Reactive Dog? Here's What Nobody Tells You (No BullSh*t)
In this live‑Q&A style video, Max O’Neill and his training team cut through common dog‑training myths and present a no‑nonsense framework for handling reactive, high‑drive, and over‑aroused dogs. They begin by warning viewers to stop Googling advice, then dive into a series of concrete techniques drawn from real client cases (a Collie obsessed with a ball, a Ridgeback that won’t lie down, a husky‑cross that anticipates commands). Core concepts include “window theory” (work vs. play windows with start/finish cues), the “enough” cue paired with a pre‑conditioned punishment marker, and the importance of clear, consistent signals. They discuss management tools such as tethering, crate use, and self‑settling, and critique misuse of e‑collars, emphasizing consistent distance thresholds. Resource guarding over humans is highlighted, along with strategies for matching dogs for play, size‑based compatibility, and supervised introductions. Conditioned relaxation and resilience training are presented as ways to lower overall arousal. The presenters stress the necessity of two foundational skills—reliable recall and a down command—often reinforced with e‑call and pressure, and explain marker‑payout mechanics, including “jackpot” rewards. Session design is addressed, noting optimal learning windows of 8‑12 minutes and the value of short, focused training bouts. Throughout, they promote their bootcamps, remote programs, and a new Perth franchise, offering free community access, a Behaviour Bible course, and a complimentary consultation. The video concludes with a call to action to join their online community for ongoing support.
Chapters
Stop Googling your dog's problems. Seriously, stop it. Because the answers you're finding out, half of them are making things worse. And I know that because we've worked with thousands of reactive dog owners, helping them transform their dog's lives. And every single one of them started in the same place. Fed the wrong information, following the wrong advice, going in circles. So instead of doing that, come and ask us directly. Every week we jump on a live Q&A in our online free community. And this week, some absolute belters. A Collie so ball obsessed it literally cannot function. A Ridgeback that refuses to lie down on anything that's not a soft bed. Not even A husky cross GSD that does everything at 100 miles an hour and then starts guessing what you're about to ask before you've even asked it. Sound familiar, right? And the one that stood out— resource guarding. Not over food, not over toys, but over a human. Here's the thing, these aren't unusual problems. They're the same things that I see day in, day out. But the answers probably aren't what you expect. So what I've done is taken the best questions from this week's live Q&A and cut out all the waffle so you just get the bits that actually matter. Whether you've got a reactive dog, an over-aroused nightmare, or you just feel like you're banging your head against the wall with your training. Stick around.
Trust me. Okay, so that's kind of two separate things, right? So I created a problem once where I had a laser pen and I didn't intend using it with my dog, but I pulled out of a drawer and I just was checking if there was batteries in. So I clicked it on, the laser pen shone on the floor and my Sprocket became obsessed with it. I literally turned it off, put it back in the drawer, and he stared at that drawer for fucking ages. The way I addressed this was what we call window theory. So i.e., there are windows for doing certain things. And especially with a Collie that's gonna have an awful lot of drive, you need to teach the dog that it's not all go, go, go, and sometimes it's slow, slow, slow. It's made up, it's terrible. But there's a window. You can have a work window, i.e., you give the dog a task to do, place, or a little recall, or whatever it might be. And then you've got a play window where you're going to use your ball. We have a start cue, i.e., are you ready? You pull the ball out, you throw it, and then you have a finish cue. Enough, finished, all done. Those are the common ones. You then gotta make sure that the dog is crystal clear understanding that that means that the game is done, right? So like, you can't then bark at me for, for another throw or whatever it might be. So when you're teaching it, I would leave the ball then on the floor. I say enough, I have a lead on the dog. Might only be like a pull tab's worth of lead so the dog's not tripping over it. I say enough, dog tries to get the ball, we walk off. