Dog Socialisation is an important part of the dog’s development, this is important as we need to know within reason how our dogs will react when confronted with particular circumstances. To have an un-socialised dog could lead to untold situations, for example – dog on dog aggression, a dislike of children, members of different races indeed anything out of the ordinary.
DISCOVER YOUR DOG’S SOCIAL SKILLS
When we present our dogs to various situations, we can begin to build a picture of how are dogs react to certain stimuli, it could be a fear of large black dogs, a fear of tall people, people with umbrellas, people with walking sticks the list is endless. When we gather the information, we can begin to help our dogs with fears and anxiety related to every day occurrences encountered in life.
DOG INTRODUCTIONS
Dog on dog greeting is a great place to start, when we first meet other dogs on a walk it is never a great idea to just go bowling in and surprise – we get a negative reaction, let’s just stand off where the dog feels comfortable and observe the body language. Let him see the dog from a distance, take a step or two closer is there a reaction does the dog go into arousal. We can tell a great deal from studying the dogs body language through the eyes, ears, tail position and posture, body posture, head height, weight distribution and the coat, learning these tell – tale skills and reading the dog is essential.
ALLOW THE DOG TO MAKE CHOICES
When we discover the areas of concern then we can begin to help the dog find his place in the world without becoming over threshold, always consider the flee, freeze, fight options. These are the stages the dog goes through on the ladder of aggression in the build up to an episode. The dogs first option is always flee, so we must allow the dog to do this if he wants to, take him to a place within his safety bubble, the size of the bubble varies from dog to dog. Dogs will never go straight to fight unless they feel threatened, and any barking lunging is an attempt to make the scary stimuli go away. So now we can counter condition/desensitise and habituate to help our dog cope and learn to live with certain things which he will learn is not really that scary, this does of course relate to all stimuli mentioned above the principle is exactly the same.
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