You've heard of Fight or Flight and maybe Freeze, but did you know there are actually 5 F's that dogs can exhibit under stress? Join us for an interesting conversation on working with reactive dogs!
Transcription
Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today I have Karen Deeds here with me to talk about advanced reactive integration in the real world. Hi Karen. Welcome back to the podcast!
Karen Deeds: It's always great to talk with you, Melissa, always.
Melissa Breau: Likewise. To start us out, you want to just remind listeners a little bit about you and your current canine crew.
Karen Deeds: We're down to eight dogs, one cat, the biggest. My dogs, I would say. I have a previous project dog. That's my border collie, Dempsey and he definitely fell into the category of reactive when I first got him. He had some mainly some focus towards people, especially me, which was not always fun.
Of course. My Labrador, he's about as perfect as it gets. So there's no behavior problems there other than he's a goof boy and I love him for that. That's why I got him because I was tired of all these project dogs because I deal with them all the time.
Melissa Breau: So. Awesome. Alright, so as I mentioned in the intro, we're going to talk about advanced reactive integration stuff. So I want to start maybe by talking about kind of those five f's.
I think people are probably familiar with the idea of flight and freeze, but they might be a little surprised that those aren't the only options. Right. Can you kind of talk us through the full list, what we're talking about when we say the five f's and they look like basically it's fight, which like you said, that's typically what we recognize as a reactive dog being is the barky lungy fight mode.
Karenn Deeds: Flight is those dogs that would prefer to run away. Flight. Freeze is actually the third one, which is the dogs that are like deer in the headlights, I can't move kind of sort of thing. That's also a reaction. Fidgety is one that people don't recognize. It's those dogs that just can't keep their feet still or they're spinning or they're circling. I think you might see this a lot when the dog is pushed beyond their stress limit and they're over aroused.
You might see that in the sport world as the dog that is doing the frenetic activity in the agility ring. Right. They're doing the zoomies. That might be something that I would call fidgeting. And the most common one that I deal with other than reactivity, barky lungy stuff is what I would call Fawning. And that's something that people really misinterpret. And that's the dog that's really grovelly, right.
They're the ones that are licky, kissy, squinty eyed, head low. Heck, I can't even talk about it without doing it myself. You know, they're, they're, they're wimpy looking. And I. A lot of people really, really think that their dog is, oh, they love me, they're kissing me. And, you know, in, in some circles, we call that the kiss to dismiss. But when I see that dog that's overly grovelly or fawny, that's also a sign of stress.
Melissa Breau: So I think it's really important for us to recognize that those dogs are also having a problem. And, you know, so we need to address that as, just as much as we do the dog that is Barbara and lunging or trying to run away. So for those dogs that exhibit one of these, you know, one of the five f's, do most dogs kind of default to the same option most of the time? Do we tend to see maybe different defaults in different situations? How does that work?
Karen Deeds: It's going to depend a lot on the situation. You know, the fight response, especially when the, it can come from fear, which is a common one. And it's kind of important for us to understand the function behind one of those five f's. Many times it comes from fear, but sometimes it's frustration. And that's where the fidgety stuff comes from.
But it can escalate. The fidgety dogs can escalate into fight if punishment is applied or if there isn't enough clarity about what we want the dog to do. Instead, frustration leads to anger, and anger leads to aggression. For example, I had a little Frenchie here recently that wasn't overtly aggressive, barky, lungy. But if he got frustrated and a lot of his was what I think we might call, what we used to call dominance aggression or conflict aggression, basically, he would like, I want this and I want it now, and he would have this little temper tantrum.
And if he didn't get his way, then, oh, honey, bar the door. He'd be biting at my feet, biting at my hands, biting at my shorts, whatever. And so his frustration, he, it really ticked him off, and then that led into aggression. So in those situations, that's where he went. But in some situations, he would go, you know what? I'm just out of here. So it just depends on the situation.
The context of where the dog is mentally as well as physically. Restraint was definitely not his friend, and certainly that wasn't my Border Collie's friend either. He ingested both of them, turned to fight in that situation. And so creating a very predictable structure around the way we handle those dogs was very helpful.
Melissa Breau: So I guess kind of, regardless of how the dog handles stress, I think people kind of hear the advice, you know, we need to work on building their confidence. Can you talk about why that is, how that factors in here?
Karen Deeds: Well, building confidence is certainly beneficial, but that can come in a variety of ways in and of itself, creating predictability in their life and how you interact with the dog on a day to day basis, how the dog interacts with the environment, that can all be a part of confidence and, of course, building resiliency, decompression, allowing for them to de stress completely, along with providing social support.
