# 91 PET TALK TODAY Dog Training with Will Bangura. Q & A: Dog Aggression, Fear Aggression, Jumping, How to introduce dogs to each other.

PET TALK TODAY #91  Dog Training with Will Bangura. Q & A: How to introduce dogs to each other. How to handle Dog Aggression, Fear Aggression, Jumping, Going after the Cat, Too Excited on Walks, Dog Training and Behavior Advice. This and more discussed today.  Dog Training, Dog Trainer, Dog Behaviorist. Cat Trainer, Cat Training, Pet Trainer, Pet Training, Will Bangura

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Raised by Wolfs with canine DNA in his blood, having trained more than 24,000 pets helping you and your fur babies thrive. Live in studio. It's Pet Talk today with Will Bangura answering your pet behavior and training questions. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome your host and favorite pet behavior expert, will Manura .

Introduction

Speaker 2 0:35

Good Saturday morning, pet lovers. I'm Will Bandura . Hey, thanks for joining me for another PET talk today. Yes, it's Saturday, March 25th. I'm here each and every Saturday morning answering your pet behavior and training questions. Doesn't matter whether you've got a small dog, a big dog, doesn't matter whether your dog is young, a puppy, or an older dog. Doesn't matter if you've got a nuisance behavior like jumping or barking or if you've got a more serious behavior like separation, anxiety, fears, phobias, aggression. We cover it all here at Pet Talk today. Do me a favor, hit that like button, show me some love. Come on, hit that like button, and then do me a favor. Hit that share button so that more people can see what we're doing here. More people can learn about PET Talk today and we can help more people. If you're brand new to Pet Talk today, let me talk a little bit about how this works. Um, in the comments section, what I'd like you to do, if you've got a question about your dog or your cat's behavior or whatever pets you have, go ahead and type your question into the comments section. And if you would go ahead and please let me know where are you watching from and what kind of pets you have and what are their names. Um, hope you're having a good week. Gosh, I can't believe we're almost into, almost into April. Um, unbelievable. Um, next month in April is going to be , um, national Pet First Aid and CPR Awareness Month. So , uh, we're gonna have , uh, Melinda Malone from pet , uh, can't remember the name of I. She teaches pet CPR in First Aid. We're gonna have her live on the show. You're gonna be able to see her. She's gonna be talking about the Pet First Aid CPR course that she teaches. Um, I can't recommend it enough. You never think that you need something like that until you need it, until there's an emergency, and then you're really, really glad , uh, you're really glad that , uh, that you have it. Um, last week we had , um, a lot of questions and I'm not sure that , you know, sometimes I can't get to everybody's questions. So , um, I appreciate your patience if I wasn't able to get your questions. Sometimes I'm able to go back into the comments and reply there, and there are times when I just can't. So, keep coming back, keep posting your question. If I haven't gotten to it, I've got a few , uh, that I actually printed out from last week that , um, that I might get into , um, as well. But again, if you've got a question about your pet's behavior, go ahead, type it in the comment section, and I'll be looking at those questions in just a second and be helping you out with whatever behavior problems you're having. Also, for the last couple of weeks, I've been talking about how I want to discuss how do you introduce dogs to one another? And that could be something as benign as, you know, two, happy-go-lucky dogs. How do you introduce those two dogs? It could be something as much as, Hey, I've got two dogs that are aggressive that have been living together. We've had to separate them, and now we wanna reintroduce 'em. Is it okay to do that? So I wanna talk about how, what's the proper way to introduce dogs, because a lot of times we're just throwing 'em in together and you know, for stable dogs, that's okay, but there's a lot of dogs that aren't stable and a lot of people are throwing their dogs together. And then boom, there's an eruption, there's a fight. So we will be talking about that , um, later today

Questions and Answers

Speaker 2 4:26

as well. Let me take a look at my questions here, the comments, see what we have. Ellen. Hello. Thanks for being here. Ellen Noel. It says, my dog attacks everyone who comes in the house. He's bitten four times, so he wears a muzzle. Now, how can we get him to stop this? I'm from West Virginia. My dog's name is Jake. Well, Noelle , that can be heartbreaking. You know, when we've got a beloved fur baby and they're attacking people and biting people, okay , first of all, that tells me that your dog has very, very poor bite inhibition, okay? And very poor bite threshold. And what that means is it doesn't take a lot of stress for your dog to wanna go ahead and use its teeth. It doesn't take a lot of stress for your dog to feel that it needs to go into fight or flight. Now, I'm gonna tell you right now, all aggression is based in fear. I don't care what it is. Resource guarding is based in fear. I'm gonna lose that resource. Territorial aggression is based in fear. Oh , something threatenings gonna happen in my territory. Possessiveness of maybe the pet guardian, the fear of something happening to them since you provide all the resources to the dog, even dominance, aggression, which really, really the only thing that dominance means is something that relates to a mate mating and dominance. Aggression is the fear of losing the mate or not getting that mate. So all aggression is based in fear. No animal goes into fight or flight unless they perceive something as threatening. Now, like I said, it doesn't mean that there's a real threat, but we need to understand that because we tend to focus so much on that outward aggressive behavior, whether it be snapping, lunging, barking, biting. And what we need to focus on is what's the cause of that? What's the underlying root cause? The underlying root cause is fear and anxiety, whether it's rational or irrational. And so the treatment, how do you help a dog that has aggression problems? You help