issue is that if the dog is anxious or fearful enough, his fear of your punishment may not be greater than his anxiety or fear of the situation. If he feels he can get away with it or avoid the punishment somehow, or he is willing to take the risk he WILL act. In addition, the pairing of punishment with a situation he is already anxious is will usually increase the anxiety.

So you potentially create a dog who is a ticking time bomb.

Now remember, each situation and issue for each dog is complex and different. But positive techniques usually do not make the dog worse UNLESS you are contributing to their irritation or anxiety levels (which is possible).

You will see people talk about rewarding the dog for the aggression by giving them treats. However this is incorrect and a simplistic view point. We have to look at what is truly motivating here. Dogs aren’t behaving aggressively so they can get a treat - they are behaving aggressively to protect themselves. A treat pales significantly compared to reducing anxiety and that is what they will be focusing exclusively on. When dogs are experiencing acute stress, what they retain and remember from those situations are the elements that are perceived to help them survive the situation. Truly stressed dogs hardly seem to enjoy the treats, and if they are not looking at you figuring out how to get more from you, then its unlikely you have engaged their cognitive processes to figure it out. At best treats might change their mood somewhat if their anxieties levels are not that high or distract them momentarily.

This may be why proponents of punishing methods for aggression will claim positive methods won’t work or may make the aggression worse. A treat will not compete with aggression where as a more frightening prospect of pain might. However this argument is based on a misunderstanding of how positive methods to treat aggression work.

Each time you expose a dog to the situations where he is likely to experience acute anxiety, he will get worse because he will start to feel anxious about the anxiety itself because anxiety is so aversive. For punishment to work - you need to expose the dog to the situation where he is going to act out. When this work, punishment suppresses the behavior, but his real problems with his triggers are getting worse because now he not only has to watch out for his trigger, he has to watch out for you.

The other issue, which has been mentioned on this blog is that punishment is usually about our anger. Trainers often have a lot of experience and they don’t necessarily carry forward the same kind of baggage we do as owners, so they can give corrections - at times - objectively. This is a huge challenge for the average owner who is and has a history of being extremely frustrated with their dog.

What happens is that our behavior of punishing the dog becomes reinforced, and this leads us to do it again and again when ever we encounter the frustration regardless of how effective it actually is.

The reason for this is because our arousal levels (feelings of frustration, raised heart rates and other signs of arousal) are more greatly reduced when we see harm inflicted on the subject of our irritation, compared to other activities (Hokanson, Burgess, 1962,1963,1970). That means we are tendency to punish gets reinforced because it relieves our frustration.

So what do we do. We are frustrated, all of our methods don’t seem to be working, our dogs aggression seems to be getting worse. What do we do?

The first recommendation is to start with safety, and then give yourself permission to take a break.

Spend what little energy you have left making sure that what you do next will keep everyone safe so matter what. If he is aggressive to dogs take a break from walking him. While aerobic exercise (not excessive) can help - your dogs won’t die if you stop walking them for a couple of weeks and just play ball outside for a while. If your dog is aggressive with you, just ignore him. Pick up all the toys is he is aggressive around them. Keep a leash on him to use to encourage him off the couch, if he doesn’t like you asking him to get off the couch (does he need to get off the couch?). If he is aggressive towards others, keep him away from others. Get over the idea he really wants to get to know the person.

The best thing to do is to plan ahead for unexpected circumstances. There will always be a situation you haven’t thought of, but planning ahead for unforeseen occurrences will go a long way in keeping your dog and those around it safe. Don’t assume that other people will listen to your requests, don’t assume that collars and leashes won’t break, don’t take chances. Put a gate in front of the front door if you are concerned he might slip out of the door, go out in the back yard if their is a fence he can get though, or the neighbour dogs who he hates are out. It might sound like a lot of work, but in reality it works to help you relax and it helps you enjoy your dog. Think of it as ensuring your peace of mind.

Next, we need to reframe our relationship. Ask yourself if there is a reason, perhaps, why fate brought you together with this dog. What does he have to teach you? What do you need to learn? Is there something greater at work?

Reevaluate all your hopes and dreams for your dog. If you had high hopes of entering competitions with him, having him be a therapy dog, a playmate for the kids, going on long romps at the dog park with him, ask yourself if that is the only thing you enjoy about having a dog. Those dreams might be better saved for another dog in the future. This step is not so easy, and may even involve some grieving. But your dog is a being with a life and feelings and just may need help from you to live a different sort, a happier sort of life. Remember, we don’t give them much choice about it.

