After a few months of living at home with Abby again, I started to see the dog that my mom had been dealing with when I wasn't around. Since the bad behaviour with people had stopped, I hadn't been working on any particular training with Abby - just practicing obedience around the house, doing agility once a week, and trying to get her to stop jumping on me and sometimes nipping when I was about to throw the ball. These things were all coming along well. Abby had learned to "down" from a distance, which I think is a very handy thing for a dog to know. We went to our first agility trial in March and Abby came home with 3 Qs! One in jumpers, one in snooker and one in gamblers. Even though I hadn't even tried to teach her targets yet (don't know why I waited so long to teach them!) she didn's miss any of them. We also tried flyball in February, but that didn't go too well. It is a very exciting environment, and Abby just got so hyped up that she was started to redirect and snap at me when I was restraining her. She was also really snarling at all the fast moving dogs, and that isn't something I want to be encouraging at all right now. Eventually I hope we'll be able to try again (she was good at it!), but I'm in no rush.
So everything was going well until one evening in the beginning of the summer, after agility, I took Abby for a run for about half an hour. During the run I noticed that she was starting to look closely at people that passed by us...like she had in the fall. She did one small lunge at a man walking by, but I told myself that maybe she'd just wanted to sniff him as he walked by. When we got to our street, I decided to practice heeling off leash up the driveway and into the house - this was something I'd been doing a lot, and Abby was always better at heeling off leash than on. As I was about to unsnap her leash, I saw that she was looking at a couple coming down the street towards us. I hesitated for a split second, wondering whether I should leave the leash on..but then told myself not to be paranoid (stupid me). I let her off as I said "heel". Abby heeled for a step, then took off in a huge circle so that she ended up running towards the couple from the back. She jumped on the woman's back and snarled and barked, as I screamed for her to "come, heel, leave it". After a few seconds (seemed like forever of course) Abby ran up our driveway and sat by the front door. I apologized to the woman, but the couple didn't stop, and all I heard was the woman saying "what a mean dog!".
That incident really freaked me out. I ended up contacting 2 different trainers. They both specialize in behaviour, but aren't actually "behaviourists" (I didn't know this at first - there are very few actual behaviourists around here). These would be the 2nd and 3rd private consultations with trainers for Abby. At first I thought that maybe I was just looking for a miracle 'cure' for Abby's problems, but I think that I really just needed to find a trainer that I mostly agreed with. The first had been the woman that my mom had called. I had been at school when she came over, and I felt like I had to start fresh with Abby and deal with her problems as if they were new (since they were to me). Also, I didn't agree with a lot of what that trainer said about managing Abby. My mom brought Abby to her advanced obedience class, and I went a few times. When Abby would react to something, like a bouncing ball, she would say "you have to get a handle on that!" and would grab the leash and jerk Abby's collar until she stopped snarling. As soon as the basketball reappeared...Abby would react again. That method was obviously not working.
I should have skipped the 2nd trainer and just gone with the 3rd - the 3rd is a training place that holds a reactive dog class, and it was this class that really got me started with managing Abby. The 2nd trainer..ugh. He was recommended by the clinic where I was working in the summer. I really should have run the other way when the first thing he said to me on the phone was "I have a 75% success rate. This means that there is a 75% chance your dog will improve significantly". He then quoted his prices, and told me I could have a discount since I worked at a clinic. So...I booked a consultation. When I told my mom, she said she'd talked to him on the phone when calling around for trainers the first time and she didn't like him becuase he'd told her that most of the training he would recommend involved a choke chain. He hadn't told me this over the phone, and I wasn't (am now, for fearful dogs) opposed to using choke chains anyway. I wanted to try anything that would work.
When I went for the consultation, Abby stayed in the car while we talked for half an hour so he could come up with a "personalized plan of action" for Abby. Then he came out to meet Abby for 10 minutes to see if his "diagnosis" was correct. These are some of the things he said:
-"She should wear a choke chain. If she lunges on a hike, she will basically correct herself"
-"She should wear a muzzle on walks, to give you peace of mind"
-"On walks, toss people her ball and get them to throw it to her. You will notice that she will start seeing people as a positive thing"
*how exactly was she supposed to catch the ball while wearing a muzzle? If a dog can open its mouth enough to catch a ball, then they can bite. When I asked him this question he was very vague*
-"Get your hands off the dog. Don't pet her"
-"If she's bad, there is nothing wrong with stringing her up. Just lift her with the leash and choke chain so that her front legs aren't touching the ground, and shake her up and down until she yelps."
When he came out to meet Abby, he had me hold her leash, and then he walked right up to us (about a foot from her), bent towards her and stared at her. She lunged and snarled, and then hid behind me when he didn't back off. He seemed very proud, and he said "You see, when you've been working with aggressive dogs as long as I have, you know what to do to get a reaction out of them". ..... I've been 'working' with an aggressive dog for a year and even I know that if you bend over and stare at a dog, you are not going to get a very happy dog!!
So needless to say I didn't try out any of that jerk's suggestions, and I never called him back with the "10 day update".
The reactive dog class that I brought Abby to in July/August was completely different. When the trainer came to our house before starting the class, she sat and talked to me for over an hour with Abby around the whole time. We even had a chance to practice her suggestions. She doesn's like to use choke chains for reactive/fearful dogs, because the tightening around their neck seems to just make them react more towards the stimulus. Her main suggestion was teaching Abby to give eye contact, so that I could ask her to watch me when there was something that she was going to react to. The eventual goal is to get automatic eye contact: The dog sees something "scary", and they turn to look at you. I taught Abby the word "focus", and we practiced a LOT, everywhere we went. We are now at the point where she will look at me when there are people coming towards us, or a bike. We're still working on skateboards and squirrels.
In class, when Abby reacted, I would leave right away and only come back when she was quiet and not reacting. This technique is pretty controversial, I think - it's called 'abandonment training'. I can't see it working well for all dogs, and not in all situations either. But it seemed to work pretty well in class for when Abby would stare at another dog until they reacted, then she would react. It also works well since she resource guards me. If the thing she is guarding so carefully disappears whenever she tries to protect it, it isn't really a behaviour she's going to repeat too much.
By the end of the summer there had been a lot of reactions, but I was learning to teach Abby to focus on me instead of everything else. She was a very different dog from when we got her - she now had to be watched around people (since she has a very low tolerance for getting too excited and then snapping, or feeling trapped and snapping) and around other dogs (she can't meet other dogs on leash right now, and off leash she usually has to focus on the frisbee or ball instead).
In the course of one year Abby became a "reactive dog". It's hard not to think of her changing because of something I did. I think that there are a lot of things I could have done differently, had I had any experience with dogs like Abby, but I also think that the reason she "changed" was mostly due to her maturing.
Abby the ultimate mutt was adopted from the Lange Foundation in Los Angeles as a shy 9 month old in 2005. Her tail is docked for unknown reasons. She's got a whole lotta drive (and a whole lotta crazy) packed into a little (30 lb) super athlete's body. She always has something to say (or scream) and this blog was orginally started to document the quest to de-crazy-fy her slightly.
Home Towns: Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, the Lange Foundation