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, until the point where I can say enough and the dog leaves the ball absolutely alone. You can then generalize that more context. So if you've got a dog that's busy in the house and comes over to you to pester you, you could say, "Enough!" And the dog should then understand that, okay, that thing is not happening right now. It's different to punishment in terms of like, if you're using enough, it means that we're not doing that thing right now, but it's a possibility again in the future at some point, just like play would be. What you can do long-term, precondition a punishment marker, is hold them accountable to the rules with that. So like, let's say for example, I say enough and I know the dog's very good at it, I know they've listened to it 9, 10 times out of 10. I say enough and the dog's like, "No, I'm just gonna have another go." They get the ball and I say, "Here's bad." We can't do that. That's like you playing after the whistle's gone. That's— there's a consequence for that, so we go through like a punishment process with it. You can then apply that to your house enough as well, if that makes sense. It depends like how long you've had them off lead, whether you've reinforced a little bit of checking in. It's a difficult one for me. Jacob and I've been discussing this a lot recently in terms of micromanaging your dog. I don't want to bring the dog back all the time. I want my dog to go and be a dog. But I understand like if the dog's going absolutely fucking miles, like if you've got a pointer or something like that and it's just fucking off into the distance and you have no idea where your dog is, like I understand how that's a little bit unnerving. If you've got a non-reactive dog and you can trust them, it's kind of okay to be out of sight for a bit. It's one of the only circumstances where I might use my dog's name instead bit of a cue. So like, if I've not seen Flea or Blue for a bit, they're the two that, um, all my other dogs are bull breeds, right, and they just stick around you. But Flea's obviously a Malinois mix something, and Blue's a Sprocket. They both like to go sniffing and searching out stuff. I might just say their name just so that they kind of look and check in. The name doesn't mean anything, you don't have to come back to me, but I just need to know where you are. Obviously you can have like an informal 'this way' in case the dog's out of sight, and you just kind of use that as like a 'come on, you're going the wrong way' or 'you're out of sight.' I don't know if you use an e-collar or not, but Just in case you did think about this as an option, the two most stressed dogs I've seen ever that had e-collar training that wasn't done by us, the dogs were taught, um, e-collar as a don't go away. The trouble with that is the dogs didn't know what don't go away meant. Like, some days it could mean 10 meters, some days it could mean 50 meters. Even on the same walk, it might mean 10 or 50 meters. The dog then can't have contingency or agency over when they might feel stim, right? Whereas if it's just for recall and you only feel consequence if you don't recall, that's not stressful. But if I don't know how far I can walk without getting a consequence, that's a little bit of a problem. So don't go down that route. But one, that plays a part of a confidence thing too, is an assessment of like what your dog's motivated by. So if they're going to go out of sight in a normal public park and they chase squirrels, it's probably not so much of a problem. If they're going to go out of sight in a huge fucking forest somewhere and they might chase a deer for miles, obviously the rules might change a little bit. You might want to keep them in sight a little bit more. The only downsides of obviously liberating your dog as much as possible, like he's going to enjoy himself, fill his boots, but There's a little bit of the heart rate goes up, right? Yes, tethering is a great way to teach a dog to self-settle. So crates are probably a gold standard management tool. Like, your dog can't do anything in there, but it doesn't teach them anything about interacting with life outside of the crate. So we've seen, we get kind of two polar opposites. Either people who liberate the dogs too much and this house is just fucking chaos, or we get people whose dogs grey in the crate, and then when they let them out of the crate it's also chaos because the dog's never been taught and never been given clarity of how to interact with their environment in the house. So structure isn't clarity. Structure is a way you can— it can assist you in getting clarity. I.e., when your dog's in the crate, they can't do things that you need to stop them doing, but you've got to teach them to not do those things when they're out of the crate. So tethering, house leads with the umbilical method, anything like that where you can teach self-settling is really, really invaluable. So Good, good point to mention. Really like underrated. Like a dog that can chill when you're not doing anything is a joy to live with, but not necessarily if you've got a Collie or a Malley or something like that. High drive working breed, not necessarily the easiest thing to get. It's also something called conditioned relaxation. If you bang that in YouTube, that can, that can help a bit too. It depends, right? And that's an awful thing for me to say. It sounds like a really vague fucking answer, but I've got 6 dogs. I let some of them play together, some of them are terrible match. So my Staff American Bulldog and my girl Frenchie, I don't let them play together because the propensity for it to spill over into a scrap is too high. My Sprocket Blue, he can play with any of my dogs, even Lil Jon the spicy Staffie. He can play with him. Cora the little Frenchie can play with the Staffie. So like some of them, like, um, some of them good matches, some of them aren't. Your problem a little bit with a Rottie and a French Bulldog is that there's such a physical mismatch. Oh, not