The Formula We Use to Rehabilitate Reactive Dogs

If you're watching this, you've probably spent countless hours on YouTube. You might have bought Gentle Leaders, tried counterconditioning, and you're still asking yourself the same question. Why is my reactive dog not getting any better? The reason is simple. You're working on the wrong 80%, the symptoms, and ignoring the foundation. And until you understand this foundation, you will keep spinning your wheels. After working with literally thousands of dogs, we've refined our entire process down to just 6 core elements. This isn't a quick fix or new trick. This is the vital 20% of effort that creates 80% of the transformation. It's the simple formula that gets strong, lasting results without crushing your dog's spirit. In this video, I'm gonna take you to the whiteboard of Dog Training Gains, and we're gonna map out the 6 core lessons of our entire system, the exact formula we use to rehabilitate the most reactive dogs. So if you're ready to stop wasting time on temporary fixes and finally focus on the master blueprint that changes everything, then grab a pen and stick around.

I think there's only really 5 or 6 things you need if you want a happy dog. And the first one is telling the dog what they should do more of. So a way to communicate to the dog, what you just did, I really liked it, and I want you to do more of that. Right? So for a lot of us, that's gonna be a terminal marker, a yes, a clicker, or whatever. Now, is this bird gonna fucking kill me? 'Cause I don't know. Right? Every fucking thing out here wants to kill me. I'm like, "Oh, look, magpie," and it fucking— I'm safe with that bird, yeah? Okay. Yeah, just don't go near.

I'm not gonna go fucking near its nest.