them with their fear, you help them with their anxiety, you help them to have a different emotional response to the environment, the situation, the trigger, whether it's a person or a dog that they're aggressing towards because they feel that that triggers a threat. The first thing you need to understand is canine body language tells us everything we need to know about whether or not that dog is comfortable. And we tend to not understand canine body language. I'll tell you what, if you've got a dog that has even the slightest bit of anxiety, the slightest bit of fear, the slightest bit of aggression, you need to understand canine body language. You need to understand canine body language, and you need to be fluent in that. And that means, you know, you could pick up , uh, the canine body language book from , uh, Brenda Aloft . That's great. Uh , crimson hound.com, crimson hound.com. They've got a a $12 canine body language , uh, course for pet parents. So , um, we've got that. Uh , and , and , and I highly, highly recommend that you do that because everything you need to know about your dog is in their body language. And a lot of people can read the big signs, but by that time, it's too late. When your dog hits that red zone and starts attacking, it's too late. And a lot of times people will tell me, they'll say, will , it just came out of nowhere. It just just happened there . There was no sign, no, there's always a sign, there's always lots of signs. Now granted, they may happen very quickly, but there's lots of signs in canine body language, but they're very subtle. Oftentimes the little ones you don't know, and those are the ones that, that you need to know. Um, I wrote an article just the other day, and here it is. You can go onto , uh, the website. Uh, where is it? You go here to dog behaviorist.com. Go to the articles section@dogbehaviors.com. We got a lot of articles, but just wrote this article on understanding thresholds and canine body language, the key to successful counter conditioning and desensitization. Now, when you've got an aggressive dog , um, when you've got a dog that's fearful, when you've got a dog that's got phobias anxiety, the treatment is counter conditioning and desensitization. Now I could talk about that for hours. Counter conditioning and desensitization. It's a gradual, slow process of changing the emotional response the dog has to the trigger. Right now, the dog views those people as scary things, and that's why it's being aggressive, because it wants those scary things in its mind to go away, to have distance and space. And what happens it when the dog acts that way, either the person runs away, creates distance and space, or usually you'll grab your dog and pull your dog out of the way, creates distance and space, and that's what the dog wants. The dog's not comfortable being that close. It needs distance and space and it's not gonna grow out of it. And you need to understand that in the beginning. The first thing you need to do is prevent these things from happening. And that is making sure that your dog doesn't get so close to these triggers that your dog is reacting the way it is. Now, you know what the triggers are. All of you. I'm not just talking about one person. You all know what your dog's triggers are. You need to stop allowing them to experience those triggers. That's not the fix, I know that, but it's the first step to the fix. Because if your dog keeps rehearsing the behavior over and over and over, that emotional state keeps coming out, that gets more conditioned, that fear than anxiety. And then the behavior that follows, the aggressive behavior that follows, that gets more and more conditioned. First thing we need to do is stop all that from happening. Then we need to start presenting those triggers at a distance where your dog is comfortable and relaxed. Now, that might be a great distance, I don't know, but we've gotta find that distance. And we've gotta set up proactive training sessions three to five times a week for about 15 minutes each time where we're having a help or a stranger appear out of nowhere at a distance from the dog that the dog is comfortable, relaxed, relaxed body language. Now, you might not know truly if your dog is relaxed and comfortable, if you don't understand canine body language. You might think you do, but I'm telling you, you've gotta understand canine body language when you've got a dog like this. But you're gonna present that trigger that strange person at a distance. And usually you're gonna be starting outside. Yep . This is a long-term process. There are no quick fixes. Any quick fix is gonna be short-lived. Ah, yeah, you can use punishment. No, you can't. It's just gonna suppress the behavior. Don't punish your dog. Your dog doesn't. You gonna punish your dog from being afraid. Think about it. You know, we don't think about that. It's the fear, okay? We need to help the dog with the fear counter conditioning and desensitization. We present it at a distance. We pair high value food rewards at the exact moment that the dog sees the trigger. When the trigger disappears, the food stops. You do that over and over and over until the dog gets very comfortable, loves that game. And then you move a little closer. You repeat that, go a little closer. Now there's a lot more to it than that. So what I want you to do, and anybody that has an aggressive dog reactive dog, fearful dog, dog with anxiety phobias, I want you to go to the Pet Talk today audio podcast. Really simple to do. Go to Google. We all do the Google thing. Go to Google and put in Pet Talk Today podcast. Go to Apple Podcast or any of the podcasting platforms. You're gonna see it, you know , there's gonna be a lot of listings when you do that . Go to the audio podcast. Look for episode 81. Episode 81. That's the one you wanna look for. Episode 81 is an hour and 35 minutes on nothing more than counter conditioning and desensitization. I think I have this conversation about episode 81 every single week I do this show, but it's that important. And then also in addition to that, go to my website, dog behaviorist.com, go to the menu, go to articles and find the one that I have about understanding thresholds and understanding canine body language so that you can have success with counter conditioning and desensitization. But the first step is you've gotta , you've gotta