When you have had a break for a few weeks, you might be able to start small. You might try clicker training, and video taping him to get to learn about his way of expressing himself. Spend some time doing research with credible sources. If he is already trained with clicker training, you might try Dr. Karen Overall’s relaxation and deferment protocols. These exercises provide the building blocks for real work down the road. But if your dog is not able to do these exercises calmly and predictably in a number of different areas under a number of different situations, then he sure is not ready for anything more.

So don’t push it. This is not school, learning for an exam where working hard will pay of. We are dealing with neural pathways, neurochemicals, neuroscience. We can’t rush real change. If we are to understand that feelings and behavior are all part of the body, and not something we “own”, then we might be a little more patient with it.

When you actually see success it gives you the motivation to move forward. And when you do it at your your dog’s own pace in small increments so that he can succeed, success is possible. This does not mean training for an hour a day (surprise!) It means building it into your life in such a way that you can make it work regularly. No point in burning out in two weeks!

Bottom line, If you are managing your dog safely, then all the pressure is off.

We have seen this time and time again on the group. People experience great frustration, and eventually come to a point where they just accept the situation. Initially it is almost as if they have given up, thrown the towel in and just figure they are going to live with a dog with issues and make sure no one can possible get hurt. They have usually become burnt out, in some cases, disillusioned with a professional(s), or just plain fed up and tired of the struggle. They stop for a period.

And then they start to enjoy their dog again. It’s because they are no longer putting their dogs into the situations where they will fail. Once the pressure is off, they stop pushing, it stops becoming all about the owners and all the owner’s baggage. It’s so much easier to go at the dog’s pace and work when its right for them. Many of us have made far more progress with our dogs once we have “given up”.

But getting to the point of absolute frustration is not necessary to accept the situation. We only experience frustration when our needs or desires are unmet. Managing the dog can prevent that.

Management is so important to keep us all safe. But its also important in helping us keep our perspective.

More favorites.

This is both a boarding and anti-bark collar story gone wrong.  The scary thing is, the owners had no idea until they picked up their dog.  Thankfully, the dog looks like it will recover.

Video and full article at: http://cbs11tv.com/topstories/local_story_221205535.html

“Let your dogs take revenge on Michael Vick!” Vet clinics are looking for cage liners. A Facebook group designed to inform more people about the issues of dogfighting by inviting people to join - even if you don’t have a jersey.

A friend of mine is a complete dog novice. Last year she got a new pup who, as it turned out, was afraid to go into any other people’s homes or garages except her own house (the dog would not go into her garage). She asked me what she could do about it. Forcibly getting the dog to go in wasn’t making her dog any better (in fact she got worse) and she felt terrible about it. I had suggested clicker training and gave her a run down on different ways she might approach it. When she first got her pup I have loaded her up with books and videos, so she was familiar with clicker training, although I don’t know if she actually tried it.

Well, I was very pleased to hear that clicker training her fearful pup had been really successful and once she got her into the building she was working on, she had no more hesitations.

Clicker training seems slow, and sometimes it almost hard to see the progress for that reason, until you realize the animal has just accomplished a major task or overcome a major hurdle. This video here, shows a mule that has been previously abused going through a similar process as my friend’s dog.

So did it stick? She took her dog to another house, but her dog resisted going in. Then she realized she had been working on getting her dog to come in through sliding glass doors. So she asked the house owner if she might try their sliding doors and sure enough the dog went right in with no hesitation.

Its interesting because it indicates the dog’s issue might not be around “going in” so much as “going through” In other words, it seemed to be the doorway itself, rather than being inside, or entering somewhere new.

I explained to my friend that she will likely have to work with her dog in a variety of situations before her dog would lose her fears of entrances because dogs are contextual learners, meaning they will learn something in a given context. They don’t tend to generalize as much as we do.

All too often you will hear dog owners in a new dog training class complain how stubborn their dogs is because while it sat fine at home, it refuses to sit in class. I have actually witnessed people being so embarrassed over their dogs “refusal” to listen and obey, that they spend most of the class trying to get that poor dog to sit instead of paying attention to what they are being taught.

The thing is, the dog has learned to sit in their living room, and that’s it. Sitting on the street or in class is simply not the same thing to a dog. They are asked to sit in class and they are thinking. “How can I possibly sit in the living room right now when we’re not in it!” So they wait for more information while we are busy tugging at their leash and yelling at them.