And that might come from other dogs, your personal encouragement, even petting, building confidence. You need to provide a place for them to feel safe. It's funny how. And I've got a little dog here now, a little border collie, who, when I took her in, she's an owner surrendered rescue group took her in, and I evaluated her at the owner's house, and she was very shut down. She'd had a lot of training previously that wasn't overly kind, and she really just didn't feel safe.
So when I brought her to my house, I kept her very quiet, kept everybody away. She was very fearful of dogs, cats, pretty much the entire environment. So just allowing her to decompress, I'd sit out on the porch with her. If she chose to come up with me, I'd let her feel welcome to do that, but she didn't have to do that. So I took all the pressure off of her and allowed her just to kind of take a breath.
It took about two weeks for her to finally go, okay, I'm feeling better now, and I can eat. And then, of course, now I'm just now really starting to do any kind of training because I started to build reinforcement strategies. But during that training, I allow her to make choices, and I'm just basically shaping the good choices and hopefully setting up the environment so that she can make good choices.
And, of course, building confidence. Sometimes that is even allowing the use of pharmaceuticals. And, you know, some dogs need a little bit of help. And I think it's very important that you have a good veterinarian on board. If you have access to a veterinary behaviorist or at least a veterinarian who understands a little bit about behavior, that would be helpful. Sadly, those are in high demand. My goodness.
So it's also nice to have somebody who understands behavior because there's a huge difference between training and behavior. I mean, this isn't about obedience training. I mean, in fact, I look at what my curriculum is, and I would probably say there's five, maybe five trained skills that I normally teach. A regular reactive dog offered eye contact, a hand target offered sit or calm behavior. It doesn't matter if it's a sit or a stand or lay down.
And I do teach a settle. So those are some of the things that I teach as far as skills, but it's not sit down, stay calm, because I'm not going to use those things to mask or suppress the behavior I don't want. So, you know, so, like, for this little Raya, this little border Collie that I have, I've done a lot of just gradual exposure to nothing, novel stimuli so that she can build her own confidence.
And if she wants to leave, she gets to leave. She wants to come back, she gets to come back. And just walking her around my five acres has allowed her to sniff and explore. You can just literally see her mind become at ease. Her tail comes up, she's sniffing. Pretty soon she's looking back at me tail wagging. And it's just been so cool to watch her own confidence exude from within herself and not be forced. So it's kind of a cool process, but it does take time.
Melissa Breau: Yeah. So you mentioned the skills in there, and I think a lot of the times when we're working with reactive dogs, right. And certainly correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like there's kind of the teach the skills phase, right. Part of the process. There's kind of this management piece that gets layered in there, sometimes in parallel, sometimes not in parallel, just depending on the dog.
That piece of the process focused on avoiding the unwanted behaviors and then an application part of the process where we start to actually talk about going out into the real world and applying those new skills. When we're talking about teaching the skills, can you talk about which methodologies you tend to look to or rely on? And maybe why?
Karen DeedsL I know there are so many options out there when it comes to reactivity, and there is, and that's why I kind of call it integration, because I do integrate a lot of different concepts.
They're all based on positive reinforcement or all. They all come from that, and I build on that. But a big piece of it is that what we call the antecedent arrangement management, basically, you know, get the alcoholic out of the bar. I mean, this poor little dog that I'm talking about, this little border collie, lived in a home that was all windows in the front of the house.
They're biggest. Their door was all windows, and she was looking out the door and she was barking at every dog that went by. So they had employed a lot of don't bark, you know, correction, don't bark. Correction. And of course, now she was pretty much terrified of the people in the house as well as everything around it. And when I was there to evaluate her, we were actually at the front door, which is all glass, and I had just started dropping some treats on the floor.
And she's like, oh, hey, this is pretty cool. This lady's not going to do anything to me that I don't like. And about that time, a gentleman was walking by with his pug, and the owner of the dog said, oh, this will be fun. And she looked out the window and you could kind of see her tense up. And I just dropped a handful of food on the top of her head and she went, oh, hey, cool.
And she started to eat the food. And what I realized is this dog has probably been like the alcoholic at the bar. She has been practicing barking at other dogs, and they've been leaving because they've been walking by her house. So setting that up so that she didn't have to bark at other dogs or feel the need to bark at other dogs was the first and foremost things that I did.
And then I start to build trust. I sit on the porch, love on her a little bit, bring out the toys, bring out the food, play chase games with her, and then I will try to create some predictability, change the emotional state, teach good alternative behaviors. And, of course, since agency is part of that confidence building, we want skills that have been trained without conflict or without, or with suppression.