keep the dog , um, out of that situation right now. And, and, you know, you probably need to hire a professional. This is not easy work. You know, I can help you guys give you advice, but you know, when we're talking about the real deal aggression, you probably need to find yourself a veterinary behaviorist. Your dog might need medication in conjunction with training and behavior modification. You need to find yourself and apply to animal behaviorist or a certified behavior consultant. They're very different than a regular dog trainer, regular dog trainers. They're well intentioned, but you know, they should be sticking to teaching dogs to sit, lay down, come when , call, maybe do some tricks, maybe a little bit of agility. Um, but when it comes to severe serious behavior problems, you need a , um, behavior professional. Let me go back to the que Oh, by the way, when you check out the audio podcast, and even if you're not gonna do that, do me a favor. If you like what I do, please give me a five star review on Apple Podcast. If you're listening to the audio podcast on Apple, please give me a five star review if you like what we do that helps us rank higher, that helps more people get this information. All right , let's get back to the questions here. Um, let's see. Akiko says, I've got an old English bully who's 10 months old and keeps eating his poop. How can I stop this behavior? And you're from Corona, California. Well, dogs eating their poop, cpro , faia, cpro faia. I've got an entire article about how to help dogs that are eating their poop. And it's on my website, dog behaviorist.com. There is dozens of great articles on all kinds of behavior problems. Go to dog behaviors.com, look for that article on, on Cpro Phia. But one of the things that we know is that a lot of dogs that are eating their poop are not digesting all of the food that they have. Now, that's not every dog that eats their poop, but a lot of 'em are not digesting all of their food. And so there's leftover food items, yummy stuff for the dog in their poop because it didn't get digested. So now the poop becomes another source of food for the dog. So one of the things that, that , um, is recommended in the literature, the research, the science, is get your dog on a probiotic, but also get your dog on , um, a digestive enzyme as well. Now, I'm not a veterinarian. I can't give out medical advice, really, that's not medical advice, but I always encourage people, when you try something like that, talk to your veterinarian first, consult with a licensed veterinarian, make sure that it's gonna be okay for your dog. Um, but then check out that article as well, because there's a lot of behavioral , uh, things that, that you can do as well. Um, okay, Mary's got a question. How do we stop him from barking at people? He's known for over a year and a half. Mary, Mary, Mary. If your dog is barking at people that he's known for a year and a half, there's usually one of two reasons. Your dog is barking. It's either demand barking. Hey, pet, hey, play with me. Hey, throw the ball for me. Or it's what we call a distance increasing bark your dog's telling them back off, I'm uncomfortable, you're too close. I need space. Now. I just got done talking about dogs that have aggress aggression and , and are reactive and how we need to use counter conditioning and desensitization. And it's a long-term process, but the first thing is stop putting your dog in a situation where your dog experiences that and has to have that emotional state of anxiety over and over and over, paired with people and people that it knows for over a year. That's just gonna keep conditioning and ingraining that emotional state. And then the behavior that follows. So the first step is prevention. Again, it's not the fix, but it's the first step to the fix. We gotta have the dog stop rehearsing that behavior. Then we're gonna stage setups . We're gonna have these people that your dog knows, one at a time appear where your dog can see that person. But at a distance where your dog doesn't care and there's a distance. We just, I don't know what it is, but there's a distance. Every dog that's aggressive and fearful, there's a distance that you can get that person. Or if they're afraid or aggressive towards another dog, there's a distance. You can get that other dog away from your dog where your dog becomes relaxed, where the body language is loose, where your dog will take food, where your dog will focus on you. Your dog knows that the triggers there, but it's far enough away they don't care. That's where the work begins at that distance. You are feeding your dog high value food rewards, but only when the trigger's there and you play a game trigger appears, feed, feed, feed, feed, feed, feed, feed, feed, feed constantly and continuously for about one to three seconds. Trigger leaves. We have that person or dog, get outta sight. As soon as that's outta sight, we stop feeding the dog. And we do that over and over and over for about 10 to 15 minute sessions. At least three to five times a week. You have to, you have to do this three to five times a week or it's not gonna happen. And this can take months. It can take six months. All right ? There are no quick fixes. You know, I know there's trainers out there that promise it. Send your dog to my board and train. Send your dog to my bootcamp for one week, two weeks , three weeks, four weeks. I'll fix your aggressive dog. No , the only way to do that, and it's not fixing is punishing with prong collars, choke collars, shock collars, heavy handed , harsh verbal corrections. Now think about that. The root problem is fear and anxiety. The aggression isn't the problem. That's your dog's solution to their fear. Get rid of the fear and the anxiety. You get rid of the aggression. So when we use punishment and corrections on aggression, it's gonna make it worse. First, it's gonna suppress the behavior because of fear, pain, and intimidation. The dog will shut down. You might not see the dog be reactive and aggressive for a week, two weeks, a month, maybe even two months, maybe three months. You won't see the behavior, but it's gonna come back. I treat dogs that have been through this process all the time. It always comes back. It always comes back because you didn't deal with the fear. And until you deal with the fear and the anxiety, that aggression's always