A complete reactivity training session with Julia
Since we have the luxury of me working on Julia’s reactivity for this year’s academy I am going to be sharing more complete training sessions with you all so you can watch how I work all of this through with her and see what my training sessions look like.
When I go work on reactivity I really don’t want it to seem like I am working on engagement and training, but we just happen to be where we might see triggering stimuli. So I have a training plan. For this day my plan was to introduce her pattern games in the environment but not work them with triggers, unless they were well out of threshold and she was not over aroused. And to work on her play, both tug and fetch in a more distracting environment.
When we arrived she was almost instantly over excited as there was a lot happening at the park. The playground was full of excited happy children. Two other dogs arrived almost at the same time we did, and she had her two dogs off leash, but it was easy to see her dogs were only focused on her and her chuck it launcher so I just headed to the other side of the playground. There were another couple dogs in the field behind where I set up the camera that she also saw. She was barking, but just her excited woofs, and they were far enough away she did not lose her mind completely, she was just very high. So before I took the time to set up the camera, I walked her around a little bit and tossed a ball for her a few times with her on her leash. That switched her focus to play and off of the dogs so I then set up my camera and put her long line on instead of the shorter leash.
I start with lots of play, tug and fetch to give all that energy somewhere to go that she had loaded up seeing those dogs. Once I could feel that she was locked on me I started doing things like treat tossing, hand touches and simple sits & downs. Then we moved into some pattern games like “up, down” and “1, 2, 3”. I moved back and forth between play and training games so to her they are seem just like one big play session. After about 10 minutes in the first location, after the 2 loose goldens leave and I see that we now have several more loose dogs behind where I have set up with the camera, so I pack up and I move to the far end of the field where the goldens had been so we had more space between us and the new dogs. This new location also put us a lot closer to the bike path so we had more bicycles, joggers and people walking on leash dogs closer to us that allowed for some more exposure a little closer to threshold, but still mostly under. You can see two times towards the middle of the second location when she starts to go close to threshold so I adjust to that, but she never went back over threshold. We stayed in the 2nd location for another 10 minutes and when I saw a nice break with no loose dogs we easily made our way to the car with her staying calm.
If she was Nick when he was at this stage, I would have likely left and gone to another spot or come back later and not risked him being around that many dogs to start a session, but his reactivity had a very different edge to it. Julia genuinely wants to play and is friendly, her reactivity is all frustration, so if a loose dog charges into her face she would probably be thrilled. But Nick would have wanted to fight because his reactivity had fearful roots of insecurity. When Nick was young, he was one of those dogs that drew in other dogs who wanted to get in his face. I swear some dogs are born with kick me signs on their backs. In reality I know it is that these dogs like him that are insecure throw a lot of confusing body language cues that make other dogs respond. But he was definitely rushed a lot when he was young. He never got into any fights and was never attacked, but he did get into a few uncomfortable stand offs where I had to intervene and move other dogs away from him that were postured up over him. So because he had that fearful insecure edge to his reactivity and it showed in his body language responses to other dogs in a case like this until I had successfully shrunk his threshold way down, I always errored on the side of play it safe. Julia is a whole different story. She is like my first bc where she is all unfocused drive spilling out of all her emotions. So I can push through in places I would not with a lot of other reactive dogs.
People ask how I know this, and a lot of it is experience from working with hundreds of reactive dogs over the years, it is very much written in her body language. But for me her eyes tell the story, she looks like a kid in a candy store, she looks like she thinks she’s about to have the best day of her life, she looks like she could simply burst because she is so dang excited. While when Nick was young, he would send a lot of conflicting body language when he saw dogs, his tail would flag up, his hair on his shoulders all the way to his bum would puff up, he would whine, and then if they looked at him he would growl, his head would lower and his eyes would be telegraphing “ok, oh no, but maybe ok, but wait no, but oh I just don’t know”. He was unsure if he wanted to engage or not. But if dogs charged at him quickly he would stand and bark, his body stiff and he clearly said “absolutely not”. Then when they left he would whine like oh wait why is it leaving and start whining and dancing his front feet like he does before he plays with a dog. He was insecure, he wants to like dogs but worries they will race up and challenge him.
So to fix his reactivity I first had to teach him that he was safe and I would not let any dogs get him. I was very careful about where I worked with him and made sure I kept any dogs from charging him, if they did he would stay behind me as I stopped them. But to accomplish that, I had to first shrink his threshold in safe places and build the trust as I built his training skills so he would trust me to sit and stay, or walk at our sides as we navigated triggering dogs. Nick is now fine with loose dogs rushing up to him, in fact on our last trip to the beach it happened 4 times and he just greeted the dogs and walked on and he draws fewer loose dogs now because he doesn’t respond with so much insecurity as he once did.
So long story long, 🤣, you might see me push Julia more than I would most reactive dogs, because I understand her motivations and can feel safe knowing if she is over threshold or does end up face to face with dogs she is not going to respond aggressively. I have also had another very similar dog in the past and know her play drive can now override triggers because I spent a year building that.
Pattern games can be found in the reactivity course but here are the ones you will see me playing:
Up, down: we stand facing each other, she looks up, I mark with “yes” and drop a treat at our feet, she eats the treat, looks up and I again mark and drop a treat. This creates the pattern of her looking from the ground to my eyes.
1, 2, 3: I show her I have treats, when she is looking at me I start walking and with each step I count them out loud: “1, 2, 3” and on “3” I reward her, and then I start again at “1” and repeat. This helps build some focus when moving. This can help us when we need to move past something exciting eventually. Right now I am just conditioning the game and not using it to pass distractions
Magnet Hand: I have a handful of treats, I let her snuffle my hand as I walk and I steadily dole out treats so she stays connected to my hand the whole time. Like 1,2,3 this is a game I can use to move her out of potentially triggering situations. And again we are currently not using it to do that, but getting her used to the game in new environments.
Find it: I show her some treats and scatter them in the grass for her to find. I like to do this with some specific movement, like I will have her hand touch and toss some to my left, then have her hand touch and toss some to my right and such. This way she is used to following treat scatters so I can use them to softly move her away from something.
Wait, release to play: This is a game I use once my dog has strong play drive to build focus and teach her to ignore other exciting things in the environment as I will replace that with my fun and games. It also rehearses coming to for play, so I will then build this into walking. So instead of always being on a wait, once she gets the cues, I can cue her to come to me for this game when she is out walking ahead of me.
This is a 19 minute video showing all our training. The only bits edited out are times we are playing to shorten the overall video length. And also the part where we walked from training spot 1 to training spot 2 which took a few minutes. Obviously you don't have to watch it all, but I wanted to show you exactly what my training sessions look like and how I move from play to training to play and how long I spend on each game before moving on to something else.
Julia has great play drive now, but do know, I BUILT this, it took me 2 months of daily trying to get her to play with me. We will look at how I built it with Training Challenge 3