Fear Based Aggression - Balanced trainers approach

The use of tools in the treatment of a dog that suffers from fear-based aggression is one of the most polarizing topics within the dog training community, and I think that people use extremes as examples, and that is seldom helpful. Today, during a video lesson, I had the opportunity to explain to a student the actual process that most balanced trainers would go through when they use tools treating a fear-based aggression case. Stick around to the end, please, so that you can through my entire process. This is not a specific example, but just an overarching process. And if you think this is the sort of video somebody who has a misunderstanding needs to hear, please pass this on to them. So in dealing with an aggressive dog case, it really comes down to just two key principles. Right? The first being that you want to show the dog that your aggression is unnecessary. So it's almost always fear-based, almost always, right? Like the dog has learned, I don't like this situation, uh, and I can get myself out of this situation by showing aggression. And maybe they just have to display it, right, versus actually bite. But that usually escalates. It usually gets to the point where they start displaying it, and when that's less effective, they escalate and they, they get to the bite. What What also happens is the triggers get lighter in that the dog then, like, the first time whatever happened to that dog to make it aggressive would have been quite significant, right? But now the dog has identified the sequence of events that lead to that, and he might also have identified numerous branch plans that he thinks could lead to it that maybe even don't. So usually when we're dealing in an aggression case, people say the dog has gotten more and more aggressive at more and more things. And the truth is, although we are observing a bigger problem, it's the same problem. It's just that the dog thinks that all these various stimulus can lead to the same end point that he has learned to first escape and then avoid by showing that aggression. So what's pretty important, the cornerstone of all aggression treatment that we want to get rid of, is that we show the dog It's actually not necessary, right? Like, the thing that you're worried about, it's not here anymore, right? So we need, first of all, we need that to be true. So if it was a dog attack, you know, we need to make sure that he's not, it couldn't be attacked by another dog. He's not ever off leash around other dogs or no dogs around him. And if it's a person, a specific person that, you know, treated the dog poorly and the dog learned to turn that off via his aggression, we're to make sure that there's no situation where he can be in that. And we show the dog like, hey, it's unnecessary. So then this is where we say aggression is mostly fear-based, and then we start strengthening the dog, right? Um, and showing the dog like, here is a similar picture to what you think is the problem, right? Whatever you would normally be aggressive towards at a distance, a proximity, you know, whatever duration that you can handle, and everything's sweet, right? The dog doesn't display the aggression, and he learns like, oh, like, that thing didn't come and get me. And, you know, what we're essentially describing is desensitization, counter-conditioning. You want to show him like, hey, that's not the bad thing. In fact, it's probably a good thing. And so we can use positive reinforcement in the presence of it. And he goes like, okay, I thought that that person was going to injure me, and I wanted to avoid that injury by barking, lunge, growl, ultimately bite them. I was in their presence at a distance where I could observe that and decide, like, as I'm thinking about it, I just got positive reinforcement, and then it was over and it never happened, right? Then, so that's kind of the foundation. And with some dogs, you can then just— if you— and if you're careful, you just keep working that all the way in, and the dog goes, okay, my aggression is totally unnecessary, right? Like, it— there's no point in showing it. The second part is showing him that his aggression is ineffective. Right, so what you want to do, because, you know, if he is being aggressive and that stops the situation, if it's reasonable that he's aggressive and it stops the situation, he's going to keep doing it. So what you want to do is show him like, hey man, you— there's no need to be scared of that. And I'll do that as slowly and carefully as possible. But the next part is we show like, actually, the aggression that you're showing, that forward momentum, bark, lunge, growl, ultimately bite, that doesn't have the effect you think it has, right? Like, you are not creating the space that you want to create. In fact, it has no effect on the other person. There's a couple ways you can do that, right? Like, so you can have— if it's a person, that person needs to be completely neutral and not stop what they're doing. That is certainly— you don't want to get closer if that's how you're working this sort of situation, but you, you, you don't want to leave. Like, you don't want the dog's aggression to cause your retreat. The issue with working towards a static, um, a static trigger and moving the dog is if you go over threshold, now you have to move the dog away, and the dog has learned, well, I got the space that I wanted, right? Like, very few aggressive dogs, and certainly not in any fear-based aggression cases, are they after anything other than distance. Some aggressive dogs, and this is not something you can fix via this technique, want to kill that thing because they would enjoy it, right? And it's a power play or it's a dominance thing. It could be a lot of reasons why that could happen, but they're not— they're not common. You don't really see that in the pet space. That's pretty uncommon, except for, you know, certain game dogs that have been bred to do that. And then there's not a lot of changing that except for other drive outlets and that kind of stuff, but that's another topic. Um, so what you want to do is when you're working that proximity to the trigger, then if the dog goes over threshold and starts bark, lunge, growl, we first have to acknowledge that's our fault. But now we can't take that dog away from it while he's bark, lunge, growling, because we're reinforcing the aggression and we're not showing him he's aggressive and ineffective. We're showing him actually his aggression is effective and it will continue. Whenever he feels uncomfortable, he'll show it. So we need a technique that we can then put into that. This is where people who would say, oh, you can never use tools or pressure or anything and punishment in aggression. And like with punishment in aggression, I would say, yeah, you're right, you shouldn't, right? But tools, yeah, you can. So imagine that we're going to use a prong collar on this dog that's aggressive towards people when he sees him in the proximity of people. We first need to show him how the prong collar works, absent any of the triggers, when he's all happy. And we show like, hey, like, come this way and I can nag you and it doesn't hurt, but it's certainly an annoyance, right? And you turn that off by moving with me, right? And we go left and we go right and we go forward and we go