gonna be looming. Episode 81, pet Talk Today podcast on counter conditioning and desensitization. Again, go to the website dog behaviors.com. You can get some of the articles there , um, as well that will help you. All right , let's get back to the questions here. Um, well, yeah, back to the barking thing, Mary. So if they kept coming closer, Mary, your dog's either gonna run away or attack, okay? Your dog's either gonna , you know, go one way or the other. So you've gotta start doing the counter conditioning and desensitization. And until then, you have to avoid those triggers. Um, Joan, Joan says, I've got a new pup. She's eight months and jumping Jumping's the number one thing. Can't get her to come in from outside and she's pottying in the house. Well, yeah, you've got an eight month old puppy, a little bit. Oh , pottying in the house at eight months. Let's get you started there. Um, not that I always wanna send everybody to the podcast, but hey, we've got great resources there. Go to the Pet Talk Today audio podcast. Do a Google search. Look for episode 16. Episode 16 is 45 minutes of nothing but in-depth information on how to potty train the most difficult puppy. How to potty train the most difficult dog. Um, the first thing I'll, I'll tell you the first thing. Here's the number one tip. When you're potty training, the puppy or the dog needs to be in your eyesight at all times. And that usually means putting them on a leash and bringing them with you everywhere. And when you can't watch them, when they can't be with you, you need to put them in a crate. I didn't say a playpen, I said a crate. Before you ever put the puppy in the crate, you or a dog, you need to let them go outside to try to relieve themselves. They need to be out there for about five minutes. If you think they need to relieve themselves and they don't, you bring 'em back in after five minutes, put 'em in the crate for about 10 minutes, bring them back out for another five minutes. If you think they've gotta go, and they didn't then repeat that back in the crate for 10 minutes. If they did not go then back out for five, they didn't go, then they probably are not gonna go. Then you've got 'em in the crate. Now, a young puppy, they really shouldn't be in that crate for more than an hour or two at the most. And you need to be making sure that you are rewarding your dog generously. Super high value food rewards, cut up chicken, cut up steak, your dog goes to the bathroom in the right place outside a party needs to happen. Good girl, good boy. Start giving high value food, rewards a paycheck and make that something special. Don't give treats and high value food rewards for a puppy or a dog just doing nothing. Save that as a paycheck for the work, for the training, for the things we are trying to motivate them to learn to do. But go to episode 16 of the Pet Talk Today podcast. If you like what we do, please give us a five star review on our audio podcast. All right , back to the questions. Um, okay, Barbie says, I've got a question every time I eat, she feels like she needs to eat my food and I'd be giving her dog food. How do I stop her from jumping on me and taking my food? All right , so let's talk about another thing because , um, Joan, you were talking about your puppy jumping and Barbie, you're talking about your dog jumping, but you're also talking about your dog begging for food, it sounds like , um, by the way, I've got a full article on how to deal with jumping. I've got a full article on how to deal with begging on my website@dogbehaviorist.com. Go to the menu, go to articles, find those articles that will help you. But first of all, when it comes to jumping and listen, any behavior problem that we have with our pets, any behavior that we want to stop, I want you to start thinking about not so much what you don't want your dog to do. Start thinking about what you do want your dog to do because your dog doesn't know any better. Oh, I know you think your dog knows better, but truly, if your dog knew better and they wanna please you, they would do better. It's our job to teach them. Dogs aren't being dominant. Everybody wants to throw that word out. Dogs are are being dominant. No, they're not. They're unruly. And what unruly means is that you have not taught them the rules. It's our job to show them what we want them to do and reward them for that so that they're gonna wanna do that more often. Wherever they're getting the paycheck, what's ever being reinforced, that's what they're gonna want to do. So let's say that you proactively Barbie and Joan start working with your dogs on teaching them to sit. How about you start having them sit for you 30 times a day every day ? Make sure you're giving 'em a high value food reward when you ask them to sit. How about you? Little by little, as time goes by, make them wait a little bit longer in that sit before you give them the food reward. Don't wait too long or they're gonna get up. You want success. So, you know, gradually, very slowly, again, don't rush these process. Good training takes time and it takes conditioning. But working on a sit and working on that sit command or queue anywhere, many places in the house. Then start going outside, working it outside. Now gradually introducing distractions. If your dog can't focus, if your dog won't take food, hey, you've gotten into too heavy of distractions. And then you want to start going to heavier and heavier distractions and then go off property. And the same thing. Start with low level distractions, then build up to high level distractions. Now you've got a alternative behavior that you can ask your dog to do when your dog wants to jump, rather than punishing a dog for doing something that you really taught the dog to do. Yeah, we teach our dogs to jump. You know how we start picking 'em up as puppies when we pick 'em up as a puppy that teaches 'em to jump. They want to get up because they liked that we picked them up. They like that. We pet them and kiss them and love them, hopefully. And so they want to keep getting up. And that's where jumping starts. Okay? So all of a sudden now people want to punish the dog for doing something that we taught them to do. No, teach them an alternative. That's not fair. Teach them an alternative behavior that you can reward them for. And then when they want to jump, ask for them to sit and reward