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.

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.

Yet in a study with selectively bred foxes who were not selected for this skill, but bred to not be fearful of humans, the fox kits are apparently just as good as dog puppies, even those who had limited exposure to humans. This paper suggests that the social-cognitive abilities could be part of the same system including tameness. People may have not select dogs for their special abilities in communicating with us, but these abilities may be a byproduct of our selecting dogs that were not fearful or aggressive.

It naturally leads to the question; do aggressive or fearful dogs today have more challenged social-cognitive skills? One would think that aggressive dogs are more preoccupied with coping in a social setting than dogs who do not tend to be aggressive, and therefor have less “mental space” to figure us out. But in people, there is a correlation between aggression and a deficit in social cognitive abilities.

It is generally considered that owner-directed aggression is partly due to the anxiety of not knowing what is expected of them, confusion around the relationship or the interactions and not being able to predict what comes next. In view of social-cognitive impairment – this makes sense. Not being able to read humans (or other dogs for that matter) would naturally increase anxiety.

Many things that people do could be misinterpreted if dogs were to look at us as if humans were not human, but dogs. For example, many aggressive episodes seem to occur when we are reaching for a dog, petting them on the back or neck, stepping over them, pushing them off furniture, etc. Most normal dogs come to learn that these actions are not threatening because they read other signs to place these human actions into context. They get that smiling, although weird, is not bearing our teeth, and than lovingly looking into the dogs eyes, does not actually mean we are challenging them. At least, most of them do.

But, while some dogs will tolerate just about anything from another dog, many of those same normal, perfectly healthy dogs will not so easily accept those behaviors from another dog. A fight might not break out, but you might hear a growl, see a raised lip, or some other ritualized behavior letting the other dog know its not okay. In fact most of the offending dogs know what they are doing when they are doing it, and are testing the waters.

Interestingly, one of the most common protocols prescribed for aggressive dogs are those which provide a consistent and predictable set of guidelines in which to interact, similar to the “NILIF” (“Nothing in Life is Free”) program as it was originally developed by Dr. Victoria Voith or William ‘s “Learn to Earn”. These programs are more about compliance and control rather than providing a consistent and predictable structure that clearly aims at reducing anxiety such as Dr. Karen Overall’s deferment protocols which may be more effective for behavior problems, however they still involving learned and rule based interactions.

In other words, while many people seem to view these treatment suggestions (and they are usually only one part of a full treatment program) as a means to control, they may really may be a tool to help those dogs who are socially challenged at the brain level. These programs not only help dogs to understand what they need to do, but it also provides them with a comprehensible communication channel, thereby reducing anxiety on a social level.

For those people struggling to understand why knowing or being told what to do would reduce anxiety, think about what its like to start a new job where the role of the job is not clear. You know you are supposed to do something, but your not quite sure what they are expecting, or exactly how to do it, but you know that your ability to keep the job depends on your being able to do a good job. Add to this, (just to make it fun) a volatile boss who thinks most of the world is full of idiots. It would help to have someone point you to your desk, tell you what you need to do, who to call, show you an example of something you are supposed to produce, do or say, etc.

But do fearful responses actually meant an “social cognition impairment”, or a merely a different way to survive? Dogs more likely to be tame, or less likely to be fearful or aggressive, may be also be more likely to take risks. What if the human intension was hunt dogs instead of co-existing with them? How much easier would it be to lure a dog in if they were less fearful of us, and less likely to turn on us. A more reactive dog that more likely to trust what he knows is more likely to stay safe in other circumstances.

But the current reality is, dogs defined as aggressive, or those who are unable to live with their owners without problems, are now less likely to survive. There is strong pressure a get rid of aggressive dogs, from our neighbours and families, and from our society in general that society is now trying to wipe out entire breeds, despite evidence telling us this won’t solve the problem of aggression. It doesn’t stop with pitbulls. All sorts of breeds are being banned all over the world (see 6 page list of breeds banned in Italy for example).

And while fearful or aggressive behavior certainly has has value in some circumstances, it entirely depends on the context. Social cognition is essential for survival. To quote from a paper of social cognition by Uta Frith and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, ” For most animals, survival depends on their ability to identify the movements, eye gaze and social signals of other creatures, to distinguish whether they are prey, predators or mates and to predict their future actions.” (links to a pdf file)

We need our dogs to understand us, and understand the context of the situation we are in. If they are responding to our affection by snapping at us, it makes it hard to bond with them. If they respond aggressively to our friends and neighbours, it makes everyone’e lives difficult. We need to do something to improve the situation, if we can.

Traditionally, we have been taught to view dogs in the context of alpha or dominance theories. These theories have come out of observing a variety of species. The term “pecking order” has come from studying chickens hierarchies, in fact. Its simple, we can teach it to others and it can provide a frame work in which to operate and treat our dogs. At the same time we become more consistent with our dogs. But the theories that have been developed may not necessarily provide an accurate view of the whole picture.

But the more we learn, the more we start to understand “dominating” an aggressive dog is risky. Confront the dog, the dog confronts back. Maybe not at first, but often it seems as if the dog finally has enough. There can be a lot of finger pointing when things go wrong, the owner, the dog, the vet, the trainer, all who for the most part are really doing their best. But as we start to study the brain and body; how we work, how dogs work, we find the need to rethink some of our current assumptions.

Science is not all knowing. Some people have developed a mistrust of it because of the natural tendency to want to believe so whole heartedly. We want to believe: we want the easy and clear answers. But science only touches on fraction of what there is to know, and being human we don’t always come to the right conclusion.

But science has also opened many windows. Collectively, we know more than we used to and its often enough to challenge our preconceptions if we can let it. At a minimum, the more we learn, the more we can be encouraged to approach research and treatment at a holistic level.