There is a ton of controversy about methods in the dog training world. Its a lot for the average owner to make sense of. Its even more difficult for owners of dogs with behavior issues to make sense of. Many of us have a strong inclination to punish. There are a lot of theories why, from how we ourselves are raised, to the human natural sense of justice.

What is rarely discussed is that humans are usually rewarded when they are punished and this reinforces the likelihood of our punishing again. But, unexpectedly, we are not necessarily rewarded by our animals compliance, although that is certainly a powerful factor when it does happen. We are almost always rewarded by our own internal biology. When punishment has a temporary effect to suppress the undesirable behavior, it becomes very difficult to talk people out of doing it.

People generally have three vulnerable internal states that lead to the more empowering and public state of anger: pain, fear and frustration. When we are dealing with animals (and children), we are often put into a situation where we need them to behave in a particular way. When they don’t, naturally we can get frustrated. The more important it is to us that they behave, the more likely we will be frustrated when they don’t. If you are dealing with a dog who has a behavior problem, you are constantly dealing with this same situation over and over again.

Most people intuitively get this. Those who fight against punishment know that punishment is usually about anger. It leads some to take a moral high ground against those who resort to it. However, what a lot of people don’t know is that studies in the 60s and 70s have indicated that inflicting physical harm on another person that annoyed the subject showed a larger and faster reduction in arousal than in those people allowed to engage in other activity. In other words, as much as we may hate to admit it and regardless of the effect on the dog, it makes us feel better to punish. Its not that we are petty, vengeful, vindictive or any of the other moral descriptions you could describe us with - its simply a biological aspect of being human. So punishment can be a pretty efficient way to reduce the negative aspects of anger and frustration.

And of course this biological response strengthens the likelihood that we will resort to punishment the next time we get angry. Of course our intellect may kick in shortly after and we feel guilty, but we get the immediate fix to our frustration. Does it feel good to punish? Not exactly. But it feels good to not feel so bad.

It kind of makes sense then, that those who dogs who start to fight other dogs, or scare off people might also experience the same thing. The more they do it, the more they are likely to do it, just based on that single factor alone. The reduction in arousal is a relief. It strengthens the likelihood of the response. Aggression might be viewed as a coping response.

If we consider how averse an experience acute anxiety actually is, it may not make much real difference how much we punish aggression or how much we drop treats in front of our dog. Our dog might be solely concerned with reducing anxiety, and if aggression does it, it might not matter what we do.

So how then do we treat aggression?

The key is to view aggression as a secondary response. The key is to treat the underlying issues of anxiety. The aggression may be our problem, but it is not your dog’s primary issue. Those who have had any short term success punishing aggression are only suppressing the response - they are not treating the underlying issue. We are not teaching that dog any thing about what it should be doing, we are not teaching that dog to be calm, or even what being calm means.

We need to treat the primary response - the anxiety. We can work with anxiety in small increments so the dog never has to be overwhelmed. This is not much different that behavior modification for people with fears. One small step at a time until we can work our way up to the not-as-scary-as-it-was-before stuff.

So, in the meantime, what do we do with our own inclination to punish when we are dealing with our biology? It can be a hard habit to break, obviously. Well, we need to have as much empathy for ourselves as we do for our dogs. First of all, we need to realize that we are just human. We got to work with what we got. One of the first things we tell people is to avoid the aggression - avoid getting your dog’s fight, flight or freeze biological responses aroused, avoid getting your dog worked up. Besides safety, one main reason for that is because if you don’t, the neural pathways in your pup’s brain get stronger each time. No one can help that - its just what happens. If you get worked up at the same time, the same happens for you too. When your practicing piano - its great. For the bad habits - not so great.

So, let’s deal with the anxiety first and teach your dog one baby step at a time a different way to respond. Set your dog up for success. Eventually when your dog learns how to relax, and is rewarded for relaxing (by you and by his own biology), you can increase the challenge in a small way.

The same for us. Let’s find a way to manage and avoid those frustrating situations. One way is reframing how we view the work. Focusing on the negative is energy sucking. Focus on what we can do, what are dog can do. Set yourself up for success. Don’t wander blindly into those situations where you are not quite sure how your dog will respond. If you are unsure, forget it. You don’t have to keep testing your dog to see if he is getting better or not or if you are working as hard as you should. Its not magic.