them. Okay ? You've gotta be patient. It takes time. But we need to think about the learner, your dog, what has been their experience, what is gonna be the experience of what you wanna do to help them? But that's called differential reinforcement. You're teaching them a different behavior than jumping a behavior that if they're committed to doing, like sitting would be incompatible with the behavior. You don't want them to do jumping. If your dog's committed to sitting, it can't be sitting and jumping at the same time. So that's one of the things that both of you can do for your dogs that have , uh, jumping issues. Let's see here. Um, back to the questions. All right . Hey Joan , how are you? Jones from New Jersey, she's got a lab Husky Mix . Appreciate you watching. Hey everybody, I'm Will Bandura , if you're just joining me, this is pet talk today. I'm here each and every Saturday morning from 11 at 11 o'clock eastern time. We're here for an hour answering your dog and your cat and other pet training in behavior questions. If you've got a question about your pet's behavior, do me a favor. Go ahead and type your question in the comment section and also let me know where you're watching from, what kind of pets you have, oh, and what their name is as well. And I'm gonna try to get to as many questions as I can. And I said I was gonna talk about introducing dogs, and I am going to do that because for three weeks I said I'm gonna talk about how to introduce dogs the right way. And I haven't gotten to it because I , we've got so many great questions. I appreciate your questions so much and I wish I could answer everybody's questions every time you post them. And I apologize if I can't always get to your question. Keep coming back, keep asking those questions. Um, alright , get a getting back to those questions. Um, where is, it's Donna, Donna. Donna. Where's Donna? Donna's got a soon . I see you later in the thread. I'm trying to see where you're quiet . Okay. My dog bites me constantly. We've had her since she's eight weeks old. She's 10 years old. Well, Donna, your dog has , um, 10 years of reinforcement biting you. If your dog's biting you, your dog wants you to back off. I'm sorry, I'm sorry that you've had a dog for 10 years that's afraid of you or afraid of something that you're doing. But that's, that's what it is. Um, Donna, you need to find a veterinary behaviorist. You need to find a veterinary behaviorist. Not a regular veterinarian, but a veterinary behaviorist. So get online and do a Google search. Find a veterinary behaviorist near me, okay ? They specialize in dogs like yours because if your dog was biting you at eight weeks and has bitten you for 10 years, that's very, that's serious. Very serious, very pathological. Okay? There are some dogs that, you know, they've got genetic problems, genetic predispositions , um, trauma they may have had even before they were born. They can have trauma in the womb, there can be neurochemical imbalances. So you've got an older dog. The first thing we wanna do is rule out what, if any medical issues could be contributing factors to this. So , um, start with that. And then the other thing, you need a professional. This has been going on for 10 years and I guarantee it this is not gonna be cured. It's something that can be managed and can be helped, but it's not gonna be cured. Um, and folks, let me just say this and I know every pet owner has great intentions. You all love your pets. You wouldn't be watching if you weren't great pet owners. But oftentimes we are in denial. We minimize what our pets are doing when it's aggressive. Um, we don't think about oftentimes that it's fear and we need to be dealing with that. We don't think about that. Hey, their aggression is communication. You know, the worst thing we could do is correct or punish a dog that growls. You wanna teach a dog to bite without a warning? Think about it. Don't ever correct or punish a growl that is the dog warning you, Hey, I'm getting ready to bite you. If you don't back off, you don't stop. Yeah, you're gonna teach a dog to bite without warning. If you do that, don't get rid of the communication system. We need to be working with the fear. We need to be working with the fear. So what do you do if the dog growls in that moment? Use a command like , let's go here. Come and move the dog away and actually reward the dog for coming with you, rather than punishing the dog for growling, which is a warning sign, which we don't wanna punish. We need that. We need that communication. And if your dog's willing to disengage when you give a command, that's fantastic. Reward that. See the mindset. Think about not so much what you don't want your dog to do, what you want your dog to do, then you gotta start doing counter conditioning and desensitization. I talk about that every single week. Well, that's pretty much what we talk about. Dogs that have aggression issues, fear is phobias, anxiety, episode 81 on the pet talk today, audio, podcast, hour and 35 minutes. Counter conditioning and desensitization. Also go to my website, dog behaviors.com. Look at the articles I've got there. There's over 50 articles on various topics that can give you a lot of help. Also, I do consultations all over the world. I do virtual consultations. You can spend as many minutes, hours as you want with me. Um, if you do need my help, professional help, and you can't find anybody , uh, that lives close to you, that is good or qualified, go to my website, shoot me a message, I'd be happy to help you as well. Let's go back to the questions here. Um, what do we have here? Barbie got her . Sherry , okay, so Sherry says, how do I stop my dog from thinking every person that walks by us on the street is his best friend? Well, you need to start working on focus exercises, teaching your dog to watch you. You know, you can do that with name recognition. What you can do, let's say my , my my, let's give a fictitious name of Lucy. Lucy, the dog. Okay? And you go, Lucy, Lucy. Soon as Lucy looks up at you, mark and reward, then say, Lucy, Lucy. Soon as Lucy looks up at you, mark and reward, then start making your dog look up at you a little bit longer before you mark and reward that behavior. You'll go, Lucy, Lucy, as soon as Lucy looks at you, think 1001, 1002 mark and reward. And gradually over time , have your dog look at you a little longer