You know the old saying: ‘Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you.’

That expression is so very true of dogs.

It can seem like such a simple solution to our problems. Just do it. Get it over with. Whatever it is won’t be that bad that the dog will take an instant dislike to it. Vet visits, medical treatment, trips in cars, being on their own, tolerating absence, going to daycare, visits to the dog park with scary-looking dogs, trips to the market, going for a walk, visits to cafés, nail clipping, muzzle use… even wearing a harness. All of these activities are the kind of things where humans can be tempted to think, ‘oh let’s just get it over with!’

To be fair, there are times when needs must. I lived with cats before having dogs as an adult. The first time I realised I needed to use a cat transport cage was the time my cat had an abscess that needed urgent treatment. I did not have time to make the whole experience more pleasant. In fact, since he’d arrived with me in a crate, you can be pretty sure he still remembered that horrible experience.

When you’re a cat guardian, I think you realise more easily that you can’t fool cats twice. Thinking of disguising a pill in paté? Good luck! It may work a little the first time, but I’d put money on it not working the second.

So when things are true emergencies, when we really don’t have the benefit of time, we might resort to force – whatever the situation is.

As long as it’s a one-off occasion, we won’t have to worry about the repercussions.

The trouble is that most things are not a one-off. Especially things that the animal finds traumatic.

So why can that one-off single traumatic event be so powerful?

Single-event fear learning is well-known in the psychology world. Where we truly fear for our safety or our lives, then our brain is very good at finding ways to make us avoid that situation in the future. After all, many millions of years of mammalian evolution mean that our ancestors – dog or man – were the ones who did learn from traumatic experiences. Avoiding or trying to escape from potentially life-threatening situations is advantageous from an evolutionary perspective.

Now you know and I know that wearing a harness is not a life-threatening situation. It doesn’t hurt, for goodness sake. We may even have gone out of our way to buy a harness made of fleece and loveliness.

Sticking a muzzle on a dog isn’t going to kill them.

Taking them for a walk in the park is not a life-or-death thing, on the whole.

Getting your nails clipped isn’t going to take you out of the gene pool.

In fact, that reminds me. There is a very popular viral video with a number of dogs fainting. It’s called ‘drama queens’ or something along those lines. People laugh at dogs who’ve, most likely, got a stress-induced medical condition called vasovagal syncope. For whatever reason your brain thinks fit, it shuts down all non-essential services and puts your body in lockdown. Syncope (fainting) can be caused by any number of things, but if you’re showing your dog nail clippers and they keel over, the likelihood is that their brain says ‘nope!’ and causes the dog to faint. The dog is not being a drama queen.

The reason I recognise it is because I have vasovagal syncope too. So does my mum and so does my paternal grandmother. I’m only saying that in case there are geneticists out there who are interested in the heritability of such a thing. It happens to us all in the exact same situation: needles.

Don’t get me wrong: my sisters are nurses. We have strong stomachs. I’ve cleaned up teenage vomit on coach-loads of schoolkids. I’ve cleaned ulcers and bathed wounds. I’ve nursed an old poodle who had an ulcerated wound on his head where you could actually see his skull and bits of other stuff I don’t want to think about very much. Helping out on vet day at the shelter opens your eyes to all kinds of wounds where you have to be grown-up about it. I’ve sat round Christmas tables while firefighters and emergency nurses explained what degloving means and what motorcyclists look like when their scalp comes off… The type of people who tell you off if you can’t pronounce vasovagal syncope because you’ve only read it on the internet… the people who’ve seen just how many people have such a fear because they’re passing out in Covid vaccination clinics across the world with surprising regularity.

So it’s not a phobia.

But once when I went for a routine tetanus, the doctor made us wait. I was standing up and … then I wasn’t. I think I hit the deck and I was unconscious for a couple of hours. It also happens when people talk about hip bones. I have no idea why. I feel icky, I feel warm, and boom, gone.

Now I’m a human. I do meditation. I know how to avert these attacks if they’re coming on. I put my head down low. Vasovagal syncope makes blood pressure and heart rate drop suddenly, so making it easier for the heart to pump it is always helpful. Not only that, if you’re standing, you make an almighty crash (apparently) if you pass out onto the doctor’s stone surgery floor. So I sit down, I wait for the cold sweats to start and for the yawning to pass. And then I’m fine.

I am a rational, grown-up human being. My rational brain is saying, ‘you got this! It doesn’t hurt at all… Don’t be a baby… it’s for the good… it’s over in milliseconds… Nurses are great at this…’ and my vasovagal nerve says, ‘I think you might die if I don’t protect your internal organs’

It’s even whispering that right now as I write about it.

So what I’m trying to say is that humans shouldn’t be judgey when thinking what animals might be afraid of. We share common fear responses to being trapped, being caught up in things, drowning, asphyxiating, certain creatures.

Here’s my girl Lidy with a snakeskin I found. It had just been shed and I don’t know if snakes smell, but you can see her hesitate. She starts by walking in very hesitantly, does that thing where her feet are planted as far back and she stretches her neck as far as it can, then steps back, licks her lips, backs up, yawns, looks away, comes in from another angle, and then my boy Heston comes in like a wrecking ball, sniffs it, decides it’s not good to eat and ignores it. Look at the length of her neck though as she stretches out to eat it. I heard a new way to describe this last week: giraffe neck. Totally.

Now Lidy is adopted and I can’t swear she’s never had a bad experience with a snake before I knew her. In other words, it could be a learned fear just exactly as this post is about. But I have known Heston the vast, vast majority of his nine years and I know he hasn’t…. and he doesn’t care. Fear of snakes is such a universal fear, though, going across many species, that it may be almost instinctive.

We don’t get to choose what upsets our dogs. Heston? Brave with that weird snakeskin, barked at a stone cross. Terrified of large spoons and cups being offered to him. Brave with dogs and people. Terrified of the vet even though I promise she never hurt him. So terrified he wet himself. Sorry for sharing that, Heston.

Lidy? Will bite a live snake full in the face. Terrified of snakeskin. What’s up with that? Scared of corncobs. Brave with cows and vans and cars and dogs way bigger than she is. Can walk past a gas bird-scarer at full volume. Petrified of thunder, fireworks and people cheering on the other side of the road if someone scores a goal.