Start small, move small, and reward yourself and your dog for successes. Remember dogs discriminate far better than we do so what he or she learned into one situation will not necessarily work for all similar situations. Practice them all. Don’t kill yourself over it, just make the sessions the way you want so you can practice them frequently (keep them short and successful). Work in baby steps. Its funny, but when you teach your dog how to relax, you often teach yourself how to relax, too.

When your dog is 80 - 90% successful at one step, you’ll know when to move on to the next baby step. If he is not succeeding, then be empathetic. He is either not feeling well that day, he’s bored or perhaps there is something in the situation you haven’t identified that is preventing success. So move back half a step or take a break. You will find you will be rewarding a lot more and punishing a lot less because you are not pushing your dog beyond what is is able to deal with at any one time.

The great thing is that you will have learned alternative ways of responding right along side with your dog. Your dog will be happier, you’ll be happier. And you will find you will be far more successful then you were when you were both miserable.

In the dog world people often equate behaviorism and operant conditioning with B.F. Skinner. Although there is much more to learning and behaviorism than simply B.F. Skinner, he was very influential in this area and I was happy to find this nice little snippet of a documentary with him in it.

Serum serotonin levels in the aggressive dogs were significantly lower than in the normal dogs. Also in horses.

One of the most common things people complain about is excessive dog barking. “Positive” trainers (those preferring a reward based system for teaching based on providing or withhold a variety of rewards) describe teaching a dog to bark, and then teaching them not to bark, other trainers “balanced” (those preferring to use both reward and punishment techniques) may also suggest a citronella, or ecollar (or shock collar) to offer a “fix”.

If you didn’t know better, you would expect that an ecollar would be pretty darn effective, but that the majority of owners don’t like the idea. Dr. Sophia Yin who has a great page on barking did a questionnaire with 996 respondents. 14% had tried citronella collars, and 14% had tried ecollars. As expected, a wopping 67% had short term effectiveness. However, only 16% had long term effectiveness.

What does that mean for dogs? It indicates that more than three quarters of the dog exposed to these collars were getting shocked for pretty much no reason. Close to 40% reported adverse effects, and the most, common adverse effects were fear of the collar or areas in which the collar was activated and generalized depressed behavior when were the collar. And 84% percent of them continued to bark in spite of this.

So, it would seem to me that many dogs have a very good reason for barking. But the stress involved for us in coping with the issues interferes in our being encouraged to look deeper into the specifics. People dealing with excessive barking often risk losing their home (eviction) or having their dog (and themselves by association) identified as a public nuisance. Neighbors who may not like dogs in the first place have NO patience for dog barking, particularly those dogs who bark incessantly the entire time the people are out of the house. Everything in our society aims to promote harmony - we are dependent on other for our survival. So when we are not getting along with our neighbors, it has some deep psychological impacts. As with dog aggression we are highly motivated to just get it to stop.

Unfortunately many efforts fail. So what are the reasons for dog barking? I owned an anxious dog who was hyper vigilant - alwasy on alert and barked at things outside that I am pretty sure were not there (judging by the other two dogs total lack of interest). I tried a variety of techniques, but I eventually got some window “wall paper” with was opaque plastic and covered the lower half of the windows. It cut her barking down by about 70%. Plus she didn’t miss watching the outdoors because it was a source of stress. The result was that she was actually calmer.

I know other dogs who bark for attention. Some of these dogs might be stopped with punishment IF their need for attention is not that strong and the punishment is implement correctly (which is rarely is). But these dogs are usually not barking excessively, so their owners don’t have to resort to drastic measures. Its the dogs who bark excessively who are more likely forced to wear an ecollar.

Unfortunately even some dogs who bark for attention have anxiety issues which is why the barking becomes excessive. Their issues may be a little different. They need constant information from the environment and from their owners, and if they are not barking for attention they will be doing something equally annoying to get your attention - whatever works. These dogs are not going to stop until their anxiety is addressed. A good vet behaviorist and a good positive trainer or behaviorist might be the choice. Minimally, deferment and relaxation protocols to address their anxiety, and potentially medication. In the meantime teaching them a more effective way for them to get your attention may reduce the barking. But it takes a lot of repetition training with the new attention-getting method, consistent responding to the demand for attention through the desires methods, and the ignoring of the barking. Consistently. And be careful what you wish for.

