Thresholds Explained: How Close Is Too Close for Your Reactive Dog?

Hello, dog peeps. Jack here. Just a quick one before we get into this episode. You may or may not be aware that when I'm not talking dog stuff with Max, I in fact interview people who are incarcerated in prisons across the United States on a show called One Minute Remaining Stories from the Inmates. And that show has been nominated for an award in America. And I would love your support if you've got 60 seconds to click the link in the show notes of this episode and just vote for my show. That would be amazing if you could. Thank you very much indeed. Oh, and don't forget to verify your email address. Otherwise, the vote does not count. Thank you.

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It's the Dog People Podcast with your host Jack Lawrence.

Secretly, I decided to start this podcast for some free dog training advice. You know, Malinois seem to be like the dog at the moment. Like, I think people see them on Instagram doing these incredible things. Yeah. Go, oh my God, that's awesome. And then they get one like, oh my God, what the fuck have I done?

And Max O'Neill.

You would not believe how many people I meet And I go, what made you want to get, say, an Aussie Shepherd? They go, I don't know. And I go, had you met one before? They go, no. If you want to ask me how often I walk my own dog a week, it's only twice a week.

It's the Dog People Podcast, the podcast hopefully giving you a no-nonsense approach to dog training so you never have to shout, it's okay, he's friendly. My name's Jack Lawrence, Max O'Neill, Down Under Dog Trainer. Of course, we are here all because of our friends at Nose, the multi-award-winning Australian pet insurance company built to help pet parents staying informed and supported Throughout your pet's life. You can get more details at nose.com.au. That's K-N-O-S-E.com.au, issued by Pacific International Insurance. We are on our little journey of reactivity. Of course, as we've stated before, it's a, it's a, it's a big topic. There's a lot of discussion to be had around reactivity, different types of reactivity. Last week we spoke about trigger stacking, but this time we're talking thresholds, Max.

Yeah. So again, another super relevant topic and one we see some misinformation with, or not enough nuance and explanation with. And, uh, one thing when you— another thing we like when you really, really understand this topic well, and it's a pretty easy one to wrap your head around, uh, it can really improve your results and your approach to your training. So when we're talking threshold, we're basically talking like, you know, I'm referring into terms of our dog's distance threshold. How close can they be to another dog before they have their blowup? And most trainers, the way I see this explained, they'll go, oh, is a dog above or below threshold? And looking at it in that very binary above or below, I find misses a whole little thing that I look at, whereas there's that sort of nuance. There's this little area in the middle where it's actually kind of our sweet spot. The way I think of our dog's threshold is having either a green, a yellow, or a red zone. Okay. So our red zone is pretty obvious. That's the point where your dog's reaction that is uncontrollable. If a dog gets within our dog's red zone, They blow up. Now I see some dogs with very small red zones. It takes a dog getting right up close to them before they go, hey, get out of my space, and they react. I see other dogs that have like a 50-meter large red zone where if you know there's a dog within sight, they're absolutely losing their shit. And our whole aim is to reduce the size of that so it's very hard to push our dogs' buttons and they're much more tolerant. They don't have a red zone anymore. Okay, our dogs' yellow zone. Is where our dog is aware of the other dog. We're starting to see some like preliminary sort of cues where they may be fixating, stiffened body language, you know, ears forward, you know, things like that. Maybe the tail stops wagging, the jaw closes, everything sort of seizes up. And that's when our dog's in their yellow zone. They're still in control. They might still be able to listen well, might still have a food drive. They can still be obedient. They can still choose not to react, but we're right below that that red zone. And that's why I don't like the whole above or below threshold thing, because this yellow zone, we wouldn't say they're fully above threshold, but they're not completely below it. And this is kind of the sweet spot with our training, is we want to expose our dog to a healthy amount of stress or a controlled exposure to their trigger where it's above what they're currently comfortable with but not enough to prompt a reaction. If we just keep throwing our dog in the red zone, that red zone will just grow and get bigger and bigger and bigger because our dog's rehearsing the behaviour. But also, if we just spend all our time in what we'll refer to now as our green zone, our third zone, where our dog can see a dog and has no stress whatsoever, clients who spend too long there never actually improve. So I'll see a lot of people who go, how last trainer said to do this, stick on the other side of the football field, pay, pay, pay, pay, pay our dog. And we've been doing that. Our dog's able to switch off, but we can't get any closer. And that's just because we're not really doing proper exposure therapy. We're not, you know, you can Doing progressive overload and gradually making this trickier for our dog. We're just sticking at the same thing forever. And if it's your dog's green zone, if they already feel safe there, great. Our green zone plays a role. Our green zone is where we want to retreat to, to like let our dogs cool down, decompress, like when we spoke about trigger stacking last week. And that's how that kind of ties in. So we always say to clients, like, your red zone, you want to avoid entirely. You want to use green zone as like your base to like return your dog to baseline and let them calm. And then we want to venture into our yellow zone, do some exposure training, do some work. Hey, look, there's some dogs. Oh, that's a bit scary. Or that's a bit— that's a lot for me to handle. You know, do some stuff and then return to our green zone. Let them decompress. And what we should notice is we can get deeper and deeper and deeper into that yellow zone and our dogs will be able to handle it. And what we're really trying to do is reduce the size of our red zone and increase the size of our green zone. We want our dog to be able to switch off and feel totally safe and calm and neutral, no matter how close they are to other dogs. So when we know we're in the green zone is where our dog can see a dog, they can actively look away, actively turn their body away, maybe lay down, switch off, and show complete disinterest. That's when we're in our green zone. And for some dogs, they don't have a green zone at the minute. Some people might say, oh, if we could see a dog 200 metres away where they're a speck in the horizon. And my dog won't be able to switch off. And that's reality for some people. And other dogs, it'll be just a, you know, it'll take time. You know, it'll be a really— had to be really far away for that to happen. But our goal is to create that green zone where they can be around dogs and then just get them closer, closer, closer, closer until they can happily switch off with a dog in the vicinity.