Deciding for dogs that they should just get over whatever experience it is and stop being babies usually backfires. Some dogs just become more fearful when forced. Heston does. His anal glands have given way twice in his life and he’s quite a fan of wetting himself when I’d be hitting the floor head first. Other dogs freeze. You can see Lidy freezing, approaching, freezing approaching. Some dogs hit the deck and don’t move. You see videos of these ones too, usually being dragged around a park with comments like ‘my dog’s so lazy!’ Some dogs just stage a sit-in. Bum hits the floor and it’s a great big NO from them. And the ones I work with will often bite. That’s usually way more effective than lying down and being dragged around on your lead anyway.

The thing is, we’ve known this a long time. The fallout of coercion, force and punishment is well known and documented. Sixty years of lab-based and field-based studies and we’ve still not got our heads around the fact that if we use these methods, there may be unintended and unpredictable consequences. It’s time we put our sensible heads on and step way from forcing animals into doing things just because we can. Or, at least, just because we can once.

Bribery also falls into the category of coercion as well. I know it probably doesn’t feel much like you’re forcing your dog if you’re bribing them with cheese to get them to put a halti on or to come back to you if you call them and they’ve stolen something they shouldn’t have. Of course, less knowledgeable trainers may think reinforcement training with food is bribery. It isn’t. That works ‘behaviour’ then ‘food’. Bribery starts by offering food and if the dog wants to, then you’ll get the behaviour. There’s a big difference between choosing to do something because you’ll get a predictable consequence like food for doing so, or being cajoled into doing something with food. Worse still, if you’re in the habit of bribery, as soon as you get your bribes out, the dog can predict you’re about to do that incredibly mean thing again.

Sometimes, that pressure or force can be relatively minor. Even bringing dogs to us with food as a bribe can be just as uncomfortable for them as doing something really, really unpleasant. Remember: we don’t get to choose what animals find unpleasant. I pass out because I think about hip bones…

Even things like stepping in towards a static dog to coerce a sit may seem like something fairly innocuous. It’s not the least unpleasant thing in the world, but stepping in to a dog’s space when they’ve failed to respond to a cue is a way of putting pressure on a dog because they didn’t respond the last time. It can be really tough to stand still and not use our own bodies as a way of coercing dogs into doing things.

So we can fool our dogs once. We can bribe them a few times. We can shove the muzzle on. We can clip the harness on. We can attach a lead to a newly-adopted street dog who’s been caught with a catchpole and never been on a lead in their life before. We can force a dog into a crate or a travel kennel or an Elizabethan collar. We can grab them and wrestle them into the car. We can pin them down at the vet and restrain them. I could have got that snakeskin, backed Lidy into a corner and held her there, trapped, until she ‘faced her fears’. We can force our dog to swallow a pill. We can hold their mouth open and force that pill down. We can stick a halti or a snoot loop or some other offensive piece of equipment on them.

And it might work. Once.

If we’re incredibly lucky (and the dog is incredibly unlucky) because we outweigh them and we’re inventive little apes, we may be able to do that for the rest of the dog’s life. Want a walk? Well, you’re wearing a muzzle. Suck it up.

If we’re fairly lucky, Pavlov might come along for the ride and if the very horrible thing like a car journey or a muzzle or a lead or a head halter or a harness is then followed by a very lovely thing, then the scary thing will come to predict the very good thing through association and our fearful or unwilling dog will come to see the offending item as being a predictor of something good.

And for the rest of us?

You’ve guessed it.

We’re going to suffer the consequences of coercion.

Aggression is one potential side-effect of using force. That may be directed at you if you’re the one trying to manipulate the dog or do something to them, or it could be directed at another individual. One example is the dog who’d been forced into a muzzle and manipulated at the vet’s, The case was very much worsened by the fact the dog had severe hip dysplasia. You’ve guessed it. The dog saw the muzzle the second time and bit their guardian as they tried to put the muzzle on.

Another possible side-effect of coercion is avoidance. Yes, you can see how this plays out. The first time you forcibly remove an item from your dog, your dog may tolerate it. But the next time they pick up something you don’t want them to have? They’ll scarper. Then you’ve set yourself up for a nice game of ‘Catch me if you can’. Avoidance is particularly problematic if you’re in big spaces, so it’s really not a good idea to catch a dog when they’ve failed to recall and then force a head-halter on them. Not only will they scarper when they see the head-halter, but you’ll also blow all your recall training. Forceful people are not nice to be around, and dogs will become wary of humans who reach out to do things to them.

It’s not unusual, therefore, to find dogs avoiding the guardian clipping the lead on, and then behaving aggressively if the guardian manages to corner them. The same for pills, medical interventions, putting dogs in the car… you name it. The last thing you need is a dog who feels uncomfortable and chooses to stay away from you if you really need them to be close to you.

Dogs who have a history of coercion also tend to offer less behaviour. They sit more. They opt out more. They lie down and refuse to move. Again, if approached, that might well turn to aggression. I’m sure you’ve all been in class with a teacher who insisted on asking you questions. When you didn’t know, what did you do? If you had lovely teachers, you’d say ‘I don’t know!’ and they’d explain. If you have teachers who humiliate you and make it an unpleasant experience, you’ll avoid eye contact but you’ll also do less. Nobody wants to draw attention to themselves when under threat. Also, if dogs have no choice and no way out, they may also have what psychology professor Martin Seligman calls ‘learned helplessness’. I write a lot about this elsewhere, but frequently coerced dogs end up doing very little. They are still and small and avoid eye contact, while at the same time keeping an eye on the person who’s been doing the forcing.

Dogs who are frequently coerced by guardians also suffer because they have no outlet for their anxiety. It’s not unusual therefore to hear of dogs developing stereotypical behaviours such as circling or pacing as a way to cope with their anxiety. Often, when avoiding a guardian, they’ll become restless and agitated. They also become hypervigilant for all the contextual cues that mean they’re about to be forced into doing something, and then they generalise wildly. Living in a hyperalert state and not trusting your guardian are recipes for ongoing anxiety problems in dogs.

Just because dogs have been forced into doing something doesn’t mean they learn how to do what you want. When Tilly had ear problems, she’d come to me, present her ear and I’d put her drops in. No force. She knew exactly what she needed to do. When I get harnesses or muzzles out, my dogs approach me and stand while I put them on. No force. I present the muzzle and they put their noses in and hold still. No force.