in the Frenchie's head, I imagine. Definitely not if it's anything like Bumble. He thinks he's like a fucking Tyrannosaurus Rex, but it's too easy for a Rottweiler to accidentally bowl a Frenchie over. Frenchie then gets super defensive, goes at the Rottweiler, then the Rottweiler goes, fuck you, I'm not having that. And then you end up with a bit of a spillover. So it does depend a little bit on the characters themselves. And in this instance particularly, maybe like the size difference is not necessarily hugely appropriate because of the propensity for the Rottweiler to inadvertently either step on the Frenchie or bowl the Frenchie over. But it does depend, like if the Rottweiler is really good at play and is very good at Essentially, like, there should be give and take within interactive dog play, right? So one dog's on the back, then they swap, and the other dog's on the back, and one dog's winning and the other dog's winning. If you haven't got that, regardless of size, it's probably inappropriate. If you've got one dog that's just bulldozing the other dog, it's probably inappropriate. And always do it supervised so that you can see it maybe creeping up and you can stop it before it escalates into anything that it shouldn't do. Yeah, so maybe like the picture-perfect thing would be you recruit someone, either a friend or someone that you see regularly, and you get rid of that real high arousal bit early by going through like a resocialization process, just walking them around the field together. Maybe they organically sniff each other a little bit, so you take away that super high arousal first bit. And whether that high arousal is social or antisocial, you get rid of both of those. I then let her drag a long line, just have it trailing, and I would practice recalling from that dog. Once you can do it from a dog that where the arousal's dropped a little bit, you can then make it a little bit harder. But just make sure that you've really gone through a good avoidance phase with your e-collar. That way you shouldn't have to use stim when you recall, because obviously what you don't really want to do is recall with stim when a dog's next to another dog, ideally. Obviously if you've got to do it, you've got to do it, but sometimes it can push the dog into reacting if they're, if they're already a little bit prickly. So create really good avoidance. So as soon as they hear that recall word, they're like, yep, fuck that, I'm coming. Yeah, fine. And then you don't have to use pressure in the moment. Okay, have her on a lead, say yes, walk backwards, lead brings her with you, pay. Only ever say your marker once for a payout. Essentially, your marker is only as good as your average payout. Every time you say it for the second time, you're halving that payout. Say it once, essentially make it happen. And that doesn't have to be like you're not taking the dog's fucking head off, you're just walking backwards and then the lead will bring them with you. It'll encourage you out of the sit. Quite often when a dog sits, it's because we pay sit an awful lot. So one of the things we classically teach dogs is to sit, right? So we've paid them an awful lot of times to do sit. So if they know you've got food, quite often they'll sit to try and get the food. Obviously when we're teaching them, when we're treating or addressing reactivity, we don't want the dog in a fixed behavior. We want them to have as much liberty as possible. So not in a sit, not in a down, not in a heel. Okay, here's your liberty of choice. Do you want to react to the dog or do you not want to react to the dog? That's when you can make some real ground. So for this, I would just say your marker and then half a second later you're on your bike, you're moving away backwards from her, it'll bring her with you, and then you pay her when she gets to you. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. Don't let her have the option of just sitting there and taking the second chance. If this has been going on a long time and it's made your marker piss weak because your average payout's not great, it's not too late to to change it to a different word or marker or noise or novel thing, whatever you want to do. Hopefully that makes sense, but we want that average payout to be good. Hence why we also use the jackpots. Obviously there's people who are already on our courses, people who are about to do our courses, people are about to do courses in Perth. But if you're not, and this is, this is essentially like the level of support you get when you do one of our courses, be it TWI, the remote program, or an in-person bootcamp in both Perth or United Kingdom. So Susie will have put a link in the description for this call. So if you want to work with us, you can have a free call and see if it would be appropriate. Obviously, we give loads of stuff away for free in the Behaviour Bible, but if you need a little bit more direction— there she is, look around, cute— right in the, um, in the chat box there. So if you want to speak to a trainer for free, find out if we can help you and give you more guidance and how that would look, then just jump on a free call. So the boot camp in Perth is exactly the same, a full replica of the boot camps that we do here. So essentially we train the dogs Monday to Friday, roughly 10 