Learning the art of counter conditioning is indeed an essential part of the dog training tool kit. When we find our dog developing fear of certain situations and we keep forcing them to confront their fears we are actually trigger stacking and increasing the Anxiety tenfold.
Trigger Stacking
Trigger stacking is the result of constant encounters with something that causes fear. Every encounter registers another level until maximum resilience is reached and the dog goes over threshold.
Threshold
If we imagine an empty bucket, this is the dogs threshold. An empty bucket is high resilience, every time the dog encounters a trigger a cup of water is added (a cup of water is a trigger). when the bucket is full resilience is low. Eventually the bucket becomes full and spills over, this is the dog going over threshold.
So now you can understand the dog’s dilemma and ready to help. For the purpose of the exercise we will discuss fear of traffic, so the vehicle approaches the dog goes into arousal and begins barking and lunging, the vehicle keeps coming and indeed passes and moves away, the dog now firmly believes they have chased the scary thing away, this behaviour will now be repeated in the future.
How to Counter Condition
the first consideration is the size of your dog’s comfort bubble, this is demonstrated by the distance from the passing vehicle the dog needs to be before going into arousal. for example if the dog begins to feel stressed by a car 20m away then this means the dogs bubble is 20m either side total size of bubble 40m.
after you have determined the size of the bubble then its time to find an area near to a busy road where we can start from 20m away. Every time a vehicle passes squat down with the dog and hold the collar, if you hold the lead this is not as effective. Cue (command) LOOK AT ME, every time the dog gives you eye contact Mark and reward, if the dog will not look at you it means you are too close and need to back off 10m. When the dog looks at you then point to the vehicles and cue LOOK AT THAT and then back to you. Use positive reinforcement to reward the desired behaviour (vocal/petting/food). When the dog begins to remain calm then move 10m closer. if the dog reacts then move purposely back to a safe place and counter condition. Eventually you will be able to approach near the the vehicles and the dog will remain calm. The whole purpose of this exercise is to give confidence in yourself to the dog to say don’t worry about that your with me.
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