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Michael Baugh CDBC CPDT-KSA

I train dogs for real life. We aren’t running an agility trial. We aren’t competing in the show ring. Everything I teach, everything we practice, applies to our daily life with dogs.

We don’t need our dog to behave well just in training sessions. We want our dog to be comfortable, calm, and well mannered in our daily lives. When Aunt Milly comes over, we want our dog to accept a brief pet and then go lie down, for example. Or when the nieces and nephews come charging in the door, we might want our dog to go into his room for a while and rest quietly. We want to see our work pay off. This is true for all of us, most especially for those of us who have dogs who have behaved aggressively.

Make training look like real life. Make real life look like training. The bridge between our dog training sessions and everyday life without dogs can be hard to navigate. Dogs with emotionally driven behavior issues (think: aggression or other fearful behaviors) rely on patterns. We can train specific protocols for meeting new people. Dogs learn those quickly and depend on them when we have guests. In fact, dogs can learn all kinds of patterns. We can teach them to go to a room when they yard men come. They can learn how to disengage from other dogs on walks. Even our formerly aggressive behaving dog can learn rituals for interacting with new people. We teach these in contrived training set-ups. Our dog builds confidence and trust. When we are at our best, the training looks and feels exactly like it will in our regular lives. We aren’t just teaching tricks. We’re teaching life hacks.

Practice what you teach. Once we’ve taught our behavior patterns, we need to stick to those patterns day in and day out. Now we cross that bridge between training sessions and real life. For example, our dog used to bark and run away from friends who came into our apartment. We trained for weeks, teaching the dog how to wait quietly for the guest to be seated before we let her out of her room. Then we taught her how to sniff the guest politely, accept a pet, and go lie down. Great. Our dog knows the routine. She also depends on it. Every time a new person comes over, we run the same pattern, just like we trained it. It’s up to us to stick to the plan with every guest, every time. If we go off-plan and tell a friend they can go into our apartment on their own because they left their phone, we are setting our dog up to fail. We didn’t practice what we taught. It’s likely the dog will panic, bark, retreat, or worse.

Here are some other examples:

• We taught our dogs to go to a room when the yard men come, but then left them outside. We broke protocol.
• We taught our dog to disengage from dogs on walks, but then let a friend’s dog charge into our home. We didn’t train for that.
• We taught our dog a specific pattern for getting petted by a stranger, but let a stranger tease and hug our dog. That’s off-plan.

Many dogs have great behavioral flexility. They learn lots of patterns and protocols for life with humans. Some they learn on their own. Others we teach them. Because I work with dogs who are fearful and behave aggressively, I see a lot of dogs who are not very flexible. These are the ones who need the most attention and our greatest care. They can learn. They can adapt. But they need our help.

Train well. Stick to the training in daily life, for your dog’s life, for a happy life together.

 

Michael Baugh teaches aggressive dog training in Houston TX.

 

 

Michael Baugh CDBC, CPDT-KSA

Owner-directed dog aggression is fairly easy to address and also usually mild in severity. Aggression, as you probably know by now, is not a malady that lives inside our dogs. It’s certainly not a personality trait–some demon that needs to be exorcised. Aggressive behavior, in fact, is just like any other behavior. It’s a response to the dog’s environment, one that we can address and change with positive reinforcement training techniques. Owner-directed aggression usually resolves well because the owner is the primary player involved. They are both the trigger and the potential source of reinforcement. As a trainer and coach, this puts me in an enviable position. If I can influence the human’s behavior, I can help change the dog’s behavior.

In owner-directed cases, I’m able to help clients implement changes on the first visit that end bites immediately. I typed that last sentence after a great deal of reflection. If we know that human behavior A reliably elicits dog’s aggressive response B, then we can quickly end that pattern of behavior. Eliminate A, at least temporarily, while we address the bigger picture. If you were to ask “what do I do if the dog attacks me,” I could confidently say we’ve put some changes into immediate actions to prevent said attacks.

That said, it’s still a question worth answering.

Safety, of course, is always our priority. Owner-directed dog bites are quick single bites, a level one or two on the Dunbar Scale. Most times, the dog will snarl, growl, or air snap long before they will bite. This gives us ample time to stop or at least pause whatever is eliciting the response. Keep in mind, if we are the trigger, then we have a great deal of power to stop the unwanted behavior.

If a dog threatens to bite, or if he bites and then continues to charge, putting distance between the human and the dog is always our safest first choice. Many dogs return to baseline behavior quickly after an incident and will willingly respond to cues to isolate in a kennel or behind a baby gate. Where this is not possible, the person must be the one to increase distance. Move away. Do not let your ego or erroneous concerns about winning or losing impede your safety. You’re already a member of the most advanced species on the planet. You have nothing to prove to your dog.