when you reward it. And then gradually over time, start working in very mild distractions. If your dog can't focus and do what we just taught the dog to do, you have gone. You haven't done enough repetition and conditioning in a lower level , distracting environment. You've gone into a higher level, distracting environment that's too high of distraction too soon. You've gotta take a step back very gradually and systematically. You do these exercises over and over and over, lots of conditioning. You need muscle memory where the dog doesn't have to think about it. That's a lot of conditioning. You don't realize, folks, if you really want a well-trained dog, if you want a well-trained dog in these crazy situations where they've had lots of problems, it takes a lot of work. But it's very rewarding. And the bond that you and your pet will have as you go through this process is absolutely amazing. And you learn so much and it teaches you patience. Lot of good things. It teaches you. Dogs teach us a lot of great things. Now, one of the things that you're gonna have to do is stop letting your dog have crazy, excitable, happy, crazy experiences with people. Chances are I , I might be wrong. I could be, I could be totally wrong. But in my experience, what I have found is that dogs that do what your dog does thinking everybody, it's a it's best friend and on the walk wants to go crazy, is that it's met a lot of people and maybe it's met a lot of people on walks and it's been very excitable. Greetings. And, and so that's been conditioned in. Every time the dog sees a person that's the cure or command to get excited because that person is like the treat bag that just came out. You've gotta start doing exercises again, focus exercises, teaching the dog when you say it's name to look at you teaching the dog to touch, you know where you teach the touch command, you put your hand out and the dog, it's nose touches your hand. You say touch and you give it a reward. And then eventually you can say touch and you can move the dog around by moving your hand and saying touch. And the dog touches the hand. Um, I don't have an article on touch. I will, I will have an article on touch next week. Um, but different things that, again, you gotta think about what behavior do I want my dog to do? What can I teach my dog to do instead that if it's committed to doing that behavior, it can't do the behavior I don't want it to do. And part of that is using obedience exercises, teaching your dog to walk and focus on you. But the problem is, is that you're too close to these triggers, too close to the distraction, too close to the people. And your dog's losing it. You gotta back up and do your work where your dog can see the people, but it's far enough away where your dog's not what we call over threshold. Your dog's gotta be able to focus, take treats and respond to commands. If your dog cannot do that, you're too close too soon. And you've gotta spend a lot of time train, train, train, train, you know, 5, 7, 10 minute training sessions. But you gotta do 'em three to five times a week. They need that consistency and repetition. Don't think in terms of days, don't think in terms of weeks. If you've got a troubled dog, think in terms of months and you'll have permanence and reliability where you know your dog can learn something quickly, your dog might learn something in, in three minutes. But that doesn't mean that there's permanence. That doesn't mean that there's reliability. That doesn't mean that you have done the work of training your dog in varying levels of distractions. Cuz think about it. When do you need your dog to listen? When do you need this stuff to work? It's not when it's you and your dog hanging out at night, it's 10 o'clock at night, everything's calm, everything's quiet, it's when all heck is breaking loose, that's when you need your dog to listen. That's when you need your training to actually work. And if we're not practicing and gradually building up to heavy distractions, our training's pretty much useless. It's, it's what I call trick training cuz it won't hold up in, in, you know, in the real world. Um, I wanna go and talk about dog to dog introductions. That's right. I'm not gonna forget about it this week.

How to Introduce Dogs to Each Other

Speaker 2 42:02

So a lot of people have dogs that they've had aggression issues with other dogs. Whether it be you've got a dog that has been aggressive to a strange dog, whether it be a dog that you have that's been aggressive towards a dog it knows that does not live in your house. Or even a dog that you have that's been aggressive towards another dog in your home. How do we introduce them? Or let's say we've got a dog that we don't know, it hasn't been around dogs, it's not been socialized, we're not exactly sure how it is going to react to another dog. Or maybe you've got a dog that you think cuz maybe on walks your dog gets reactive. You're like, well I don't know that he's aggressive. Maybe. Maybe he's just excited. Maybe he's just excited, wants to go over there and you're unsure. You know , I hear people say, well I don't know what would happen if I let him go. Well, don't just let 'em go. Don't just throw the dogs in together. Let's take a little time to do this the right way so that we have success. Because think about it. Think about it. When you throw the dogs in together, you might as well flip a coin. That's right. Flip a coin because you've got a 50 50 shot of it going well, I don't like those odds. I don't wanna gamble like that. Not with my precious fur baby. I'm not gonna gamble. So I'm gonna first of all know my dog. If I've got a dog that has a lot of problems, I need to be working with that first. I'm not gonna bring a dog that I think is unstable around another dog. Remember we talked about the counter conditioning and desensitization. So that's where I'm gonna go to before I even think about this. But we're gonna fast forward and say that we did that or, or we don't think we need to do that. And we know our dog, at least we think we do and we think we've got a stable dog. Um, but we wanna bring our dog together with another dog. What do we do? Well, one of the first things I'm gonna do is start scent swapping. And I'm gonna do scent swapping for a couple days. I might do it for a week. What is scent swapping? Well, I'm gonna take something, maybe a