Choice is also a very powerful motivator, where force and pressure are not. Where dogs understand what’s happening and they’ve been taught gradually and without fear or uncertainty things become more predictable. The funny thing about unpleasant events is that individuals cope better with predictable unpleasant events than they do with random ones. If we can pair predictable unpleasant events up with predictable yummy stuff that follows, then we can very quickly turn something unpleasant into something that’s acceptable. This is how we teach dogs to accept muzzles and harnesses, leads, constraint, being in the car, having injections, getting their nails clipped…

So force a dog at your own peril, I say. Accept that you may have to do it once or twice in emergencies. Know that this will destroy a whole lot of trust with your dog and you’ll need to rebuild that trust. Prepare your dog for all of life’s unpleasant events. The last thing you need is a dog who really, really needs to wear a muzzle for a couple of vet visits being forced into one and then deciding that she didn’t like it very much and makes your life miserable the second time she sees the blessèd thing.

We should all remember, too, that we don’t get to choose what our dog decides they are opting out of. There is no rhyme or reason that says one dog will be afraid to approach a stone cross and another will be afraid to approach a snake skin and that both will be happy to go into the vet but neither feels happy going in to water that’s too deep. We don’t get to predict and we don’t get to choose. It may seem ridiculous to you that your dog literally passes out at the sight of nail clippers, but in your dog’s brain, it’s literally a matter of life or death. And if you’re thinking they should grow up and get over it, remember most humans have got some weird thing that they can’t do. I can’t touch felt. I can’t stand people sweeping carpets with sweeping brushes. I like watching the swallows in the evening until I realise they’re bats, and then I freak out even though I like bats and they’re literally no more likely to fly at me than a swallow is, and if they did, it’d be no less bad.

We don’t get to pick what we find icky. Animals don’t either.

Remember that the first experience sets the rule. After that, we’re learning exceptions. So if you want your dog to learn that leads and collars are horrible, they feel like they’re choking and they might die, then go ahead and force them that first time. That initial experience sets the rule. If you want your dog to enjoy walking on lead, introduce the lead carefully enough that there’s no force involved at all. That sets the rule.

And if you’re looking for cooperative ways to handle your dogs, then you can always read my post about cooperation and handling.

References:

Azrin, N. H. (1956) Some effects of two intermittent schedules of immediate and non-immediate punishment. Journal of Psychology, 42, 3-21.

Azrin, N. H. (1960) Effects of punishment intensity during variable interval reinforcement. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 3, 123-142.

Bolles, R. C. (1970) Species-specific defense reactions and avoidance learning. Psychological Review, 77, 32-48.

Fantino, E. (1973) Aversive control. In J. A. Nevin (Ed.), The study of behavior. Glenview, Ill: Scott, Foresman

If you’re here as a dog trainer, why not check out my new book?

Client-Centred Dog Training helps you get out of the coercion and compliance mode with human students too. No grown person should be forced to do something they don’t believe in. I really feel that, if we’re working with humans and their animal companions, we need to step away from words like ‘compliance’. Guess what? Force free works for humans too! If you enjoy my articles, you’ll definitely enjoy this!

No, I’m not talking about wafer-thin ham or lion cuts in grooming, I promise!

One of the things I find to be absolutely true is that guardians have already tried to do what I’m proposing. I never turn up and propose something they’ve never considered. If they have a dog who’s wary of strangers, they’ve tried to expose their dog to strangers. If they have a dog who barks when people come in their house, they’ve tried to expose their dog to people coming into the house. If they have a dog who’s chasing cats, they’ve tried to expose their dog to cats.

And so it goes.

So when I say we’re going to try it again, they’re all: ‘Tried that. Didn’t work.’

The main difference between what I’m proposing and what they did is that I’m going to do less of it over a longer period. Much less of it. Much longer period.

When we’re working with dogs to expose them to things they find exciting or frustrating, or when we’re working with them on things they are afraid of, then we use a planning tool called a stimulus gradient, like those road signs you see to show you inclines and declines.

It means instead of exposing our dogs to things they’re scared up right up close, we’re going to take our time and work further back. We’re working either to train them and teach them new skills, to desensitise them or to counter-condition them. We can, of course, do all three.

So why am I doing exactly what the guardians have already done, knowing that it will work?

Basically it comes down to understanding and expectations.

Lidy, the recalcitrant malinois, has recently discovered pigeons. We’ve never known pigeons, other than the wood pigeons that lived in the garden and were much more wary of other species. At the moment, we’re living among cocky, well-fed pigeons who have never met a Lidy. She’s never stalked birds, but now she’d decided she’s a pointer, she’s in full-on stalk mode around 200m away.

Now we will be working on this once life settles down for us again. Right now, we’re just getting by.

When I start working on her with it, though, that gradient will be so gentle and so ridiculously slow. We’ll start over 200m away, where the sudden flight of a flock of pigeons isn’t likely to set off all her chase mechanisms.

Where most guardians start, though, is when the dog is so aroused that they’ve no chance intervening when the pigeons all decide to fountain up into the air. Often, they will tell me that they’ve had loads of space. And when I ask them how much space that is, it turns out to be 10m or so.

Not only that, but they’ll also lump the distance and increase the challenge too significantly. I may well do a couple of days around 225m and then 210m for a couple of days. This is shaving. Slicing off such fine, fine tranches of the distance that it may seem barely noticeable.

Generally, I tend to work between 5% – 10% off the gradient. Any less and progress will be frustrating. If I’m doing 3%, for the sake of argument, over 225m, by day 21, I’m going to be around 125m away still. It could take me 3 months of diligent work. For most guardians, that can be very frustrating. It can also be frustrating for the dog too.

Yet most guardians shave off too much distance or add too much time. For instance, even a 25% gradient will take you 17 days, shaving off 55m on that very first day, and if I’m working on Day 1 at 225m without reaction and I dip down to 170m on Day 2, it’ll be unlikely my dog will be able to cope with such a big dip, especially at the beginning. If she’s stalking them at 200m, I’d be silly to think that one day of training will be enough. The gradient is too steep.

In fact, most guardians aren’t always aware of the point at which a trigger becomes noticeable. We call this salience. Last night, hot night, windows open, some neighbours were out late in the garden drinking and chatting. I was trying to drop off to sleep. Most of the time, their voices were background noise, and once or twice every two or three minutes, the decibels would increase. Background noise became salient.