Is an important part of this, obviously, like with everything we do with dogs, is patience and not to rush these things, because if you push that Zone too soon, too quickly, you could send yourself all the way back again to the beginning.

Exactly.

I mean, and that's why I think it's always important with something like that to get someone like yourself involved because it is tricky and you don't want to mess it up.

Exactly. It can be really hard to spot this nuance. And sometimes even when I'm pointing it out to clients in real time going, hey, see, that's how we know we're in the yellow zone. See that with their ears or their tail or whatever, whatever they go, they're just not seeing it. And if that's the case, that's cool. There's nothing wrong. But that's the time to bring someone in. If you're really struggling to see these little sort of nuances, if you're struggling to Notice when your dog's trigger stacking and a change in body language. If you're noticing— not noticing a change in your dog's demeanour based on where they are, which zone they're in, that's definitely the time to bring someone out because this can be tricky stuff to navigate. And like Jack said, is you don't just want to accidentally make things worse, or you don't want to waste a year where your dog's reactive for any longer than they need to be because we've kind of just not pushed and we've not known how to. But this is a really important one to understand. So You know, the next time you hear above or below threshold, kind of just push that to the side. That's just a very simplistic way of looking at it and does our dogs a lot of disservice. The way a lot more people are talking about it now is our green, yellow, red zone, or, you know, those 3 sort of zones. And understanding red zone, avoid altogether. Green zone is your home base, and we want to dip into our yellow zone. So I always think of it like the example I give to clients is Imagine if you had someone that's fearful of water. Our green zone is sitting on the edge where we're like, cool, I can touch the ground, I'm safe here. Our red zone is the deep end where our feet can't touch, it's way too much right now. Our yellow zone is sort of dipping into like our waist or chest where we're like, okay, that was enough, I'm going to swim back to the step and catch my breath. That's essentially how we think of it.

So obviously when people are doing any of this sort of stuff and they're trying to— so, you know, they're doing the, the red Orange, green zones.

When they're going into these zones, they also have to have already put into place things like markers, rewards, all that sort of stuff, because it's not a case of, okay, we're going to go out there now, find some dogs, and I'm just going to slowly creep towards dog and we'll just do that every day gradually until we can get closer. I mean, the dog needs to be rewarded for the behaviour that we want to see.

Yeah, exactly. We still got to have a bit of a game plan in terms of what do we do when we go there? Yeah. And that's, you know, in terms of specific advice there, it's a little bit tricky because Because there's different types of activity. Every dog's different. If you've got an idea of like, cool, thanks, I know what to do now, I know what to do when I'm there, I just didn't know how close I should go.

Yeah,

then go with it. But if you're kind of sitting there going, oh, okay, like, this makes sense to me, but when I get there, I'm not fully sure what to do, that's probably the best time to bring out someone.

Yeah.

And like I said, it's a bit tough to give advice like this over the air because I could say something where you call me next week and go, hey, things are better already. Or you could call me up and go, hey, like, you've made things worse because, you know, depending on their type of activity and things like that.

Case by case basis.

Case by case basis is the best way to put it.

Exactly. All right. Well, as always, if you've got any questions in regards to any of this, we're doing our little reactivity sort of series. So if we haven't touched on anything to do with, you know, your dog and its reactivity, I'm sure we will get to it. But if you've got a question, The Dog People Podcast on Facebook or Instagram, we'll catch you on the next one. The Dog People Podcast is a Mashed Pumpkin production hosted by Jack Lawrence and Max O'Neill. Edited, produced, and audio production by Jack Lawrence.

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