So, yeah. We wanted a way to communicate to our dog, "What you just did there was great. I want to see more of it." And that's what was lacking when I was first training dogs. It was telling the dog what they should do, telling the dog what they shouldn't do, but rarely giving them an opportunity to concisely communicate, "Yeah, we need to see more of that." And if we don't have a way to start building behavioral pathways and neural pathways within the dog to do more of what we want, eventually we're gonna start playing behavioural whack-a-mole. I've got no problem with suppression. I've got no problem in some instances telling a dog, "Wind your neck in, do less of that." But with that needs to come opportunity to communicate to the dog, "You need to do this instead." Because of what I was seeing with the dogs that we were previously working with back in the day, a dog is gonna be explorative in their behaviour, and unless we build the path into what they should be doing and we're just cranking them and telling them what they shouldn't be doing, eventually they're gonna keep trying other ways to get their form of expression, and we're gonna just end up trying to take a hammer to absolutely everything, right? So we're very big on, like, showing the dog, "Hey, do more of this." But that's not gonna take us the whole nine yards, and sometimes we need to know, "Do less of that," right? So second thing we look at is, "What you just did there, I need to see less of that." and we look at punishment in order to deter the dog. Now I had a personal problem with punishment, given the training background I come from, where I saw a lot of it, and I saw a lot of punishment not done very well. And I'm sure we'll look at it this weekend. And what that was creating is a dog that was hesitant, a dog that didn't want to do everything, a dog that the force-free side would say that he's got learned helplessness and he shut down and so on and so forth. And so So, when we did change our methodology as we opened the Yorkshire Canine Academy, we kind of weren't doing much of this because of my exposure to punishment wasn't effective punishment, it wasn't fair punishment, it wasn't ethical punishment. But we do things slightly different nowadays and I think the method we put in place in order to concisely communicate to a dog that you shouldn't do that is way fairer and more effective than what we were seeing with previous methods. And so we've got a way to start communicating to a dog. Yes, no, do lots of that, do less of that. And we really wanna be thinking about setting up the environment for the dog where the scales are much more over here than they are over here. Again, I don't have a problem with suppressing a dog to say you're not allowed to eat that turkey or the other dog or people or whatever, but I need you to do this instead. Alright, the next one would be play. And we put a very heavy emphasis on play working at the Yorkshire Canine Academy because chances are, if your dog has come to us or your dog is here this weekend, they are getting a form of expression through their reactivity. Our dogs, especially our working dogs, our higher drive dogs, when they go into that state of reactivity, they're expressing themselves at like full capacity. And we see a lot with pet dogs, they have very, very limited opportunity where they can express themselves at that full capacity. And so if we look at sport and protection dogs, couple of times a week, we're going to club, we're allowing the dogs to do what Mother Nature has put them on planet Earth to do, and that's absolutely lose their heads. And albeit with a pet dog, we don't have to go and teach them to bite things, but we do want to give them a form of expression, and doing that through play is probably the most constructive way to do that. Because like I said before, at some point we're probably going to have to suppress some behaviors, and as dog trainers, we shouldn't be scared of that word suppression. A lot of the time we do suppress behaviors, and that's only really going to create problems if we don't give expression and show the dog, hey, don't lose your head here, but over here you can go into fifth gear, you can absolutely lose your shit. And when we then come back to showing the dog the picture that they were previously getting expression out of, they're going to be much more comfortable with accepting, oh, I understand, I'm not supposed to do that. And they'll, there'll be a much clearer picture for them because they're like, I've already had my— I've already filled my boots over here. So that's super important. And so we'll probably have a big emphasis on play this weekend, making sure that when we are communicating to the dogs, hey, I want to see less of this, but you can do this, right? And play isn't about just throwing a ball willy-nilly. Realistically, within our game that we play with the dog, there needs to be all the core ingredients of the reaction. So a little bit of fight in there, a little bit of negative reinforcement, a little bit of fear in some instances. And I know I've used some strong words there, but hopefully that'll make sense when we go on to playing with the dogs this weekend. So really making sure that they have that expression, because suppression without expression is going to create issues with your dogs, right? And again, once upon a time, training dogs the way I was showed to initially train dogs, we weren't doing any play. There was no food involved. There was no, there was no tug involved or anything like that. It was purely just telling the dogs what they weren't allowed to do. And what I was seeing time and time again, 2-month mark, 3-month mark, these reactive behaviors were coming back with a vengeance because we were just bottlenecking the dog and really like creating a cold spring. And so there are some arguments that are presented by the force-free community that do have, that do have legs, that it has valid validity, and they're things we need to be super conscious of as dog trainers, making sure that we're not creating problems later on down the line, right? So play is going to be the next one. The next one I'm going to say is fundamental obedience. And for me, that's predominantly a loose lead walk. The main benefits for a loose lead walk are going to be getting a dog from A to B as safely as possible without disruption to those around us, and two, making sure that our dog is in the correct frame of mind or gear when they're exposed to potential triggers while we are moving from A to B. For me, a loose lead walk is never going to fulfill a dog whether it's a Chihuahua, a Herder, a Doberman, or anything in between, a loose lead walk isn't there to exercise our dogs. It's just there as a tool to get us from A to B to then go on to exercise our dogs, whether it's let them off leash or play with them, do some scent work, whatever. Number 5 would be off leash. I'm a keen advocate for the e-collar because I truly do believe that the e-collar allows us to get our dog off lead as quick as possible, as we possibly can. Again, people are going to argue it's a quick fix. I would argue, when, since when has quick been a bad thing, right? And so pretty much all the dogs come through, that come through our program are e-collar trained for the main reason to get them off leash as quick as possible so they can start finding new hobbies. If your dog's reactive, they've got a really bad hobby, a really unhealthy hobby, a really unhealthy addiction in many instances. And so being able to enable our dogs to have off-leash freedom allows them to find new hobbies within the environment. So the quicker we do that, the easier everything else is going to be. Again, when I used— how I used to train dogs was the dog was taught via the curriculum loose lead walking first, then a sit, then a down, and if he couldn't do any of those things, he doesn't deserve the right to be off leash. And then we very quickly flip the script when we started training dogs differently at the YCA. And we actually aim for to get the dog off leash first. Main rationale was making sure that dog was fulfilled. If you got a fulfilled dog, making behavior change becomes exponentially easier, right? And so again, I was never taught how to use e-collars because of the place I worked for, very compulsion-based, slip leashes only, no food, no toys, no real tools, no prongs, no e-collars. And it made gaining that off-leash reliability very, very difficult, especially when you're not— you've not got the ability to reinforce the dog properly when it comes back. And then conversely, we don't have the reliability component of the e-collar. And so these aren't something we really teach in order. I mean, we're always going to start here, but these aren't something that are going in like priority. These are just boxes we want to take, and it's more so of a puzzle than it is like a pyramid or priority list. And then finally, we've got a settle. A way to teach our dog, calm down, I need you down here, right? Some dogs, they don't come, or many a dog, they don't come pre-programmed with the ability to settle and to control their arousal and manage their own arousal. And they're just gonna wanna be up here all day, every day, especially like our higher breed working dogs. And so, Sometimes we have to invest a little bit of effort in order to teach them how to regulate themselves and come down in the gears. And that's gonna be useful inside the home. It's gonna be useful in terms of teaching the dog how to recover from our training sessions. And if you wanna take the dog out and about to a, a cafe or a pub, that's gonna be practically useful there, right? And so these are the boxes I'd be ticking. Notice there's no sit there. There's no flashy obedience. There's no stays or waits or anything like that. I'm a big proponent of the 80/20 rule. Work in a dog, 20% of your input will bring about 80% of the results. And so I see this as the very important 20%. Double down your efforts on this 20%, and I promise you, you will garner much more effective results, longer-lasting results, happier dogs, and so on and so forth. Of course, like, we're going to throw in little bits here and there, and I see them as supplements to the core components. But more often than not, we nail these these 6 things, you're gonna have a great dog. And people always ask me, what about resource guarding? What about separation anxiety? What about really nuanced issues? Well, let's use resource guarding as an example. If I've got a dog that understands yes, I got a dog that understands don't fucking do that, I got a dog through the means of play that can relinquish things of high value, I've got a dog that will disengage from things of high value with my loose lead walk, I've got a dog that will disengage from things of high value whilst at liberty, and I've got a dog that can manage his arousal, chances are I don't have to directly tackle the resource guarding because once I've ticked these boxes, that's all gonna go away anyway. Or the dog sits over the item, I say, "Out," I say, "Come here," I say, "Settle down," and job's a good'un, right? And so this is why we're gonna put a massive emphasis on these components over the next couple of days. And hopefully start talking about ways we can implement them within our programs and see kind of things come into action with the dogs that we're going to be working with. If you have a reactive dog and you feel like you've tried absolutely everything, then I've just put together a free training that hopefully will be able to help you and maybe the confusion you're experiencing right now surfing the internet looking for magic wand, looking for the golden goose, looking for the solution, the be-all and end-all solution. I think I've got it. The reason I think I've got it is because if it's been tried and tested over thousands of dogs over the last couple of years, and I've just put it together in a free training for you guys. So if you click the link in the description, you'll be able to hop on, watch the video. If you've got any questions, you let me know. I'll see you in there.

So yeah, that video there covers what you should do, but there's a couple of things and a couple of mistakes you might be making on day-to-day basis that means your dog's reactivity will never get solved, or even worse, actually sending you backwards. So if you want to see what those 5 things are, click this video right here, and we'll see you in there.