till 4 in each day. We cover kind of different things each day with the expectation of finish or fixing your reactivity or getting your dog off lead or whatever it is that you need by the Friday. If not you don't pay, pay the deposit, you don't pay the remainder after the deposit. Essentially, we guarantee our work. But in terms of how often we come, I don't know, you don't know this already, Sam, but we're opening a franchise there. So we've got two guys who did— a guy and a girl who did Jacob's business mentorship. We've met them a whole bunch of times. We have absolute trust in them. So they're replicating what we do over in Perth there. They were already dog trainers anyway, and very good ones. So we're doing a bootcamp next week with them, a reactivity seminar to kick off and get the ball rolling. You can do exactly the same courses with them as you can with us. So you can book onto a bootcamp or you can do the hybrid slash remote program version, but they're great. Adam, like he's the main trainer there. He's come and I would say shadowed, but he didn't really shadow. He just fucking took over the bootcamp anyway and did one. He did a great job. So he's, I've got absolute faith in them that they're going to be great. And then we get the luxury of, I say luxury, I'm going to be knackered with the travel, but we get the luxury of coming over on Saturday/Sunday, seeing where— seeing the great city of Perth and helping him out with his first one. So there was another question this morning on the Instagram Q&A, and it was about a very social dog who barks when put in place when visitors come. So this is one of the problems with using or trying to use only reinforcement-based training. What happens is you can't give the dog liberty. So essentially we're putting the dog on place to manage the dog so they're not too overzealous when guests come around. This dog sounds super overzealous, and also then barking from the place bit. So rather than that approach, for me, I would just teach a preconditioned punishment marker of like, hey, don't do that. So if the dog jumps up at people, I'm going to stop it. I want the dog to be out and free. It's my house, it's their house, it's not the guest's house. I don't want to put my dogs away, I don't want to put them in crates, I don't want to put them in a bed. So I don't want to use management or what's called differential reinforcement of doing something else. So like the the place bed thing there. I want them to have the liberty, but if they're dicks, I need to be able to stop them being dicks, right? And there's a degree of like, all right, I expect them to greet guests enthusiastically because they're social dogs, they love, they like people. But if they're jumping up and kicking them, scratching them, I can say bad and they'll stop doing it. So there is a big difference between managing your life, your dog's life to the nth degree, and being able to say, hey, some behaviors are just off the table. So the rationale behind, or our rationale behind using punishment, which people are terrified of, is to be able to liberate our dogs more. So as another example, I can walk through fields of sheep and cows with my dogs. My, one of them's a Frenchie, one of them's a Sprocket, so he's a Whippet, um, Springer mix, and the other one's Malinois. And they can walk through sheep fields without chasing sheep look at and they might acknowledge them, but then don't make any forward steps towards those creatures, especially because they've recently changed livestock laws here in the UK. So you can get in some serious bother for sheep worrying. On the flip side of it though, we had one the other day that was going to chin us. I don't know whether I can sue that sheep for trying to beat me and my dogs up, but I don't know. So is your dog reactive to dogs at all? Or purely just humans? Okay, so not reacting to dogs. Okay, fine. So, so it's, it's a similar thing, right? So the dog still needs some sort of clarity, and eventually we've got to build the dog's confidence up slash resilience up. Okay, so if it's only at home, if we were out on the street and I came over to you and I tried to stroke your dog, is that a problem? Or is it purely an indoor thing? In which case, obviously, like, territorial element comes into it a little bit. It may be that the dog just got super comfortable within the home. It's like, hey, this is my home, you, you get the the fuck out of it, in which case I would look at it differently to if it's a dog that's like super anxious and super genuinely super nervous. It's easy to assume that a dog is anxious and nervous, but sometimes it's not, it's not that, it's just like a different contextual thing. But normally, though, probably the preferential approach would be to get the dog really good at play and then get guests to play with the dog. It might be like that you play the triangle game first, so like if you teach chase and catch, you would throw, get the dog back, get the toy, you would throw, get the dog back, get the toy, you would throw, get the dog back, get the toy, then you pass it to me and I throw it and then you rinse and repeat that. So essentially, like, it's probably the best icebreaker. You'd then be a little bit careful as you went into the house over the threshold, because sometimes what you'll get