When NOT to make your dog comfortable
I’m sitting at a coffee shop, working with a German shepherd who’s about to fail out of service dog training because, according to his owner, he’s uncomfortable around strangers.
Kind of a no-go for service dogs, given how many strangers they encounter in a day.
This dog had some bad experiences with strangers — kind of a lot of them — so it’s understandable that he’s a little gunshy. The good news is that he’s had a lot of good experiences and neutral experiences with strangers, too, so he’s not super scared of people. Just nervous.
I ask him to lay down and he does. His ears are flipped forward, and every time anyone makes any noise (which happens a lot) he whips his head around to look. Eventually, someone makes a loud enough noise, or maybe enough of them happened in short order, that he sits up.
I quietly ask him to lay back down. He does.
This happens another several times before he finally stands up. I ask him to sit. He backs up instead. His owner has told me that this is what he does when he’s scared of something. Typically, the owner then redirects him and they leave the area. Today, I simply ask him to come forward again, sit down, and lay down.
His owner has done a beautiful job teaching the GSD to move with pressure, so after a tense second pulling away, he comes forward, sits down, and lays down again.
Thirty seconds later he’s back up. We repeat the process. I’m careful to keep my energy very quiet and calm; he doesn’t need me feeding into his rising energy levels, dogs will try to match our energy levels, and I want him to know I’m not alarmed about anything happening.
We do this for half an hour before the number of times he gets up starts to decrease. At no point have his fear levels gotten to the point of fighting his leash, or I would have changed my tactics. He’s not scared, he’s unsure.
This is when you want a dog to simply work through it. Stop everything. If you’re walking, stand still. If you’re chatting, be soft. Don’t escape the discomfort; sit with it. Let them work it out. If it gets worse you can always move away, but more often than not, it improves.
By the end of half an hour he’s remaining laying down, still looking around, but calmer about it.
By the end of 45 minutes he’s relaxed.
By the end of an hour he’s practically napping.
Service dog saved.
If we always redirect or distract our dogs back to a comfortable state, they never learn that there is no monster. And most of the time, the monster is just in our heads.
Jenna