towel, maybe a shirt, and I'm gonna rub that all over the body of one of the dogs and even get a little saliva on it. And when I say rub it all over the body, I mean all over the body. If you get my drift. And I'm gonna do that to both dogs. They each have their own towel that I'm gonna be wiping them with. But I'm gonna give dog a's towel to dog B and I'm gonna give dog B's towel to dog A so that now they haven't met each other, but they're gonna start getting familiar with each other's scent every day , every day I'm gonna put the scent on that towel if I can. If it's a dog that doesn't live with me or that I don't, can't get to relatively easily , um, that scent will last a while . But the more fresh it is, the better. But I'm gonna do scent swapping first and foremost. Um, then before I get ready to introduce the dogs, I need to make sure I've got the right equipment. I wanna get a 10 or a 15 foot long line, a 10 or 15 foot leash. And I wanna make sure that I've got a treat pouch. I wanna make sure I've got high value food rewards. Okay? And again, I am dealing with what I believe my dog is stable and I'm dealing with another dog that I believe is stable at this point. If they're not stable, forget about the introduction. Go back to counter conditioning and desensitization, the behavior modification work to see if you can even get to the point of introducing. But after you've got your equipment, one of the things that uh , you want to do is like I've been talking about a lot, is understand canine body language. Because the canine body language is gonna tell you everything you need to know. Hey, should these dogs meet? What's their body language telling me? What am I seeing? Do I have a dog that's very loose and relaxed? Dog that's mouth is open, it's got relaxed eyes. There's no tension in the forehead. The eyes aren't big and wide, they're just relaxed, they're almond shaped, relaxed face. I've got a tail that is kinda wagging loosely. Okay , the tail that's up high wagging fast, that's not good. That's a stressed out dog tail that's down and tucked. That's not good. That's a fearful dog. Those are all recipes for disaster. A very loose, relaxed dog. And there's a lot more to canine body language. I cannot emphasize enough. Learn about canine body language. Go to the Charman Hound website, do the body language course for pet parents for 12 bucks. Buy the book Canine Body Language on Amazon by Brenda Aloft . Best investment you'll ever do. Now you understand ca canine body language before you bring them together. You put the 15 foot long line on, you are gonna start by going outside and you're gonna go to a neutral territory. That's right. This is a lot of work, huh? But you know, when you do this, there aren't fights. Your dog's not getting ripped up and bit up and your dog's not getting tears and having to go to the emergency hospital to get staples and drainage tubes put in and stitches your dog's not traumatized for life. And now really can't be around other dogs. And that's why we do it the right way. Now I understand my canine body language. I've got all my equipment, I got my dog outside. We're in a neutral territory. I'm gonna start at a distance again, all about distance and thresholds. I'm gonna start at a distance where the dogs can see each other, know that they're there. However they don't care. Then I have a care in the world. That's the distance I need to start at. Now remember, I've got a 10 or a 15 foot long line. I'm not talking about retractable. They've got a 10 to 15 foot long leash where there's a handle on it, just like a regular leash. It's like a cotton, cotton leash or a nylon leash. Why do I do a 10 or 15 foot? Because when I'm at that distance, I wanna see what's my dog doing on a loose leash. Is my dog wanting to go towards the other dog? Is my dog wanting to go away? Is my dog completely not interested in just doing whatever? Hanging out with me if I've got a short leash? Couple things is that the dog doesn't believe it has that freedom to either go towards the dog or go away. And you , a lot of times they're gonna see more reactivity, more aggression when a dog is on leash . Because again, if they get nervous, if they view something as threatening, they're gonna go into fight or flight. And on a tight short leash, they can do neither. They can't go into fight, they're restrained with the leash. They can't go into flight or fight. So having that longer leash, I still have control of the dog and I can cinch it up. I can make it shorter if I need to, but it gives me the ability to see what the dog's gonna do at a distance. Now I would never bring the dog close enough on that long of a leash where they could connect without doing this work first. So I need to know, does my dog listen to me? Will my dog respond to training I've done previously? Hey, if you haven't trained your dog and you think you may have an issue with your dog meeting another dog, don't put 'em together again. You need to get your dog focused on you. You need your dog to be doing a job, doing something different as it's beginning to meet this other dog . And if you haven't done some training on basic commands, you can't do this. So you gotta do that first. Now, little by little, you're gonna get closer and closer to the dog reading their body language. At any point in time you start seeing stress signals. Now if they hit the red zone, hackles go up, you know the hair goes up, pilo erection, they show their teeth growling, snapping, lunging, whoa, whoa. Way over threshold. Forget it. Might as well end for that day. Go back to counter conditioning and desensitizing Little by little you're gonna get closer, but you can only get as close as calm, relaxed body language. And when you can get each dog close together with calm, both dogs having calm, relaxed body language, then you let them sniff each other for about three seconds. And then you call your dog away from the other dog. Let's go. Come heal here. Move away. Reward your dog. Get them to disengage. Now bring them back towards each other. And when you bring 'em back towards each other, don't bring them in straight on. That's threatening. Bring 'em in kind of arc. Kind of make like a little circle and little by little, you know, get them in like that. But watch the body language. Any stress signals, dilated pupils, ears going back, mouth closing with a