is a dog that feels then comfortable in the garden, but as you cross the threshold into the house, it's literally a signal for the dog to go, oh no, I'm not. And I have heard of people where they've walked in thinking everything was okay, and then the dogs turned around and they said a little pop at someone. So you would be— then you'd almost restart the process again. You can do treat and retreat, so the person can have a little bit of food, they can toss it behind the dog, because what you don't want to do is let someone give the dog food straight away like this, right? I can't reach the camera, but that is quite intimidating. So normally we would kind of toss the food behind the dog, toss the food behind the dog. Okay, now the dog knows I've got food also. And then when you hold it, then at some point usually the dog goes, why the fuck are you throwing it behind me? Why don't I just come and get it out of your hand? In which case, yep, fine, they can do that. But essentially, if the dog's truly nervous and anxious about people in the home, It's kind of strange that they're anxious about that. You can normally— you can get dogs that are territorially defensive in the house with that, but it's weird that they're viewing humans as a different thing in your house. But you'd want to make them more confident, more resilient in general. Play would be the way for that, by and large, but you can do the treat and retreat stuff. Essentially what you need to teach is that the presence of a person brings good things. Presence of the person brings good things, and then you start creating a different association with those visitors, if that makes sense. It kind of depends what your training is built up of, and it depends a little bit on your definition of training. So let's say, for example, we've got a small boot camp this week because we run, um, a training— a dog training trainers program. So we've got smaller boot camp on this week than we have before. But what that means is that we get through more sessions. Yesterday we cut it short because a lot of the dogs were a little bit brain fried, right? Because they'd been— yesterday was the first time they'd faced their triggers. So the first time you present the dog with the trigger and ask the dog to come up with a response and then start giving them clarity of what happens response dependent, it's actually very taxing. There is some info somewhere and I can't remember where I read it, but like dog sessions, learning sessions, like true, like training, 8 to 12 minutes is like optimal learning time. But then outside of that, you could play with the dog. Outside of that, you could have an off lead walk with your dog, right? Depending on what your definition of training actually is, like you can get away with doing very little. So we can get away with probably doing like 1, 2 sessions a day. And you'll make steady consistent progress. It depends on what the content of those sessions is rather than the duration themselves. There is a train of thought that says when she does stuff 100 miles an hour with enthusiasm, you pay anyway even if she's preempting it, and then go back and fix what the, the thing was, right? Because you, you want the dog to have that enthusiasm depending on what you're doing. Like if you're teaching like skill-based stuff, then you would pay those really enthusiastic reps, but then you'd have to go back and fix it. So let's say for for example, me teaching down, but you've taught like a focused heel and the dog slams into the world's best focus heel, you could pay that and then go back and fix your down. At some point you're gonna have to hold them accountable to wherever it is you're trying to teach them though, and that, that's where a little bit of negative reinforcement is necessary because you can fix it in the moment. Whereas if you're only using positive reinforcement, you can only stop the session as the consequence and then try and fix it next time or reinforce it more next time. Whereas negative reinforcement gives you a must-kill. Like if my Malinois Flea breaks his down because I've got my frisbee tucked under my arm, I can tap on the e-collar, he'll go back into his down. I could also use punishment if I know that he knows what he's, um, difference obviously between negative reinforcement and punishment regardless of them both using pressure. It's one of the most difficult ones because you, it's really hard to kind of cue yourself not to give free access because you want to give them the affection, right? What you may have to do is have a rigid— on like a rigid schedule, but like rigid windows of opportunity for them to get affection off you. I've got, um, a little Frenchie, she's a spicy little fucker. If she sat on my knee and one of my other dogs— you may do all of them, but one of my other dogs, my Amstaff, comes over, she could be shitty with her. But if I've invited Cora onto my knee, then if my Amstaff does walk over, I'm like, nah, not right now. And then I'll get rid of Cora at some point and invite Rita over. And if Cora then comes over I'm like, no, not right now, just window. And it does depend on the dogs. Like with other dogs I've got in my household, I don't need to do that. But there's an element of that going on. Then it's like, no, you don't get to decide when you're coming