So it's. It is an integrated process in that we have to get them into a different mindset, and that's hard, especially somebody living in an apartment, somebody living in the city, especially intra housemate dog aggression issues. And that's really not what we're going to cover in this, in this class, but it is certainly something that I think would benefit from having a class. But for there's a lot of things that we can do within your own home or your own yard to help build that confidence.
Of course, we're going to reinforce their emotional state. We're going to change their emotional state as much as we can. And I really find that the multiple marker system or the location specific marker cues. Thank you. Shade has been very, very helpful for building that clarity that some dogs need as well as just the ability to change their emotional state. I mean, this is a little border collie.
She likes to chase things. So when I toss a treat, she goes, whoa, that was so much fun. So immediately her emotional state is like, this is a lot of fun versus. Yeah, I'm not so sure I want to come take food out of your hand because hands haven't been so good to me in the past. So for now, I'm not doing a lot of that. So it's It's really a matter of looking at the dog in front of you and going, okay, what will work for this dog? And that's what I like about any of the in the handler choice type classes. The one that I'm going to be teaching is going to be very specific to each individual. So, you know, while we work on these skills, we can build confidence in the house. We can create predictability there.
And then what we can do is we can start taking that and adding pressure even within the home. So there's a lot of things that we can do before we ever go outside. Granted, when we're in the apartment or the city, does it make things more difficult?
Melissa Breau: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, yeah, so, you know, while we're kind of building those skills or working on those skills or kind of covering what we can, you know, we can't just ignore our dog's needs, of course. Right. So a lot of times that means we still need to take them out and about. We still need to navigate the real world. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, kind of meeting our dog's needs while we're working through a behavior program and maybe, you know, what management out and about might look like.
Karen Deeds: I do a lot of food puzzles, sniffing, even just teaching tricks, shaping games like the Vito game, or even teaching targeting.
Go to something. I mean, really just sniffing and licking can be calming. Hunting for their normal daily ration, training for their normal daily ration can be helpful. I never want to deprive a dog of food, and I don't make them work for all of their food by any means. But out and about, man, that's where we have to have some of those protocols, so to speak, in place.
The emergency u turn, a body block, you know, get them out of dodge, transport, you need to maybe have to drive them to a less populated area sniff spots are a big thing, at least in some areas. I have a couple of students of mine that I think she takes her dogs to a stiff spot at least five days a week and they get to go sniffing and exploring.
Boy, you know, if I die, I want to grow up to be one of her dogs, that's for sure. Because she really, she allows for all of that. And I think that's what makes her household work because she puts a lot of effort into it and she avoids a lot of the conflict as well as all the training that she's put into it. But it is a difficult proposition.
And that's why when we're dealing with dogs in an environment that is beyond our control, we have to employ, you know, covering the windows, white noise and again, getting pharmaceuticals on board to help with the situation. Lots of decompression work as much as you can, relaxation work, making sure that their physical and mental needs are met. All of that stuff is really important.
Melissa Breau: Once we've kind of covered the skills they need, can you talk a little bit about how we kind of transition from working on those skills in the house to actually taking them out into ever more kind of real world situations?
Karen Deeds: Sure. Slowly but seriously, what I tend to do is I start to create games at home. For example, let's look at the emergency U turn. You put your dog's favorite toy or a bowl of canned food in front of them 10ft, and they see you put it down there and can you say, uh oh, and turn around and run away from that? Will they respond to that cue when their favorite toy or their favorite bunch of food is in front of them?
So I'm adding distractions that I can control and then once I've done that and utilize something that the dog wants in a good way, I might start adding in something like, okay, well, there's the scary vacuum. Can you do a U turn around that? And then not only can you do an emergency protocol around that, but can you do some of the skills? Can you, can we do the pattern games around a full food bowl or can you do a hand target around a full food bowl?
Can you do a settle while I'm throwing food around as a slight distraction? And so I start to implement distractions within a controlled setting because I know when things, when we go outside, it's, you know, honey, bar the door. What, whatever's going to happen is going to happen. And we try to do as careful of setups as we can. But I like to have some generalization at home first.
Melissa Breau: So, as you mentioned, you do have a class on this stuff coming up in October. Do you want to share a little more about kind of what you'll cover and maybe who might be interested in joining you?
Karen Deeds: Sure. If anybody has taken my reactive integration classes thus far, whether it's through FDSA or in person or during COVID I started it online through Facebook. You're going to be familiar with the material, and in fact, you're going to be familiar with a lot of the material because it's pretty common knowledge in a lot of behavior work.