back. And then what would even then let the dog kind of, you know, check out a little bit, and I'd say, hey, when I nag you, you come back to me. And at every ceasing of the pressure via the prong collar, he gets positive reinforcement so that he's motivated to turn off that negative reinforcement by the prong collar, not just because it's, it's uncomfortable, but because doing so quickly announces the delivery of the positive reinforcement— the food, the toy, the game, whatever it is. So when he understands all of that really well, Then we can start working distance proximity to the triggers. And now we have a tool that we can use if we make the mistake and push the dog over threshold. And it's exactly like what happens in some sort of human attachment therapy where they, like for people who are dissociative, where the therapist will have you hold, they even do use dog leashes in some cases, where the therapist has you hold that. And if you dissociate or become fixated on something, they can nag you back, right? They can, and it's a tactile feedback Because in that moment, especially in a real aggression case or whatever, the senses like your hearing is not, you're not paying that much attention to that kind of thing. And, you know, people like sound like they're at the end of the tunnel or whatever. And the same will happen with the dog. Tactile feedback is what the dog's gonna understand. So if the dog does go over threshold and the type of over threshold that I'm talking is just fixating, that's the time to get in. Where the dog is like happily walking around with you at the distance to the trigger. And you then say like, okay, we're gonna take that extra step. And the dog sees the trigger, is aware of it, or hopefully is aware of it the whole time, but begins to fixate, that's the time where you go like, "Hey man, stay with me." And we've already taught the dog elsewhere that that, you know, feeling via the prong collar and all the flat collar, if that's the way you're going to teach this, but more often than not, the flat collar has been desensitized in this type of dog that it's not that usable in this scenario. And the prong collar hopefully is a fresh tool that we can continue to use. We're just using it at a level where we go like, "Hey," You remember, we're together in the same way the therapist says to the person, like, hey, come back to me. We do the same to the dog, and the dog goes like, yeah, yeah, sorry, what? And looks at us, and he knows at the moment he turns that off, we get the positive reinforcement. And then while he's taking that positive reinforcement, because we got too close to the trigger, we're over threshold, that's when we take a step back, right? And we go like, I'm getting you out of here. You get the reinforcer you wanted of distance. We're delivering, we create that distance by the delivery of food or whatever the the reinforcer is, the game, the toy, whatever. But the way we deliver it is the real reinforcer by creating the distance that the dog wanted. So by doing both those things, we show the dog like, hey, we desensitize, counter-condition. The thing that you're worried about can't hurt you. You've misunderstood this situation. It's not actually a danger to you. We have to make sure that's true. We then put the dog in its presence at a level he can handle and we go, hey, the presence of that actually brings good things. If by— and we slowly decrease that distance. If by accident we find ourselves going over threshold where the dog is beginning to fixate, and that is our time to intervene at the lowest level of arousal that we can. We have prior to that loaded the tools and the capability to say to the dog, hey, come back to me. The dog feels that, kicks out of that scenario, looks at us, and now we're straight back to where we were, where we can reinforce. But we have to acknowledge the reinforcement is not necessarily what we're going to be giving it. It's going to be the way way we give it, and that is by creating distance away from the actual trigger. That way, we're not in a setback by going over threshold. But of course, our absolute goal is to never go over threshold, right? Like, we want to slowly work that distance proximity, but that's not always possible. And, and as humans, we make mistakes. Sometimes the triggers that we're working dogs towards, these things are mobile, right? Sometimes they come from nowhere, uh, you know, like, there's, there's reasons that will always happen. And absent that tool of pressure to bring the dog back, you— that's a loss, and it can be a catastrophic loss. Like, you can set the dog back massively if you've been working really well and things are going well, and then he has this big explosion of aggression and you get him out of that situation, he goes, man, I was thinking aggression didn't work, and then it turns out it really, really does. All right, so what you want to be is like, hey, that's not effective. And if the dog does display— if imagine you don't get it in that early phase where it's just fixation, imagine the dog really does blow up and he's going ballistic. You just outweighed him, and you just like— in this case, we're kind of flooding, and it's absolutely what we want to avoid. But we want to be like, hey man, like, you don't have the effect that you think you have, right? And that's why we want to avoid this altogether so that we're not stressing the hell out of the dog. But we want to show them like, that's not a threat to you, it's not getting any closer, it's not going to hurt you. And as the handler, it behoves you to make sure that it really can't, otherwise you've, you know, that's unethical, uh, But you want to show the dog that's not going to hurt you, and you doing that is not going to change the outcome here. This is one of the reasons with that kind of stuff I even like to do this on a mill so that the dog can blow off all that kind of steam if it's another dog. So he's static and I use the other dog to come closer and closer, and I keep the dog engaged with me. But if I lose him and he blows off and tries to get to that other dog, I can just stand there and wait for him to exhaust himself desperately trying to get to that other dog while he runs in place on the spot, provided my other dog doesn't give feedback, right, the dog and make it worse, he can just show like, oh, I've had no effect and I'm not like restricted. I just— my aggression is doing absolutely nothing in the direction that I want it to do. And eventually the dog becomes essentially helpless and looks at you and you go, that's what I wanted. Here's the reinforcement. Now I'll take you away, right? Or I send that other dog away, right? Whatever it's going to be, because the principles of the whole thing needs to be we show the dog First of all, you, you shouldn't be scared of it. There's no need to be. You've made a mistake, you've misunderstood, you had one bad experience and you've generalized that to everybody. Don't be scared of the thing that you're scared of, right? You don't need to display that behavior. It's unnecessary. But not only is it unnecessary, it's, it's, it's not effective. And the specifics of how you do all of this is up to the individual case and the dog and what it is that he's going off at. But that's the underlying principles of the whole aggression treatment plan.