Now I was a long way from yelling at them out of the window but two hours of spiking did test my patience. Yet most dog guardians do the equivalent of waiting until their dog is leaning out of the window yelling obscenities. If you wanted to work on my tolerance of night-time noise, then waiting until I’m involved in blue-faced yelling about respect out of a window at one in the morning is never going to work.

So partly we have to notice that point of salience and work at that point. Not the point of reaction.

In other words, we want to know when the trigger becomes noticeable, not when is the dog out of control. The salience point for Lidy is around 200m. The out of control point is around 10m when the pigeons all decide to take off. That’s the first thing we need to do if we’re going to start shaving off thin slices: work out the salience point and the reaction point. When does it become noticeable? When does the dog react?

When we’ve got the point of salience, that moment the trigger slips from the periphery into relevance, that’s where we need to start the gradient. As you’ll know from my other blogs, that can often be around 500m sometimes.

But that’s where we start planning.

A stimulus gradient is basically like any other gradient. It can be steep or it can be really shallow. Our dogs’ exposure to things that excite them or things that make them afraid is most likely to fail when we expose them on a steep gradient. That 25% gradient is too steep. Even a 15% change gradient is too much for most humans involved in achieving goals – let alone a dog who feels murderous around pigeons. Think of us going down a steep hill in our cars…. We know the steeper it is and the more pressure we put on our brakes, the more likely they are to overheat and fail. The same happens to our dogs’ control mechanisms.

Making the gradient less challenging without making it frustrating is where the shaving and fine slicing comes in. The better we are at this, the more likely our dogs will be able to cope. Too big a gradient over too short a time and we’ll lose. Too small a gradient over too long a time and we’ll lose. We’re looking for the Goldilocks gradient: just right.

Once we’re working at the point of salience, not the point of reaction, and once we’re working on the Goldilocks gradient, the animals we work with will find life much easier.

Now I could take you through the complex maths and pyramid sets I do with clients, or the occasional variable sets that average out to the set increase for that day, but most of my clients find that too precise and overly complex. I find that, as long as they’re keeping an eye on body language and they’re working roughly around the Goldilocks level, things usually go just fine. It doesn’t need to be planned in compulsively inflexible mathematical steps. In fact, I think most of my clients would give up if I expected this. That’s not to say I don’t expect journals and logs along with rough estimates of distance, but I don’t expect them to get their measuring wheel out, glue some pigeons in to place, measure out exactly 169m, do five trials that average out to 169m and repeat the next day at 162.5m. That’s where frustration lies.

I have found, though, two other techniques that can help. The first is to keep to a short number of trials.

I know people who’ve shaved their gradient so finely that they’re doing eight months on a programme. Not only that, they’re starting at reaction point, not salience point, and they’re still battling the dog eight months in. If you’re doing it at that beautiful sweet spot, you’ll find that five trials that finish on a win is more than enough.

You don’t need to be doing twenty or thirty minutes. Everything we know about Pavlovian conditioning says that associations should happen within a brief number of trials. We do five trials and we go.

Of course, my clients think this is madness at first. We rock up, we do five trials, we go home. What kind of trainer is this?!

And this is why I need them to be able to do most of it themselves. I don’t expect to have to go and hold their hand over this once they know where the dog notices the trigger and they’re making sure their next-day goals aren’t some enormous and unreachable challenge.

We turn up, we do five trials. We go home.

Dog working on fearfulness around people? See five people, go home.

Dog working on predation of pigeons? See five flocks of pigeons, go home.

In fact, it may even be five repetitions of the same trigger. That’s fine too.

That’s my first piece of advice. Keep training sessions ridiculously short.

My second is to finish on a win.

Humans are terrible at pushing things too far. We always do it. ‘Just one more!’ we think to ourselves. Our hardest habit to break will be getting over that just one more mentality. When we finish on a loss, not only is the dog rehearsing a behaviour once more, but they’re also strengthening the link between doing the behaviour and what comes next. One loss and we’re then fighting to try and get a win. What happens if we have to go through fifty repetitions to get that win? We’re at 50:1 in terms of practising vs learning. I want zero practising.

So when I finally get around to working with Lidy on her pigeon fancying, we’ll be doing those four things: starting at the point of salience where she notices them, not when she’s leaping after them… planning a ‘Goldilocks’ gradient to make sure I’m not asking too much or too little… keeping sessions short… finishing on a win.

Once those four rules are in place, the progress made is astounding. Those four rules are the difference between trying a technique and failing, and trying a technique and succeeding.

In other news, my new book came out on Saturday. It’s a book for trainers who are looking at ways to increase client engagement. If you’re a dog trainer who wishes that you just had to work with dogs, because they’re easy, but their humans are a challenge, this book is for you!

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If you’ve ever felt like you know how to train dogs but you’re missing out on key skills on training people, if your clients testing your patience with their weird and idiosyncratic ways, then this book is made for you.

‘Owner compliance’ is often seen as the magic ingredient where successful outcomes are concerned in dog training. Yet the concept of force is at odds with how many of us work with animals in a compassionate and cooperative way. In this book, you’ll find 30 lessons to sharpen your skills in taking a compassionate and cooperative approach with your human clients too. Make no mistake, though: it’s not tea and sympathy! It will also give you a business edge too!

Client-Centred Dog Training by Emma-Jane Lee: Out Now!

Working with dogs who are afraid of humans can be tough. Sometimes we may find our dogs are aggressive towards unfamiliar people, barking and lunging at them. Sometimes our dogs may well have bitten guests, groomers or vets.

Other times, our dogs may well be very fearful around new people, be they people we meet on walks or people who come to the home. Perhaps they try to make some space, lick their lips or cower away from anyone who approaches them.

If we work in kennels or a shelter, we may find that certain dogs are aggressive or fearful with employees, making it hard to care for them.

Even if our dogs are simply more agitated than they are normally around visitors, perhaps approaching them or fussing them for attention, it can also be a sign that our dogs feel uncomfortable with strangers. Just because they seem really friendly, it doesn’t mean that a dog who is jumping up or harassing guests is actually any more comfortable with unfamiliar people than a dog who is growling or flinching.