What about those barking when their owners leave? Is this separation anxiety? It would be a good idea to video tape what your dog is doing when you leave and show this to a vet behaviorist. The will look at what the dog is doing over a period of time, as well as listen to the barking.

What about other suggestion such as discouraging dog barks at the door. Well years ago I saw a trainer who strongly discouraged this. To this day I am not sure if he actually believed it, or whether it was his way of maintaining clients. After all, a person who is continually dissatisfied with ther dogs behavior - but who thinks its is because of what they are doing - may be someone who is likely to sign up for more sessions.

From personal experience, making a big deal at the door does not work. You get worked up, they get more worked up. You yell, they think you’re barking right along side with them.  Alert, alert!

We forget that they are trapped in the home; they can’t see through the door often; they can’t smell as much as they would like about what ever there is on the other side; there’s no buffer of space, just a door; they have no idea what is going to happen; they don’t have the information they need to determine if everything is going to be okay. We need to realize that dog bark when they are concerned. It can be an alert call - come over here, something’s up, I’m worried, and/or back off whatever you are - I’m scary! Our telling them something to make them quiet is meaningless. If they are also prone to anxiety you are dealing with underlying issues - the issue at the door is a symptom.

At a minimum, you dog needs to know that everything is going to be just fine. Give them something to do that is the same every time, let them know we’re handling it - we know what’s out there - and provided they are not aggressive, they can even check it out. Stay calm. If they are may be aggressive, then teach them and reward them for going to their crate.

Surprisingly, many people are unaware they they may also have a stress response when the doorbell goes off. There seems to be time pressure to get to the door before the visitor leaves, or before they ring the bell again, and you dobn’t always know who is going to come to call - its not always a pleasurable experience if you have to tell pushy sales people to go away. If you are one of those people who worries about getting to the door in time, but you would like to try to get your dog into a crate, putting up a sign outside letting people know it many take a minute to get to the door may reduce your stress.

Another stress is feeling like you got to get your dog trained right now. Know that your dog predicts what is going to happen in the present far more on what has occurred in the past than we do. So it will take time to change their outlook.

I read a really interesting report that used straight classical conditioning for an extremely aggressive dog at the door - hundreds and hundreds of repetitions over a period of several weeks of ringing the doorbell, which took the edge enough off the dog that they were able to use operant conditioning. The idea here is that the dog eventually starts to develop the assocaiton of the bell or knock with the coming of food. Its the anticipation of this food (and now you understand why so many darned repetitions are needed to compete with previous associations) that will start the dog to salivate. The point? The desire to eat is part of the parasympathetic nervous system. This is parasympathetic nervous system is thought to be largely incompatible with the sympathetic nervous system which dictates our stress response.

No technique will work easily on a dog with generalized anxiety or who has anxiety issues that underlie excessive behavior. If you suspect your dog has an anxiety issue, spend some time observing your dog and video taping them in a variety of contexts, but especially the issue that is causing the most problems, or the behavior that seems excessive. It might be time to take those observations to a veterinarian and have them consult a vet behaviorist on your behalf.

What I wish credible trainers, behaviorists and veterinary behaviorists would make public are photographs and videotape of dog behavior with clear identification and make it available to the average dog owner. I don’t mean training videos, but behavior: images of dogs who are anxious and relaxed; normal and not normal dogs within the same context. What do they sounds like, what to do they look like?

The question of identifying relaxation has come up frequently on our dog aggression group where anxiety and relaxation are critical to treatment. Its difficult to explain what relaxation looks like - especially online - unless you can actually see comparisons. You would think it would be easy, but its not. Again and again, owners are challenged to recognize what relaxation actually looks like. Until we can do identify relations reliably, treatment is going to be an uphill battle.

Many of us become desensitized to peculiar aspects of our dogs behavior and we start to think its just “them”. Well, of course it is just them (who else would it be), but they may also being showing you signs of anxiety that we are not recognizing. Anxiety is tricky because its an internal state and it can manifest through any kind of experience or interaction in a variety of behaviors. When it does, it is usually behavior that is outside of “normal” as compared to other dogs without anxiety.

Those of us who have multiple dogs are lucky because we can at least we are aware of the differences even if we can’t identify why such as the: The aggressive dog who always seems hyper-alert to the slightest thing outside when the others snooze on the couch. The dog who never investigates when he comes into a new room. The dog who can’t sit still after an hours of being in a new room. The dog that lies down with his legs and tail tucked in. This is the stuff you get to see when you go to the veterinary or training conferences but generally is hard to find for average dog owners.  I’d like to see these videos/images online. For free.

