OK one more post and then I will get to the fun training stuff – at least fun for me and Amber. It might be like watching paint dry for readers….
From the start my approach with Amber was that she was allowed to avoid and/or retreat from anything that scared her. I know the logic initially sounds weird but in hindsight it worked. Knowing she had the means to get herself out of an uncomfortable spot gave her the courage to stick around to appease her curiosity. It was not that she didn’t like people - she just didn’t trust them. Conventional wisdom would have suggested that I give lots of people treats and let people feed her. The theory being that this would make them less scary. There were a few problems with that. First she was too nervous to eat from people – if she won’t approach then it is hard to get the treat. Secondly I am not sure how well that actually changes the dog perspective – I suspect their new outlook is that sometimes the scary people dispense food. If they offer food then they might be safe enough to approach.
This also gets back to my discussions about reactivity – threshold is very important. If the dog is over threshold then they are overwhelmed by the scary thing and anything that we do is relatively useless. Yes they might be responding to a correction or be eating a treat but their ability to connect either of those events to the trigger (what they are reacting to) is limited. Similarly if they are way under threshold then the “threat” is gone and they don’t learn from the experience. I have some tools that work well with reactivity but in Amber’s case I pretty much allowed her to control her own threshold. Too close and she was free to move away. However what I did not allow her to do was to bolt in a blind panic – if she tried I stopped her. Once she collected herself for even a second we moved away from the fearful thing. We can retreat but we have to do so gracefully….
I also avoided setting her up to have to “deal with” her fearful things. We just went out into the world for travel or training or whatever and if something was spooky then we dealt with it. In a lot of training venues I think people can go crazy with the proofing and I have an issue with it a lot of times. If a dog is reactive (whether it be prey drive,fearfulness etc) how does it help them to teach them that the stimulus that makes them reactive is going to be there each and every time they perform the task? All too often I think proofing goes to a place where the dog feels like he is being setup to fail.
Anyway, getting back to Amber. She has made amazing progress in her ability to cope with the world. She will always be a little environmental “twitchy” I think. She is not crazy about strangers although she can handle them under the right circumstances and on her terms. Like a cat, her first instinct when encountering something suspicious is to retreat to a safe distance and assess the threat level. She also travels like a trooper, going in and out of strange houses, yards and motel rooms willingly. She even spent two weeks hanging out in the van while we were at the FBI Academy. Why was this impressive? Because the van was parked alongside firing ranges – lots and lots of firing ranges. I don’t think there was a caliber of firearm that did not get shot while we were there. She even did some narcotics detection in the yard while that was going on. Pretty impressive for a girl who freaked out when some kids set off firecrackers last new year’s eve near our yard in MS; if she could have got out of the yard I don’ t think I would have seen her again….
The brave little munchkin alerting on narcotics in a big scary warehouse...
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