On rare occasions in which a multiple-bite incident occurs or appears imminent, put a barrier between yourself and the dog. Think: solid door. A furniture cushion can even shield you long enough to get to safety. This is an emergency response. Extremely aggressive incidents are also extremely rare. When faced with imminent danger, people yell and attempt to physically protect themselves from an advancing dog. This kind of reaction is reflexive and normal. Our underlying goals remain: increase distance between us and the dog, and put a barrier between us, even as we attempt to push away from or ward off a dog. Keep in mind, though, our physical and verbal responses are not training.

Intentionally confronting or physically challenging a dog is dangerous. We risk significant physical injury. Dogs are fast and some bite very hard. Hitting, grabbing, tackling, rolling, or otherwise putting our hands and arms anywhere near the biting end of a dog is ill-advised and foolhardy. Further, there is well documented evidence that shows physical punishment as a cause of, not a solution for, aggressive dog behavior. “Dogs subjected to physical reprimands scored significantly higher on aggression sub-scales” (Hsu and Sun, 2010). “The use of positive punishment or negative reinforcement based training methods was associated with increased chance of aggression to family and unfamiliar people outside the house.” (Casey et al., 2013).

Here’s the rub. We think we need to show the dog who is the boss. It’s woven into our pop culture about dogs. How else will we show that their behavior is not acceptable? We want to punish our dogs because it makes us feel like we are doing something. Yes, there may be an immediate interruption of the behavior. No, there won’t be long-term benefit from it. The research is already very clear on this.

The fallacy is that our dogs are behaving aggressively 1) as a logic-driven choice and 2) as guided by some moral compass of right and wrong. Most aggressive outbursts in animals (including human animals) are impulsively driven from a very primitive part of the brain. Little thought goes into them. Add to that, there is no evidence at all that dogs engage in philosophical pondering of good versus evil or right versus wrong. Aggressive behavior in dogs is about making the target person (or other animal) go away or stop what it is doing. Fear drives aggression: fear of an unknown person, fear of a person’s erratic or aggressive behavior, or fear of losing a prized resource, to name just a few.

Cases of owner-directed aggression usually involve:

• Guarding a resource: food, object, or place.
• Resistance to physical handling (fear of being restrained or physically manipulated).
• Conflict with the owner related to owner’s attempt to punish the dog for a perceived misbehavior (including behavior related to the above).

We can address these aggressive dog behavior triggers with positive reinforcement training. Most dog guardians want to resolve their dog’s behavior issues at the source, and rightly so. How can we teach our dogs to behave differently? How do we help him better self-regulate and more effectively navigate situations he used to see as frightening or threatening?

Reacting to an aggressive outburst is not training. If we do our jobs right, we address the issues at the core and eliminate the aggressive behavior altogether. In cases of an emergency, we behave with safety as our primary goal, creating distance and barriers between us and the threat of harm. We deescalate rather and inflame an already volatile situation. Any advice to the contrary would be ill-informed and dangerous.

Michael Baugh has worked with families with dogs since 1999. He specializes in aggressive dog training.

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Baugh CDBC CPTD-KSA

I like metaphors and analogies when I’m teaching folks about dog behavior change. Comparisons to money are my favorite since humans find it so reinforcing.

Here’s an example. Let’s says we have a dog who barks and charges at new people coming into his home. Every time we follow a predictable training protocol for introducing him to new people it’s like putting money in the bank. Behavior analyst Susan Friedman calls it her “trust account.” We are making an investment in building trust. On the flip side, every time we allow a person to set our dog off it’s like taking out a huge withdrawal from the account. The dog barks and charges and we lose part of our investment. The idea, of course, is to get rich earning lots of trust. Too many mishaps and we go broke, no more trust.

Just like with a financial investment, sometimes the best thing we can do with our dog training investment is to let it mature long-term on its own. Let’s look at that same dog who barks and charges at new people. We’ve put in a minimal effort with training. We have a good greeting protocol in place and the dog is actually getting comfortable with some of our friends. The returns on our training investment can build exponentially just by letting things be.  Here are some specific strategies for building compound interest on your training efforts:

• Allow for zero uncontrolled greetings (e.g. person just walks in). That alone will build trust and confidence. Think of it as passive income on your investment.
• Put more training in the account. Run controlled meetings that are easy. You don’t have to invest huge amounts of effort, just a little bit here and there adds up.
• Don’t mess with your investment. We don’t want to withdrawal what we’ve put in for something that promises quick gains. We can lose everything that way and none of us wants to go broke or have to start over where we began.

Think for a moment how rich we’d all be if we started young. Puppies are prime training investment opportunities. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start with the dog you have now – you should. But, keep the puppy thing in mind. There’s nothing like a dog whose learned behavioral flexibility from day one. That kind of investment will pay dividends for a lifetime.

 

Michael Baugh teaches dog training in Houston, TX. He specializes in fearful and aggressive dog training.