over and being bullish with me. Yeah, I never have a day off. I like to go on little hikes when I get to a new spot. All my dogs are like, oh, fucking amazing. We're in a new place. It's manageable. If it wasn't manageable, if I'm getting multiple dogs out of the van at once, I might stick one in the down so I've got a little bit of management so they're not fucking running off through the car park whilst I'm getting others ready. When I release them from that, because of a lot of anticipation, it sometimes makes the problem worse in terms of their arousal, because being in that fixed position creates loads of anticipation of being released. So if you want them to get a little more accustomed to it, yep, go to more new routes all the time. And then it depends whether that whether that level of arousal is causing problems or whether that level of arousal is just like there for a minute or two and then dissipates. Normally with mine, as soon as we get like 30 seconds to a minute down the trail, they're just like, oh, this is what we're doing, and they settle into just exploring the world around them. So it kind of depends whether it's, um, a problem or not. If it is a problem, you can practice one, going places more often, maybe not even getting out, just so that you driving up to a new place doesn't create like an anticipation of getting out and doing something And then you can also do conditioned relaxation as an adjunct to that because you might be able to gear them down a little bit. You could do that for sure. There's a whole— I think it's Mark McCabe's company in America, I can't remember what it's called, but a lot of their training is based around what they call a behavioral down. But for me, it's just like teaching the dog that it's not all go, go, go, and being able to self-regulate, self-relax. You would want to have done that in easy locations first and then you can apply it out of those locations. There's an advancement to the sit on the lead protocol, which is that conditioned relaxation I've been talking about. There'll be, I'm sure, videos on YouTube of that. But essentially, you start with the sit on the lead part. Once they're good at that, you start adding a collar grab. And this is quite important. So like, in the junk to the vet question, what happens is we go to the vets, we grab the dog by the collar, we stick them on the table, and the dog's like, oh fuck, I know what this means. You can condition that collar grab to mean something else. So we start with a sit on the lead protocol. We get the dog to relax, um, and do a behavioral down like that. Once they do that, okay, okay, we grab the collar and then we basically massage the dog, like, um, rather than like scratching to clean or whatever that might be. It's like nice, smooth, relaxing massage type stroking. What you're after is the dog sitting down without you asking them to sit down. Once they're sat down, what you want them to do is lie down without you asking them to lie down. And then ideally at some point we can also like pull them to the side, which shows like the ultimate relaxation, but also a little bit of acceptance that you sometimes lie on your side and I maneuver you into that position. Once you're at the point when you've practiced it a lot, you grab the collar and the dog goes, ah, I know what we're doing, we're relaxing, you can start putting a word in front of that. And then eventually that word will be tied to the emotion of relaxing. So it's like, uh, you might be able to take a few percent of arousal off of a super hyper-duty dog, if that makes sense. If you genuinely got a nervous, anxious dog, then you can use play to help them get more resilient. So you get them obsessed with the game, and then you make a novel noise. Like, you might, you might even get Helper to do it, but you knock something over, make a noise. Cost to them is losing the toy, and cost to them is like the non-continuation of the game. Next time you do it, you make the same noise. Oh, I don't want to let go because last time it meant the game was over. And then you get the dog to go through a little bit of mental discomfort. When they go through mental discomfort, they develop resilience to stress. A dog that is resilient to stress is less likely to be reactive in any context. One of the things Jacob did with Stark— well, I say one of the things, like, we did all sorts of weird stuff to make him so robust to any kind of stress that when he's put in the situation on the sporting field, like, years later, he's seen it all before. He doesn't care what's going on. All right, you might be motivated by other stuff and maybe make a mistake off the back of that, but those mistakes won't be because he's scared of environmental stuff. It's just not motivated to lie down on an uncomfortable surface, right? So like, if, if you wanted the dog to do it, they've got to be motivated to do it. So if you lure them into a down with food, and that's how you taught it, they'll be motivated by whatever you toy with. So funny story, I'll tell you in a second, but I only teach two things really to my dogs. All right, I have like a requirement of two things. Well, not behavioral things, skill-based stuff. You got a recall when asked to, and you got to lie down when asked to, because with those two things, I could pretty much