We may well have labelled our dogs ‘reactive’, for those sensitive, shy souls who we hope wouldn’t ever bite but who still make a lot of noise around people they don’t know.

The most straightforward programme to work with dogs who are afraid of strangers will include two compulsory elements and a third option for those who are really struggling to cope.

The first compulsory element will be management. We need to make sure our dogs aren’t habitually running into people when they’re unable to cope, simply because most of the time, they end up practising the behaviour over and over. Management means making sure we don’t put our dogs in situations they can’t cope with. It means avoiding busy places like cafés and shopping centres until we’ve put in a lot of ground work and it means not hoping for the best. It might mean setting up a safe place in our home, in our garden or making sure our dog is safe on walks. I’m managing my stranger danger dog right now: we’re taking early morning walks, using doors and making sure the neighbouring gardens are empty when we’re outside. Management may be all you need.

But management doesn’t really treat behaviour. For that, we need a behaviour modification programme. In fact, I said this was a compulsory element and I’ll correct that to say that, if I’ve got a dog in a sensitive fear period, if I’ve got a dog who’s unwell, if I’ve got a dog who is old, or if I really haven’t got the time to dedicate to training, then management may take all the weight. However, management for the rest of a young, healthy dog’s life is not just restricting them to the smallest life they could possibly live, it may also be depriving them of future friends, of contact and of being a functional member of a social species. Management will undoubtedly fail in the course of a young dog’s life, which is why, for most dogs, it’s just not enough.

Behaviour modification programmes may have many elements, but the main retraining will fall into two main approaches: changing the dog’s emotional response to unfamiliar people and giving them some skills to help cope. This is where, depending on the level of your dog’s problems, a well-qualified trainer or behaviour consultant can really help. Not only will they give you the benefit of many years’ tips and tricks, but they should also make the whole process more efficient and also more effective. That, in turn, improves the welfare of your dog. It doesn’t really need saying that we need to do this thoughtfully, kindly and systematically. Flooding a dog by overwhelming them until they shut down, or suppressing both emotional expression and behaviour through punishment such as choke chains, prong collars, shock collars or slip leads are methods that are doomed to failure. Not only that, they fail to take into account the dog’s view of the world and these approaches dismiss their feelings recklessly and insensitively. What you do with your dog to help them cope is very much dependent on what works for both the dog and their guardian. That said, no matter the dog and no matter the guardian, punishment and flooding are both methods that no good trainer will need to use. There are plenty of safe, reliable and efficient methods that don’t cause harm to our dogs and risk the health of people they come into contact with.

Medication may be the third strand of a programme, dependent on your dog’s needs and your vet’s recommendations. There are also many nutraceuticals and herbal remedies that may help your dog cope if they are anxious around strangers. My dog Lidy is not generally an anxious dog, so the vet has never felt that anti-anxiety medication would be necessary, although she does have moments when she’s afraid. That’s normal and adaptive. She didn’t understand all the cheering she could hear following the goals in football matches, and she doesn’t understand thunder. But generally speaking, she wouldn’t benefit from medications to lower her anxiety. Feeling afraid or uncertain following various changes in the environment is normal and adaptive if we’re not sure what’s going on and it scares us. When our dog does not adapt to scary stuff, or when they have an extremely strong reaction to things in the world around them, panicking even when they can’t see, hear or smell things they’re afraid of – those would be times that seeing a veterinarian would be a sensible precaution. In part, this is not least because noise phobias can be related to underlying musculoskeletal pain, and it may be that, especially if your dog’s fears have got worse gradually over a period of time, or if they suddenly changed, then a health check is always vital.

One thing that can be really difficult is when we need to interact with people. Lidy has mastered the fine art of coping with people who don’t interact with her. She’s watched men with diggers. She’s come across picnickers in the forest. She’s kept her beady eye on the people in the supermarket car park. We’re fine with people we don’t know. I protect her from their unwanted attentions, and absolutely everybody has been amazing about leaving her alone.

What is hard is moving from non-contact strangers to contact. It can be very hard for dogs to learn that people are not scary, and progress can be glacially slow. I worked with a lovely setter a couple of weeks ago, and it took two hours before the dog was really relaxed around me. And I’m a professional who keeps my hands to myself.

As you know, asking strangers to give your dog food can really backfire. If your dog approaches, your dog is drawn into the space of someone they perhaps feel uncomfortable with, and when the food runs out or the energy changes, you may find that your dog reverts to aggressive, fearful or reactive behaviour.

Personally, I’m a huge fan of Suzanne Clothier’s Treat and Retreat and I have a couple of other protocols I designed myself so that I can approach dogs when I need to. I mean, when you’re in a shelter, needs must. Treat and Retreat is surprisingly easy and also insanely effective. However, I can’t ask people to play Treat and Retreat with my dog.

Lidy had a vet appointment just before we came away to make sure she’d had her wormer and to check her health. Can you imagine, in a very busy, noisy vet surgery asking if your vet will play Treat and Retreat with your dog for ten minutes or so? You’d have to run them through what it was… then pass them some treats in the hopes that they could manage it… give them a bit of coaching to get it right… manage your dog… hope that the vet nurse didn’t walk in…

Yet there is one thing that you can use to help your dog cope with humans. An item that has a magical power, if you will.

Some dogs in shelter kennels have a really hard time with all the staff passing. One day, I noticed that one dog was an absolute lamb for the guy who brought him his dinner. The volunteer who turned up with the lead got the best reception. Yet this dog regularly threw himself, barking and lunging, at his kennel gates in a display so terrifying you’d have had no doubt it would have ended in a horrible way if he’d got out.

Turning up the next day with a bowl in my hand, I got the same reception. When I walked past later, I got the same response as the day before – a real telling off to move out of his space. Bowl = cute ‘yck-yck-yck’ behaviour and a lovely sit with a charming smile. Lead = delighted ‘whoo whoo’ behaviour and some joyful dancing. Nothing = barked at and lunged at from behind the gate. Eventually, because I took him out often, that lead transferred its magical power to me and the dog was as pleased to see me as he was with the lead.

