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Help! My Dog: The Podcast. Dog Behaviour & Training Strategies that Work!
Ep 119 Dog Reactivity at Home: Top Tips for Explosive, Unpredictable Behaviour
00:13:46
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But there should be another window between settle being settled and reacting and it's called being disturbed. Yeah, being mildly offended. It strikes me that your dog's not good at the whole mild offence. They go, I am absolutely mortified. Yeah, I am barking, I am lunging. Before we dive in, a warning. The content of this podcast may not be appropriate for some young listeners. This is real life and that means that sometimes it can be a little bit graphic. Some. So listen on at your own peril. As a veterinarian, dog behaviorist, best selling author and trainer over the past decade, I've had an obsession with transforming the behavior of dogs, understanding their brains and creating practical strategies that you can implement easily at home. I know all too well when the dream you imagined when you first got your dog is far from your daily reality. In fact, out of the blue, a few months ago, my little dog, Gorse was bitten by a dog 20 times her size. And suddenly our of stress free walks, a calm and cuddly household and being teammates was replaced with reactivity, anxiety and worrying about what's around the next corner. I'm Dr. Tom. This is the Help My Dog podcast. And this is me documenting that journey of transformation, sharing my knowledge and experience with you and having a few laughs along the way. Hello and welcome to this episode of the Help My Dog podcast. And today we've got a listener's question again, because you guys finding these really helpful and getting value from them and we've always got questions, so love the podcast, Tom. And my question is about my dog reacting at home. She will be sleeping peacefully, then all of a sudden she barks and lunges at my husband and runs and barks at the window. What do I do? So I probably need a little bit more information, but what I thought would be useful is to go through some tips about why dogs might have to 100 type reactivity at home and what would be some initial things that you can do to improve it. Because I imagine that, you know, there are a lot of listeners that have dogs that do bark in the household and it can be really, really quite stressful. So first things first, the first reason why your dog might be just suddenly barking and running and lunging and jumping at the window and whatever else might be. Because if you think of their stress system as like a stress bucket, and that bucket can get filled by all kinds of different things. It can get filled by excitement, it can get filled by fear, it can get filled by frustration throughout the day. It can get filled by, for example, health conditions like if they have any kind of soreness or pain that will pay into their bucket. It can be filled by, if they're itchy. Right. And they, I don't know, they've got seasonal allergies or something and they're a bit itchy, that can fill it. And so what I'm saying is that these barking episodes might just be the tip of the iceberg. Right. They might just be the straw that broke the camel's back. It's an awful saying, isn't it? It might just be the shot glass that went into the bucket that led to it tipping over, not what actually was the majority of the fill of that bucket. Okay. And so what I would love you to think about is, well, bearing in mind excitement, exciting things, scary things, frustrating things, pain, itchiness, gastro, upset, all of those things might be contributors to your dog's bucket. Are there things that might make up the majority of the fill of that bucket right now? Yeah, because it's often that the things that are filling the bucket a lot are not the presenting problem. Right. They're not the thing that you're getting in touch with me about. And actually they might be things that you can do something about them. And with that, what do you do about them? Well, there's really nearly always two options or three options, I guess. First option is avoid it. Is it something that actually your dog doesn't need to have in their days or their weeks. Right. They don't need to go to the park and madly chase the Frisbee and end up with a, you know, a close to overflowing bucket from excitement. Is that just an avoid situation? Yeah. And second option with anything that fills a dog's bucket is can we reduce it so we can't avoid it? Our dogs don't have the skills right now to think that it's. To think that it's nothing to worry about or to be calming in that context, but it's a situation we cannot avoid. How can we make it 1% better? Yeah. How can we make it 2% better, 3% better? Because ultimately that has a knock on effect on how much fills the bucket. Right. How can we make it slightly quieter? How can we make our dog's response not be quite so extreme? Like, for example, could they be on lead in that context? Would that make a difference? So nearly always there are like, you know, three to five different little tiny things that you could do that would make a situation just else slight bit better. Yeah. And actually those things add up. And then the third one, hey, Guys, I just want to take a moment to answer a question that has been coming in literally 10 emails today and that is how can we help you with your dog's behavior struggle? Whether that be reactivity, separation anxiety, resource guarding, maybe you've got multi dog household struggle right now. Maybe your dog's just so over aroused on a walk that they just can't listen to you and they're chasing everything in sight. Like can I get Tom's help? And the answer is that actually you can. And you can do that by booking a Behavet behavior consultation. That's where literally my team give you the plan on how to transform your struggle and get you to that dream that made you get a dog in the first place. Right? Your world's got smaller and smaller and smaller and actually it doesn't need to be that way. You just need to reach out for help. Now a couple of things to say on that. First of all, if you're insured, if you, if your dog's insured with Pet plan, Kennel Club, Agria or many pets, we actually do direct claims with them, which means that that's covered by your insurance. So you don't pay out of your pocket, your insurance covers that. And the second thing to say is that we have loads of options. If you're insured with another provider or if your dog's not insured at all, that's also totally fine. We have loads of options that we've developed