take him anywhere. I can take him to a cafe, I can take him on a walk. They're pretty much then self-regulating, but they're non-negotiable. So those are the things I've used eCall with, both skills, right? So eCall first for recall, brilliant, fine. Also overlaid it over down. So Mr. Bumble, he's a Frenchie. He is adverse to water, not a big fan of it. I went on a hike once once and I was getting across the stream. One of my dogs, Blue, he just fucking jumped over the stream and I go, fuck, starts running off down the path. I didn't want to lose sight of him, so I shouted down, he lied down. I turned around because I was going to carry Bumble across the stream. He'd started crossing the stream and he'd lie down in the middle of the stream and there's fucking water going over his head. I ended up having to go pick him up. But he's motivated by it because he's had both food reward and he's had pressure to do so through the e-collar. Not terrifying amounts of pressure, like but he's just got to that point where he's like, oh, you say down, I lie down. So like, you teach it with food, but the dog will be as motivated as that food is. And then you can also overlay pressure and/or at the same time so that you've got a must-keep that he does it. Like, okay, well, you have to lie down. And also then lie down on different surfaces because it's not as optional, or you haven't got the— especially if you use direct word. I use lowering a lot, or you have the thing out before you ask for the thing because it's like, well, I know you've Hopefully you don't. I don't even fucking need them. I don't want to lie down on this hard floor for them. All right, uh, what else we got? Fillet steak? Nah, prefer edams for fillet steak anyway. So this is the, the problem with that, right? So problem with indirect— for a problem with direct reward, i.e., luring or bribery, is that the dog knows what you're going to give him for it, or if you haven't got it, they ain't going to do it. So you want indirect reward, i.e., the thing's not out, lie down, maybe I pay you, maybe I don't. Or if I don't, I can compel you to lie down with some sort of pressure, be that lead pressure or e-collar pressure. At some point. Just before I answer the next one, I will reiterate, if you're not already working with us and you like this level of support, Susie will put a link in the chat. There's already been one, but it's probably miles up there somewhere. So you can have a free call and we can discuss with you whether we can help you or not. Training-wise, you can try and make it more difficult at home, i.e., like, you do— you play, you stick him on place, you break him off place, you play again. It might be at some point you've got to give him some sort of consequence if he's wailing and wailing. I don't know what sort of dog it is, but it sounds kind of funny, but also I imagine quite irritating. He's probably just got loads of anticipation of like, well, you're gonna release me and then I'm gonna go and do cool shit. Yeah, but for me, place is lie down. Oh, I don't really Teach place to other people's dogs, not so much my own. But down is lie down wherever you are, and, and that's it. It's not lie down and scream at me. So I would be happy having consequence for that, be that they give reinforcement of like tap on the collar or the lead and just saying, just wind in, mate, we're gonna move on in a minute. Because like what I like to do, as I said before, go on a little hike, sometimes I go for breakfast afterwards. If you can't lie down and be quiet whilst I have breakfast, I think that's a fair ask after we've just been for 10-15K hike or whatever. We'll probably do something later as well. So consequence is fine, so long as you're ticking the dog's boxes around it. Like, if it was just like everything's my way or the highway, then I don't know why you've got a dog. But it sounds to me like you're taking them for a— taking them for a mid-walk, like you're already on the walk, like you're getting— you're getting something out of this, mate. But just don't do that, otherwise we won't come again, and then your life will be terrible. They understand the emotion which you say those words, or the way you convey them. Do a quick countdown and I will evacuate the call. Been some good questions though. Um, obviously if you need further help, further interest, one of those calls, and then we can obviously see if we can help you with a little bit more structure, a little bit more guidance, a little bit more hands-on help. If not, I bid you all farewell.
Look, if you took one thing from today, let it be this: most dog problems aren't actually that complicated once you understand the why behind them. The hard part is cutting through all the rubbish advice out there, right? Come and join our online community. We go live once once a week. You get access to our free Behavior Bible course. And honestly, it's just a really good group of dog owners all working through the same kind of stuff. The link's in the description. Grab it while it's free. Now, if you enjoyed this video, you're gonna love this one right here. And if you want to see how we transform dogs' lives, then watch this one here. Catch you in the next one.
More from Max
How to Charge the 'YES' Marker For Your Dog Training (Terminal Reward Marker Conditioning.