The process by which this happened is not new. If you’re a trainer, you’ll know that this is Pavlov at work. Instead of bells, we’ve got bowls. It’s pure magic at work. However they feel about the food or the object, then that’s how they come to feel about the person holding it. It does work the other way, too, by the way. Not just for dogs either. Working with New Caledonian crows who are captured and then studied before being released, the researchers soon learned that the crows remembered who’d captured them and attacked them in the enclosure. It was so bad that they had to send novel researchers in who had no connection to the initial capture.

In shelters and in kennels, you can really use this power to help fearful or aggressive dogs out. When there are objects like these which have a magical power to bring out an emotional response, you can use them to make the shelter world routine and to help dogs (and cats) overcome their fears of strange kennel workers.

The word I use for these magical items is a talisman.

A talisman, an object thought to have magical powers, brings good luck. Our talisman in this example doesn’t bring good luck. It brings good science. Any object can take on magical powers to elicit responses from your dog. Bowls, harnesses and leads are common ones for us in the home. Some of us resort to saying W-A-L-K-I-E-S because even the word walk takes on magical properties. Actions like putting shoes on can cause immense excitement. Weird confession: the second time I go to the toilet in the day gets my dogs excited. Walks come next. Brushing my teeth makes my dogs excited. Brushing my hair makes my dogs excited. No, they’re not just excited by my occasional attempts at personal hygiene. Putting on my boots brings them to near delirium. Picking my keys up? Same. Putting my bag in the car? Utter ecstasy.

It’s not just objects like bowls, boots and leads. Nor is it just actions like picking up keys. Dogs respond to noises. Words like ‘walkies’ and tea can bring out the most giddy puppy in the most sedate pensioner. My alarm goes off at 6am and 6pm to give my boy Heston his medication. That invariably means Good Stuff At The Fridge. What do my dogs do when the alarm goes off? Get excited and run to the fridge. My mum’s been using the magical power of noise to announce herself to Lidy as she arrives, so that by the time she gets to the room, Lidy’s already dribbling with delight.

You think it’s just visual stuff, noises and words?

Don’t overlook the dog’s biggest and most powerful sense – smell. In shelters, it’s very easy to use smell to help dogs learn who new people are. Using zoopharmacognosy scents or even pairing up items of worn clothing from kennel workers can be one way to link smell with food or walks. One of my clients had adopted a sweet little girl who was very dog-aggressive. Unfortunately, her daughter was coming to live with her and she had a dog. We thought things would be okay, but to shorten the odds, we paired up the other dog’s bedding with food. The first day, we just put some treats inside a blanket that we’d wiped over the other dog. The next, a blanket we’d wiped over the other dog’s feet and interesting bits. If you don’t know what’s an interesting bit to a dog, pick off bits that’d normally make us cringe. Then we had a blanket the dog had slept on for an hour. Next, a blanket he’d slept on for the afternoon… you get the picture. When the dog finally arrived, we kept them separate for a few days, then we set up a meet and greet that was very carefully staged using walks and neutral spaces. When we came to introduce the dogs, she already knew all there was to smell about him, and she also knew that the smell of him meant fresh roasted chicken. Sure, we did a bit of work at a distance and we continued to take it easy, but pairing up smells with good stuff can be an amazing way to help your dog progress.

Even people can be a talisman. If your dog associates the presence of another person (or even of you!) with good stuff, then you can use them as a talisman to predict the arrival of good stuff, but also to predict safety and how events will unfold.

A talisman can be a word, then. It can be a smell. It can be a sound. It can be an object. It means, ‘when this thing is present, good stuff happens.’

It is a way for your dog to know that, in the presence of that magical item, it’s nothing but good stuff. It’s reliable. It’s predictable. It leads to more good stuff. I also use mats very often for exactly this. The mat comes out and good stuff will happen.

What you want is a full ‘whoo hoo!’ to whatever object you choose. Ironically, you can do this with virtually any neutral item. I get a whoo hoo when we see the muzzle. What you want, though, is a talisman that you can pass to the other person. Whoever carries the thing has the magical power.

I use a paté pot with treats and paté in it. Whoever holds the paté pot is magical. When I took Lidy in for her wormer, the vet was holding the paté pot. Lidy didn’t lunge. She didn’t growl or freeze. No hackles went up. No tail went between her legs. She trotted up to the vet, sat at her feet and was A Very Good Girl.

Aww, how lovely, you’re thinking. Surely this Lidy that she is describing had some mild worries about people. Not so. Lidy is more than capable of some very frightening behaviour.

Now when we have all the time, it’s great to take it. My mum has gradually been getting to know Lidy for a few minutes a day. When the Mother is here, nothing but good stuff happens. Meals, walks, snacks. She announces her presence so Lidy isn’t taken by surprise. And Lidy chose to approach her for cuddles. Don’t get me wrong: we’re not up to the point where I’ll be letting Lidy off-lead just yet, or hoping she’ll cope in moments of tension. This stuff works and it is just fine.

But I don’t have 7 days to go live in my vet’s house and ask her to do these things with the dog. So passing her the magical talisman meant that – just for that short period of time – the vet had a magical charm. Of course, I’m still relying on management (Lidy had two leads on and she was muzzled) and modification (I’ve spent a lot of time charging that paté pot let me tell you!). But, for the five minutes in the surgery, the presence of the paté pot meant that good stuff was assured.

Anything can become a talisman. In fact, you can make use of the super powers of having several work together. It needn’t even mean that the stranger is going to give out food. It simply means that the stranger is safe. It’s a transferable icon that means there is nothing to worry about and predictable things will unroll. Our paté pot is easy. It means paté. But we can also ask people to use words or ask for specific behaviours. When unfamiliar humans can ask for a behaviour like ‘spin’ and the dog knows it will lead to predictable results – the world really is your oyster.

Some final thoughts about the object you choose. The first is that it should be portable and fairly small so you can take it with you and your dog will know what is about to happen. It should also be unusual. You can of course hand a dog bowl over to your vet although it may be confusing – eating from bowls tends to happen in predictable places. Our paté pot comes out at regular intervals. On walks. In car parks. Just for fun. It’s small. It’s portable. It is very well charged. By that, I mean that paté and treats have come out of that pot at least a couple of times a day since as far back as I can remember. I don’t overdo it. And I try to keep lots of surprising things going on. Sometimes it might contain a piece of liver or kidney, a bit of black pudding, a piece of salmon, a bit of cheese. It’s always massively yummy human-grade food. I usually ask for a behaviour with it too, like hand touch.

