WHY YOU SHOULD NOT SEND YOUR AGGRESSIVE DOG AWAY TO A BOARD AND TRAIN FACILITY

It’s tempting to let a skilled trainer do the work training your dog and then have them show you how to do it. But here is why its a bad idea to send your dog off to a board and train scenario when it comes to treating aggression in dogs.

You Can’t Confirm How Your Dog is Being Treated

The biggest risk in leaving your dog with a handler is that you don’t know how your dog is being treated. However, when we are dealing with dog aggression the risk goes up. People will not tell you anything they are uncomfortable sharing.

In the best case scenario: are all the people the qualified to handle your dog? Do you feel you know enough to know the difference? Will you be able to tell after treatment whether shock collars, deprivation techniques, isolation, or fear or any other controversial techniques have been used to inhibit aggression? What about neglect?

If he or she is using methods you don’t agree to, you will not know. If your dog comes back with a problem, you will not know how it happened. This can cause guilt and anguish for having sent them away in the first place.

Unfortunately there are several real life stories of people who have ended up going to court.

You Give Control to the Trainer

You are vulnerable to the whims of the consultant because they now have your dog. If the consultant chooses to ignore your attempts to contact him or her, there is little you can do, outside of going there physically. If the consultant tells you your dog has attacked another person or dog, you can’t be sure whether or not it happened or what the circumstances were.

Unfortunately we have first hand reports of a trainer who maintained control over his clients by threatening to reports the dog aggression to authorities.

In other cases, when a dog was returned to its owners and still has issues, the trainer told the owners the dog was fine with him, and suggested the issue was with the owners and in other cases that it meant that the dog was beyond help. How will you know?

Aggressive Dogs Need to Strengthen Their Bond with Their Owners

A fear or anxious aggressive dog needs to first earn and then know he or she can rely on their owner. This should be part of the treatment program. If you don’t know how to react confidently when some situations arise, your dog can sense this and lose confidence in you, and may resort to his aggressive behaviors.

A territorial or protective dog may regard his owner as his territory which is not something you can work on if he is somewhere else with someone else.

The majority of dogs seen by vets for aggression problems are thought to be aggressive towards their owners. If your dog is is aggressive towards you or another member of the family, the problem that needs to be treated lies between the dog and the people he has the issues with. If you send your dog away to a trainer outside of your home for training, you will still have the problem when your dog returns [1]

Dog Owners Need to Learn to Trust Their Dogs Again

Dog aggression can be traumatic and it can take a certain amount of time for owners of aggressive dogs to trust their dogs again. It is not enough to take the word of a consultant that your dog is fine, when you have learned to be fearful or cautious. Your fear has not need treated. You need to work through the treatment as well as your dog. Trust takes time. In undergoing the rehabilitation with him and witnessing his progress, you can learn to trust your dog be seeing with your own eyes whether he is trustworthy. Otherwise, fear can crop up no matter how you try to disguise it causing you dog to lose confidence in you, or to sense there is a problem and resort to other behaviors.

Dog Owners Need to Learn When Their Dog Is Anxious

If you were able to recognize and act on the subtle signs that indicated your dog was getting anxious, it’s likely that you wouldn’t have an issue with dog aggression because you would have prevented the situation from escalating in the first place.

It can’t be stressed enough how important learning these signs are to your future peace with your dog.

The benefit of doing the training work with your dog, especially those programs that have a good solid foundation of relaxation work, is that you really start to learn and understand the subtle signs that indicate that your dog is unfocused or anxious. This knowledge goes a very long way to avoid your dog becoming aggressive.

Dogs Learn by Association

Dogs are considered to be more discriminatory learners than we are meaning learn in much more specific contexts than humans do. In other words they don’t generalize as well as we do.

What they learn in one situation may not translate to a different situation. This means if you teach your dog to sit in the living room, he doesn’t know how to sit in the backyard. That’s because he learned what it meant to sit in the living room – not any where else. If he learns to sit from a standing position, he does not know what it means to sit when you ask him when he is lying down. That is because you taught him to put his bottom down, not up.

What a dog learns with a trainer may be solid, but when it comes to you doing the same work, your dog may not respond nearly as well. What this means is that you are still required to do a fair amount of work with your dog.

In time by being taught the same thing in a variety of different situations, they start to generalize better. So while learning with a good trainer can’t hurt, it also doesn’t remove as much of the work as you would hope.

Dogs Are Highly Habitual

Dogs are very habitual. The more practiced and established the habit, the more likely that habit will take over. It is simply the brain’s way of being the most efficient. On your dog’s return he may resort to aggressive behaviors simply because that is the habit of how he is around you, or his home.

As much as it takes time for your dog to learn (or unlearn), so it will be for you, too. Any step backwards, or inconsistency can be detrimental.

It’s better to make your mistakes as the dog is learning. Once the dog has learned with another but then experiences your weak points, trust can be eroded, and the treatment can begin to unravel. Then it can be more difficult to get back on track because the dog is unsure and the consistency is not there.

Most Highly Educated Trainers Wouldn’t Recommend it

It’s possible for your dog to be sent away to learn how to sit, and stay and walk nicely on a leash, and then come home and with some adaptation learn how to do it with you. But sitting, and walking nicely on a leash are behaviors, not reactions. Teaching a dog to do these kinds of things is a little like teaching someone how to do the correct tennis stroke.

Aggression is not a behavior that is treated by inhibiting or punishing it. Dog aggression is usually an extension of anxiety and to treat it is a process. Aggression is a coping mechanism and expression of a deeper issue.

To out it into human terms, we can’t treat anxiety in people by scolding someone for having it, anymore than we can eliminate anxiety by giving someone a hundred dollars to get up in front a room to give a speech they are terrified to give.

Most trainers who are well educated in treating aggression in dogs know that you have to be part of the process. They simply wouldn’t recommend it. Their job is to train you and help you learn how to recognize certain dog behavior and communication. BUt as the dog learns and builds new association, it must include you and changing nature of your relationship.

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[1] “He has to learn to be subservient to you,, in your home, not to a stranger in a distant kennel” p. 116 The Dog’s Mind – Understanding Your Dog’s behavior, Bruce Fogel, D.V.M., M.R.C.V.S. Howell Book house, New York 1990


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