The first thing we have to do is identify what our problem is, and sometimes that's more difficult than you would think. For example, like the little Frenchie, you know, his issue wasn't that he's a bad dog. He just gets really frustrated easily. And so we just had to break things down really simply for him and show him that, yep, you can do it right. You can do it right.
You can do it right. You can do it right. You can do it right. And he's go, oh, is this all you wanted me to do? Cool. I don't have to bite your hand or your ankles. Got it. So we need to identify that function of the behavior that we're trying to change and then, of course, implement those management strategies. And then we have to teach reinforcement strategies.
Food, toys, personal play, and all of that can certainly help with changing emotional state. We have to make sure we have physical and mental stimulation. So all of that stuff is going to be part of the plan. And then I want to teach the dogs how to offer and think, and all dogs know how to think, but we want them to think good thoughts and we want them to think of ways to get what they want.
And that's going to help build confidence, because being right builds confidence. The more right you are about things, you just kind of pat yourself on the back and go, see, I knew that. And it's affirmation, right? And the more that we can set up our dog to make good choices and to have a good result and be correct more, the more confident they'll become. Of course, we're going to use those reinforcement strategies to change emotions and to teach the skills, skills.
Predictability is part of that, and that's predictability of reinforcement, using those location specific markers as well as predictability within their environment. Again, this kind of goes back to knowing how to be right. And if I know, if the dog knows what to be, what to do to get what they want, all of a sudden they go, I got it. This is what I do. This is what I get.
And knowledge is power, and power increases confidence, and confidence reduces anxiety. So we look at that predictable structure, and this is even part of the resiliency rainbow is creating predictability. And then, of course, we do the real work of behavior modification, which is applying classical counter conditioning, desensitization and counter conditioning along with differential reinforcement. I did a webinar not that long ago about differential reinforcement, and it was probably one of my funnest webinars that I did.
It was, it was kind of a deep dive into science in applied behavior analysis. But I think there's some really good things that we can get out of differential reinforcement. You know, what do you want the dog to do instead? So I want to change emotion as well as teach them an appropriate behavior to do instead. And that's pretty much what we're doing with all types of behavior problems, whether it's reactivity or just, you know, counter surfing.
What do you want them to do instead? You know, I want them to lay here on the floor in the kitchen instead of get up on the counter. So, you know, all of that is about teaching the dogs what to do instead of. But we really want to focus on how they feel about doing it.
Melissa Breau: Can you talk a bit about what folks might need to be prepared for in terms of setups? Any tips or ideas for, like, arranging a setup that doesn't require a ton of organizing with other people and their dogs?
Karen Deeds: Yeah, you need to do your homework about your, your community, perhaps, or your environment, where you want, what your goals are. Let's identify what some goals are and see if we can't set up some similar situations. And it is going to take some setups, and that's what makes it hard.
You have to have those emergency protocols when things go bad, but we can also work with things at home to generalize those situations so that when you are in them live, you have a history. Not only does the dog know what to do, you have to know what to do. And he's like, oh, my God. You know, I've even had, I had one client that I'm working with right now.
They have a lot of stray cats in their neighborhood, and they want to take their dog for a walk. And so I have, one of the partners is upstairs and the other one is downstairs, and the one upstairs will occasionally, like, throw a stuffed toy in front of the dog, and while they're working downstairs, and the handler, the one who's handling the dog, has to make a split second reaction of okay, what do we do in this situation?
So you can practice some of those things. You know, being single poses some problems, but, you know, you can go to parking lots, go to the end of a parking lot at Lowe's or Home Depot. I did that when I got Dempsey. I spent a lot of time sitting in my car with a hatch open with him, watching people go by. And, you know, I really didn't do a whole lot of behavior mod to start with, other than with me.
But he just, he'd never seen the outside world. He'd lived in a ten foot by ten foot pen for the first ten months of his life, and he was like, I have never seen a stroller before. I had never seen other people. I'd never seen an umbrella. Hell, he'd never seen anything. So for him, just sitting there watching the world go by was fascinating and probably pretty alarming for him.
So I did a lot of that. You can go to trails where you know that, you know, you can pull over to the side again, you need to scout out these places before you go. Dog parks, obviously not in the dog park if you have a dog issue, but you can. I'm thinking of some of the bigger dog parks that I know of back in Texas, and there was one that had a huge parking lot.
I used to visit that one a lot, and we would work with dog to dog issues and use the dogs that are in the bar in the dog park. They didn't know we were out there, but the dog we were working with certainly did. And again, like I say, you can even do some of this stuff at your sniff spots. Drive to a new place. You can practice some of this stuff in a novel environment.