Talismans come from the Arabic verb meaning ‘to complete’ or ‘to perform a rite’. A talisman that you use with your dog can be just the same. The talisman will be produced. The dog will be asked for a behaviour. The dog will do the behaviour. Treats will rain from the sky. Magic will happen.

I use a talisman frequently to make the world predictable for the dogs I work with. It helps them understand how the world operates. When we know what’s going on, we don’t have anything to be afraid of. It makes for confident dogs who understand the world.

I don’t place all my faith in them, and certainly not for long. But they form a central role in helping the dogs I work with move to interaction with humans when I need to do that a little more quickly than the dog would like. As I said… growling at the vet one visit, sitting for a wormer at the next. That’s not a speed I like to work at because it’s a speed that has been coerced unnaturally.

But if needs must… a talisman can work wonders. It can also, if used properly, form a bridge in building relationships of a longer duration.

Understanding the power of objects, sounds and smells can also help shelter managers ensure kennel safety. Imagine knowing that you could go into a block of kennels, say ‘Hi dogs!’ and be greeted by lots of wagging tails because they know that ‘hi dogs!’ always means snack time! It ensures safety for new kennel workers if they can pick up items with which dogs are familiar. They may not know you, but they know the routine. Certainly, having Lidy’s little green harness on display when I was away from the shelter meant anyone who approached her kennel with it must certainly be a friend because they were carrying the Magical Harness of Joy. Lidy knew what that harness meant and what it rituals it predicted. If you know much about Pavlovian conditioning, you’ll also know that it doesn’t take many pairings at all for an association to be formed. What you have then is a baton that can be passed from staff member to staff member and can be used to help dogs understand the world around them.

Unlike asking strangers to give your dogs food from their hand and risking a nasty bite when the dog realises they’re closer than they wanted to be, the talisman can be used at a distance, even behind fences or guards, or when your dog is on lead. Food, if that’s what the talisman predicts (mine do) can be given by the guardian or dropped and moved away from. Quite often, as I did with my vet, they might do the feeding (well, giving of wormers) and then I’ll move the dog away and feed them before returning again so that dogs who are startled by movement aren’t suddenly thrust into a situation where things were okay while the person was still but all bets are off when they move away. I’ve seen a few butt bites in those situations, so it’s well worth moving your dog away before the person starts to move.

Used well, Pavlovian conditioning can go a huge way to helping our dogs make sense of the world around them. A talisman tells the dog that they are safe and predictable events will occur. We try so hard to tell our dogs using words that they don’t understand. Why not use the objects that they have faith in to really make a difference?

One of the first things my clients want to know when their dog has bitten is whether it will happen again. It’s one of those impossible questions because there’s no answer that will put an end to people’s worries and there’s definitely no accurate answer.

A risk assessment definitely helps. I designed one I use with my clients to help them understand what is serious and what’s not. It’s easy for me to say that I don’t think their dog will bite again when as far as they’re concerned, Tricky Woo the Shih Tzu is now an unknown entity. But it is never easy for me to say, when there haven’t been any bite incidents, that I think if nothing changes for the dog, then the dog will find it increasingly difficult not to resort to using their teeth. Why is it that those of us whose dogs have bitten are frightened it will happen again, and those of us whose dog might be a huge risk are convinced it won’t happen in the first place?

A lot of it comes down to human psychology.

As you may have read about in Dog: Thinking Fast and Slow, humans have many cognitive biases. One of these is a negativity bias. We think that things are unlikely to improve and we don’t expect a positive outcome. That way of thinking can make it very difficult for us to put dog bites behind us and move on. Most of my clients go through a period where they completely lose trust in the dog and don’t know if they can go on living with an animal that they’re concerned is a ticking time bomb. I feel a little like this living with Lidy. New situations are always concerning and I’m probably much more cautious than I need to be. So many times, her behaviour has said that she’s well and truly moved on from her darkest days. She’s moved on. Maybe. I haven’t.

That’s the first stage I think we go through when we care for a dog who has bitten. Will they do it again? How can I trust them again? We lose all faith in them and in ourselves. We become overly cautious, even sometimes opting to rehome or euthanise our dog simply because we can’t trust them again after a bite, despite the fact we trusted them before. I don’t think there are many of my clients who don’t worry incessantly. And where the bite has been directed at someone in the family, it somehow becomes so much worse. Not least if we’re living together all day long. I never, ever feel judgemental if a client says they can’t live any longer with their companion, even if the risk assessment suggests a positive outcome. We live a life of blind trust before the bite, and then a land of constant worry after.

So why do we live in this land of blind trust before the bite? Even perhaps following one or two incidents?

The joy of human thinking also means we have a default optimism bias. I know. An optimism bias and a negativity bias. What fun! Who dreamed up these brains of ours?!

In reality, both have an evolutionary function. A negativity bias keeps us in place. It keeps us safe. It makes us risk averse. I’ve just spent three weeks on the move, in new locations, in new homes. Every walk goes back to being a walk into the unknown. Strangers are dangerous and change is bad. In experiments where mice were moved from one habitat to another, those who’d been there five days before predators were introduced were much more likely to survive than those who’d just been transplanted. In the real world, change can kill you.

And an optimism bias stops us dwelling so much on past experiences that we can’t move forward and we become crippled by anxiety. In fact, when we lose our optimism, it can cause us all sorts of problems.

I find some people to be very blasé about the risks posed by their dog. This is not really their fault. That delightful optimism bias carries us through, sometimes even past plausible deniability that our dog has a problem. I know many people whose dogs are repeat offenders, but because the bite hasn’t been bad enough yet, they continue with blind optimism. I’m there hearing stories about people who take incredible risks with their dog. It’s not that the dog is dangerous. They aren’t. It’s just that people take incredible risks with their dog simply because nothing bad has happened yet. On our way up north, I stopped off for a leg stretch with my dogs. We’re on lead. Lidy is muzzled. It’s quiet. I don’t, for one minute, expect there to be off-lead dogs at a motorway services when there’s 130kph traffic thundering past only 10m away. Guess what? We turn a corner and a guy is there with an unsupervised off-lead aggressive dog (he really was…) who charged at us all. No recall. No apology. Things ended okay – his dog took one look at Heston and changed his mind. But not only could there have been a horrible fight, his dog could easily have ended up getting squashed by traffic. I guess the jetski and the unsupervised toddler that the guy had with him said a bit about his view on life – and I guess the two leads and the muzzle and the deliberate choice of a very quiet services says a lot about mine. I expect perfect storms. He doesn’t.