We are so used to looking at dogs in a modular fashion. So many dog owners spend hours analyzing why their dog has gone after Fluffy, but not Fido, and why yesterday, but not today, but today he went after a big dog, and he never had issues with big dogs before. Well, that’s just us being human. Sometimes we are trying to justify it, sometimes we are in denial, but mostly we try to make sense of things.  But its hard to make sense of things when we don’t have all the information we need.

One of the most popular pages on the K9aggression site is the page on types of aggression in dogs. You can imagine people pouring over those descriptions and trying to match it up to their dogs. Some people get despondent seeing owner-directed aggression, food aggression and possession aggressive. Lots of debates have centered around whether their dog had protective aggression or territorial aggression. Actually, if our dog is aggressive towards other dogs - we kind of like the idea our dog is protecting us (its all about us - we’re so predictable). But we don’t like the aggression or the problems is causes for us.

But the kind of aggression our dog is classified with does not give us much information except in predicting the circumstances where might happen again (which is actually huge, but usually not what people focus on), and then to some degree how to treat. But aggression is not our dog’s problem. Its a symptom of the problem(s) - a non-specific symptom at that. It does not always occur in isolation to the specific trigger, even if it looks to us that way. Most of us just learning about aggression know very little about it, or about anxiety as an underlying contributor.

If our dog really has the larger problem of anxiety, then learning about anxiety will inform us much more about the aggression. The more we understand anxiety, the more likely we are to recognize it in a variety of situations. The more we understand it, the less inclined we are to expose our dogs to the triggers of anxiety. In turn we will see less aggression without treatment simply because we are managing it much better.

In some circles there is moral judgement around “just” managing your dog’d behavior, when we should be treating our dog. To some degree I subscribe to this, because a dog who can be helped is a happier and potentially safer dog. I say potentially, because people can be lulled into the idea that their dogs are no longer aggressive when the changes in the brain never go away.

However, so many people do not know how to properly treat their dogs, even when they buy into the idea of desensitization and counter conditioning. The reason for this is because doing these techniques right depends on recognizing when your dog is relaxed. In most cases we are only looking for what is not there (i.e. I can proceed to get my dog closer to his trigger because he is not acting aggressive), opposed to the behavior that is actually there: is it a quiet, still, focused body, or loose limbed dog? Dogs give lots of signs, but we don’t always know how to read them.

Some people claim that aggressive pitbulls give no warning to their aggression and this is what makes them dangerous. I would argue that in fact pitbulls give signs as much as any other dogs. But some may not give the same kinds of signals that some other types may. I have seen some dogs play and act submissively - excited, almost manic. They seem like silly crazy puppies, when in reality there is no submission there at all. They are not truly playing - and this may be our inability to differentiate between different mode of interaction - but they are interacting anxiously and trying desperately to get signals from the other person or dog. It looks like play on the outside, to us, at least, and maybe it will never turn. But that silly crazy behavior may be a cue for issues in other areas of the dogs life

Dog owners hyper-focus on the behavior of aggression because that is their problem, when by the time their dog is acting aggressive its too late - the damage is done. Dog owners can be susceptible to those professionals who can promise to stop the behavior now (or soon). Hyper focusing on suppressing the behavior interferes with understanding and treating the underlying causes. Interestingly not too much literature is out there by shocking people for anxious responses. For the most part the standard treatment includes relaxation as an important element.

Unfortunately not enough solid comprehensible information is out there to help owners establish trust and treat their dogs humanely. Desensitization and counterconditioning is understandable is theory, but in practice is a challenge to execute as it is with people. It usually gets reduced to throwing the dog some treats.

But if we can focus on relaxation and getting our dogs there we are on to something, because a relaxed dog is not an aggressive dog. Start in the home, start to teach them what it means to relax, start teaching them what they need to do to relax. And reward them for relaxing so they get it and can do it on cue. In time relaxation can be self reinforcing.

In the mean time I encourage any trainers, behaviorist and vet behaviorists - make the stuff available online (we can help with the online part). Identify what is a relaxed dog, what is not a relaxed dog. Identify a relaxed mouth and a tense mouth. Show us the wrinkled brow, show us the tucked in legs, show us comparisons. Tell us more about stress responses.

Dog owners need it. Dogs need it.