I find that construction places, like a new subdivision that's going in doesn't have a lot of people yet, doesn't have a lot of dogs or any. Those are great places to go practice. You might see some workers. They're going to leave you alone for the most part. So those are some good places to do some setups, but sadly, it is what it is, and we have to eventually put them into the real world situation if you have to, and if that's what you're willing to work through.
I have so many clients that are like, you mean I don't have to take my dog for a walk every day? Like, well, not if your dog is terrified of going for a walk every day. I don't think that it's really a good thing to force your dog to do that. And so when they start creating new things to do at home. Their dog is so much less stressed.
Their gut gets better, their skin gets better. All of a sudden, they're like, oh, my God. I had no idea that I could just, like, my dog wanted to be a couch potato. I thought they wanted to, like, go for a three mile walk every day, even though they were barking and lunging the entire time or hitting the end of the leash, trying to get back home. You know, sometimes it's okay to not put your dog into situations where they're not, where they don't want to be. And that's a hard one for people to accept. Yeah, I could see that.
Melissa Breau: Now, I know this is a, you know, an advanced class. Can you talk a little bit about prerequisites? What do people need to know before they. Before they sign up?
Karen Deeds: If anybody has done any work with what I'm going to say as a positive reinforcement trainer on reactivity, you're probably going to be familiar with a lot of the stuff that's in this class, but if you haven't and if you're new to it, all of that information will still be there.
I'm basically going to do a, you know, a big, big burp of everything we're going to work on. Kind of like what you, what you did, Melissa, in your treibball class is I'm basically going to release everything the first day as much as I can, get it uploaded as quickly as possible. And those people that need help on, let's say, what was my week? Five. That's where we might start.
But if somebody's starting at the beginning, we start at the beginning. And so the information will be there. It just won't be, you know, little, it won't be bled to you drop by drop. You're going to get the whole, the whole gallon of blood there. So they're going to get it all in one big fell swoop, but it will be organized so that you can follow from step one to two to three, you know, give or take, so to speak.
And that's what makes the integration process so, so unique is there are some things that I recommend for some dogs that other dogs don't need at all. So I'll be able to look at your dog and go, okay, that dog really doesn't need a lot of structure. It doesn't need impulse control, so to speak. It doesn't need focus work. It needs a lot of confidence building. So that's where we spend a lot of our time.
So it's a matter of looking at the dog in front of us and, and going from there and determining what you need with that particular dog. Okay. I think that makes a lot of sense. And so, in other words, folks can join even maybe if they haven't taken the prior class. Is that kind of. Yes? Yeah, I would love to have a bunch of repeaters. In fact, I think I have somebody who's interested in taking a class that took my resource guarding class.
And ironically, my resource guarding class ended up being a lot of intra housemate dog or dog and cat issues. And so I have a couple of people that are going to take that, that were in my resource guarding class that want to take this because they kind of want to work on, you know, continuation of the resource guarding between the dogs. And again, this might go into the intra housemate dog aggression type work, but I'm game. I'm game. We can do that. We can do that.
Melissa Breau: Fair enough. Any final thoughts or key points you want to leave folks with other than class is going to be customized. Each gold spot and I will be customized. Silver spots, same thing. You guys get to ask all the questions you want, but I am going to be running a Facebook group. I always do that. I do not have a TA yet, but I have someone in mind hopefully that I'm kind of grooming for the job eventually.
But so all of you bronzers out there, you will get to ask questions through the Facebook group. So come join me. It will be lots and lots and lots of fun. It's going to be, I'm going to be pretty hectic during the months of October and November. What we've got Fenzi camp and then I'm doing, I think, six workshop seminar things in Texas in the middle of October.
Then 1 November I go to the ranch to do basically a handler's choice on reactive integration at the ranch. And then after that I literally come home one day and the next day drive back to Texas and teach at Dog Scouts of America camp. So it's a good thing.
Melissa Breau: You like traveling. It is. I do like traveling.
Karen Deeds: I do. I wish I could take my dog more this time. I used to, I'm so used to taking my dogs, but not going to take one to camp, not going to take one to California, so. But the other places I probably will. So.
Melissa Breau: Fair enough. All right, well, thank you so much for coming on to chat about this stuff, Karen.
Karen Deeds: It was great. Always good to talk with you, Melissa.
Melissa Breau: Likewise. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in.
We'll be back next week with Loretta Mueller to talk about multi dog households. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free by bensound.com
The track featured here is called Buddy audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training.
Credits
Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called "Buddy." Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.
Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!