I’ll tell you something else too. Instead of sighing with relief and realising what a lucky escape he had, he’ll do the same thing again in the future.

I don’t blame people for this, either. Even if I’m explaining until I’m blue in the face that their dog is a risk. This is not just for dogs who bite, but even dogs who jump up on people or who have poor recall. Nothing Bad Yet is a dangerous state. I’ve lived in it, with dogs I’ve taken risks with myself, even over simple things like not securing them properly in the car or letting them off lead when I shouldn’t.

We put the dog in situations they can’t cope with, and boom, you’re then dealing with a negativity bias and wondering how you’ll ever recover. Once bitten, twice shy. Literally.

Take the dog that was in before Lidy and me on one of our vet visits. I say ‘visit’ and I run it like a military operation. At this visit, there was a a teenage labrador in for routine vaccinations. There were lots of stress signals I could see but were ignored by the guardian. As soon as the vet walked in, the dog started lunging, barking, snapping. That dog was a big dog and the guardian had him on an extendable lead. Luckily, the vet was risk averse. That’s the optimism bias at work in the guardian, though. It doesn’t cross our tiny minds that our dogs might actually, one day, inevitably, bite someone if we keep doing what we’re doing. Lidy got to be the best dog in the vet surgery simply because I’d planned to keep people safe from her.

I walked in and Lidy’s muzzled, on two leads. I’ve checked her harness, but also have a lead clipped on her collar. I’ve checked the clasp on the muzzle and secured it. I have paté. I’ve booked us in at a very special time (just after the vets open – so we don’t get trapped on a day when there are five or six overnight emergencies being brought in, and before things get too busy with queues). I went in first, leaving Lidy secured in the car. I scope the surgery. I check for problems. I let the assistant know I’m there. She tells me to go straight on through into the vet consulting room so I don’t have to hang around trying to be polite to people with cats when my dog is having a meltdown. That’s the negativity bias at work. Plan for the worst. In the end, she did a tiny growl and went back to eating paté.

So what is the biggest problem for our dogs after they’ve bitten?

Us.

We are.

It happens with those perfect storms, when we think we’re safe.

The problem about the brain making quick decisions is that it quickly reverts to the optimism bias even if you live in a carefully risk assessed world, especially if nothing’s happened for a while.

I always tell my clients: ‘Watch out for the day when you think your dog is better… it’s inevitably followed by the dog reminding you that they are not’.

That’s not just some silly fatalistic view. It’s not a case that the dog knows we’ve let our guard down. It’s just a case that we have let our guard down and usually that means we’re not as careful with risks.

What happens when we think our dog is better is that we drop our negativity bias and re-find the optimism bias once more. We become risk takers. We put our dogs in situations they can’t cope with and – boom – they remind us that we took one too many risks. It’s usually the day after we start feeling relaxed.

It also happens when we’re stressed and when we’ve five hundred things on our mind. This is me too. I do sometimes think Lidy is ‘better’ and then she reminds me she’s not. But most of the mistakes come when I’m stressed.

Our rational brain is the one that makes all the plans and security arrangements. Baby gates? Check. Hook and eye lock on the door? Check. Sliding lock? Check. Secure buckles on harness? Check. Secure clip on lead? Check. Muzzle to hand? Check.

And then, when we’re stressed, we forget all of that.

Take me three weeks ago. Unexpected change in house moving date. Got a few bits and pieces to move out. What do I do? I let Lidy ‘supervise’ moving tables and she can’t cope. All I needed to have done was put her behind the sodding baby gate for two minutes. That’s all. Two minutes.

We ditch our rational mind’s probability and possibility risk assessments and safety measures when we’re stressed and even doing something that I’ve done a hundred times then becomes something I forgot to do.

At the end of the day, she coped much better than she could have done and I’m here reminding myself that under stress, the best laid plans of dog trainers and guardians go astray. That is the biggest risk post-bite. That we’ll think they’re over it or that we make hasty choices when we’re stressed.

What I would say to my clients is this: know your dog. Do the risk assessments. Keep them safe, if you have even the slightest doubt. If you don’t have doubts, then you’re probably stressed or walking into another bite situation. Watch the flashpoints where there’s excitement and little control. Watch the hotspots where dogs come in contact with people or dogs they’ve targeted before. Be risk averse and have double, triple or even quadruple safety protocols in place. Then make those protocols so automatic that you could do them in your sleep.

They say insanity is doing the same thing you always did and expecting different results. Well, in that case, there’s a distinct loss of rationality – if not sanity – when we’re under pressure and I promise you that you too will fall foul of taking your eye off that proverbial ball. In your moments of rationality, put every safety measure into place and practice routinely and predictably. I secure Lidy in the car on every single journey – as I should, mind – as I know the one time I’m stressed, I’ll forget. I want it to be so automatic that I do it on autopilot. Our brain’s autopilot system is pretty efficient as long as you’ve practised something long enough. I didn’t forget how to drive my car during that unexpected move, although I did have to very consciously remind myself to stick to the speed limits, which I never have to do under normal circumstances. Autopilot is good for dogs and their guardians. Safety checks and security measures are the perfect things to have on autopilot.

So when guardians ask me if their dog will bite again, whether it was just a perfect storm, I say I don’t know. I don’t. I do know that dogs with a bite history will repeat that behaviour when we stop paying as much attention to safety as we were, and that we’ll revert to our own stress behaviour patterns when we’re under fire, just as they will. We spend our lives thinking ‘only’ in a perfect storm – and yet perfect storms happen so much more frequently than we’d expect.

If we can take anything from this, it’s the need to always stick to your safety and management routines, and never let your guard down because you think your dog will cope. Why did I let my crazy malinois supervise furniture removals? Just because in the heat of the moment, it seemed like she would be okay and she’d cope.

I got lucky.

And relying on luck means one day our luck will run out.

Make sure you rely on good management habits for the days when perfect storms hit, and stick to those procedures even if you think it’ll be okay.

That way, I’m sure we’d have fewer ‘repeat offenders’ and fewer guardians who regret the day they took the eye off the management.