straight line dog that does lip licking, tongue flicking, licking their nose. Did you know if that moment they started scratching? That could be a stress signal. Also, there's a thing called a urogenital check where they start sniffing their private parts. That's a stress signal. If I get closer, the stress will go up. How bad will it go? As I get closer, I don't wanna know. I'm gonna back up. I'm seeing some stress signals. I'm seeing the dog go from open panting in a good way, panting to a closed mouth and now shortened shallow breathing. That's a stress signal. So there's lots of little subtle stress signals. A paw lift, stress signal as we're going in, the dog's turning its head away appeasing signal, still a stress signal. Dog yawning. As we're going in, these are all little subtle canine body language cues. Maybe you know some of them , maybe you knew all of them , but maybe you didn't know many of them or maybe you didn't know any of them. These and many, many more canine body language cues that let you know how your dog is doing. Should you keep going closer towards that strange dog? Should they meet you need that information. I don't care. Again, if it's two dogs that were fighting that you separated and did lots of behavior modification work, counter conditioning and desensitization, and now you're trying to get them all the way together, same process. Two strange dogs that don't live together. You're trying to get them together. Same process. Now the more stable the dog is, the quicker this is gonna be. You might be able to introduce two dogs in three, four minutes or less. And again, you may have to take three, four days for some dogs. You know what scares me? Where I run into issues, where I get calls and where there's lots of problems is , um, you have a dog or dogs and you wanna go visit a family member or your family member and they've got dogs and you wanna bring your dogs with you or your family members have dogs and they're gonna come visit you and you've got dogs and they wanna bring their dogs with them. And a lot of times it's a disaster. But if you understand this information about how you introduce dogs the right way, you can have success and avoid the horrible pitfalls of having the dogs have a fight and and traumatizing each other. And, and then maybe things are ruined for the rest of their life. I've got an article that talks all about how to introduce dogs the right way. If you'll go to my website@dogbehaviorist.com, again, I've got over 50 articles up there. Look for the one on how to introduce dogs, and they'll give you a lot more detailed information. Let's take a look. I've got a little more time. So there it is. I I got to, I got to the introducing dogs finally, after three weeks of saying that I'm gonna get to it. We finally got to that. Um, I've got a couple minutes. Let me look at the comments. Let me look at the questions and see if there's anything here that

Puppy Going After Cat

Speaker 2 56:19

, uh, all right , Lesa , is it Lesa or Lisa? Um, spelled l e s a. Anyway, how do I get my 15 week old pity lab puppy to be gentle with our cat? He starts out fine, but gets too excited that the cat is paying attention to him and tries to play. Like the cat is a puppy. The cat is a Norwegian forest cat, which is a larger sized , oh , you wrote a lot. Let's see. Larger size cat. Um, so a lot of these answers folks are gonna be the same. A lot of these answers are gonna be very, very, very similar. And that is, you've got the puppy too close to the cat too soon. Okay , so maybe I get the puppy used to being exposed to the cat, but I gotta be a lot further away and I wanna start doing exercises, keeping the puppy focused on me. One of the best things I might do is start teaching again, name recognition. Because your puppy can't be looking at you and be engaging in a bad way with the cat at the same time. You'd have to give up one behavior for the other. So start teaching your, your puppy when you say it's name to look at you and reward it. Like I was saying, if you were listening a little earlier, I went through that process. If you weren't listening or watching a little earlier, rewind this a little bit and and hear what I say about how to teach your dog or your puppy to look at you when you say their name and how to get them to ex extend that look as far as duration looking at you, that is critical. Um, anything you could teach your dog to sit, lay down. You could start going through a repertoire of behaviors where your puppy can see the cat, but it's gotta be first starting far enough away where you can manage and control the puppy. And then little by little you get them closer and closer. Little by little you get the cat moving faster as a distraction. But anytime your puppy loses it and can't stay focused on you too close too soon. And this is all about drive, it's prey drive . This is genetics. Not all of you have dogs that are pitties and lab mixes that have super high prey drive . So when they see a cat or anything moving quickly, they're gonna go chase. And that adrenaline, that's the reward. The reward is the chase. It's not catching cuz they usually don't catch the cat. The reward is the adrenaline, the chase. That's very, that's a powerful reinforcer. And when you've got a puppy or dog with very high prey drive like that, this, these are the things you have to do or you have to separate them. And in the beginning you need to make sure that they stay far enough away. Cuz again, I've said this over and over and over. If your dogs, if your puppies are rehearsing the behaviors over and over that you don't want them to rehearse, that you don't want them to do, it's never gonna get better. The first step is prevention. Second step, teach alternative behaviors. Then use those alternative behaviors at a distance under threshold and start conditioning your dog to be able to handle that kind of stimulation gradually and systematically. We're gonna do that. Okay, well that means we are out of time. It's been a fantastic show. I appreciate everybody's questions. Do me a favor, hit that like button, hit that share button so that more people can benefit. Tell others about pet talk today. I'm here each and every Saturday at 11 o'clock Eastern Standard time. Have a great weekend. Don't forget, practice. Practice that's train with your puppies and dogs. Have a great weekend. I'm outta .