to make this so accessible for you because we're aware that you've already invested a load of time and a load of money in getting your dog, looking after your dog, caring for your do. But the last thing we want is for you to have done all that and still not be living the life that you deserve with your dog. And we know we can get you there. So all you need to do is go to the Behave Vet website and the way to do that is go B E H A dot V E T that's beh vet and it will take you there or just Google Behavet. Right. And you can get scheduled in and we can literally get you booked in for a consultation as soon as possible. We normally can accommodate it within a week. Right. So that you can be getting to your dream asap. And then the third one is, well, what skills does my dog need to be able to not just survive that bucket filling situation, but thrive in it? In other words, it's no longer a bucket filler. Yeah, it's a little bit like something that a great coach of mine says to me is solve or evolve. Right? Sometimes we have. Sometimes we can solve something. We can solve a problem. Sometimes we have to evolve to thrive in that problem. Right. And it's very much the same when we're thinking about our dogs. Solve would be, well, can I avoid the problem or can I reduce the problem? Right. Can't do either of those things. Or I can do those things. But actually I'd like to also prepare for that being a thing in his life again. Well, how does my dog evolve? Yeah. Do they need more? Do I need to grow the skill of calmness? More? Do I need to grow the skill of disengagement? More? Do I need to grow the skill of optimism? More? All these things you can learn about in the Help My Dog Hub, which like our membership with all the video lessons and live teaching every week and Q and A in the Facebook group. And it's a really just great and transformational place to be if you're struggling with your dog right now. And that's kind of where that would be my first kind of focus for you with your dog. Second thing that I would be, that I'd be thinking about is I would love you to keep a barking diary. Okay. Because it strikes me that your question doesn't seem to mention specifically the things, the challenges that might be triggering this barking and this reactivity. And that's normal not to quite know. And sometimes it takes actually keeping a bit of a diary where every time they bark, you just record, keep it down, and you say, well, what happened in the 20 seconds prior to them starting to bark? And what you might get is you might just get a list of suspects. Right. But the nice thing about that is that then you can do something about that. Yeah. You can start to try and pair those. The arrival of those suspects that I don't know, the door closing in the house next door and your dog can hear it through the walls with some attempt at getting in there and delivering a positive outcome to your dog to tell them it's nothing to worry about. So thinking door closes next door, following up with a marker word like nice or good and delivering a piece of food. Right. Quite simply. But sometimes we need to know what suspects we've got that we need to work with before we can notice them and get in there and deliver that different outcome for your dog. Okay. So that would be my second tip, and then my third tip would probably be whenever I hear these kinds of words of sleeping peacefully, then all of a sudden barks and lunges at My husband or whatever. Right. What I hear is interesting. What I think is interesting. So this strikes me that this dog lives their life between being super settled or being. Or reacting. Yeah. But there should be another window between settle, being settled and reacting. And it's called being disturbed. Yeah. Being mildly offended. It strikes me that your dog's not good at the whole mild offence. They go, I am absolutely mortified. Yeah, I am barking, I am lunging. And they're not so great at just being mildly disturbed. And sometimes we can make that worse as humans, because what we can do is, if we're struggling with barking, it's like when they're asleep, we're like, they're asleep, Nobody move. Yeah. But the thing is, then something happens, like the door closes in the house next door and they absolutely hit the ceiling. Right at arousal level. And the thing is, what we're doing is we're making it worse by making it even more polarized, even more 0 to 100. Nobody move at level 0. They're asleep. Yeah. But the thing is, life still happens. And so what we can create is these dogs that have these very polarized reactions. Reactions that they're either asleep or they're, you know, running around barking. And so I would actually encourage you to incorporate some more disturb into your dog's life. So, for example, and it can be just little things like when your dog's settled, stand up, sit down, see if they become mildly aware of you, and then choose to resettle. The more their brain goes, I'm mildly aware of something and I'm choosing to resettle, the more that pathway will open and the more able that brain will be to be able to put slightly bigger events or distractions or stimuli through that pathway rather than the reaction pathway. But right now, your dog needs to be aware that the disturb pathway exists, that being mildly offended is an option. Yeah. There are not just two options of I am asleep or I am reacting. There is also this other one, which is I'm momentarily disturbed and then I'm resettling. Does this make sense, guys? So really, really, really big one. And I think between those three tips, you can really make a huge amount of progress in this struggle. And I know because I've had dogs in the past where I've not known what to do, and it just seems like their barking is just getting worse and worse and worse. And what happens is you go into a state of firefighting and you go into a state of making short term decisions at the expense of the medium term. And yet, as soon as we start to take control of this, we stop firefighting, we move from a place of survival to a place of thriving, which will happen with these tips. But you've got to be aware that you're firefighting and that sometimes you're not making the best choices for the medium term. It really can improve and it can improve quickly. Right. But we've got to be making medium term choices, not short term ones. And then there absolutely is hope. And you can go back to having a silent and harmonious and tranquil and calm household, I promise you. And I cannot wait to hear how you get on. That was this episode of the Help My Dog podcast, and we will see you next week.