When you have a dog with a big problem, fixing the problem behavior can feel like the insurmountable task. Katie’s problem was Jack. Jack’s dog aggression, to be precise. When Katie’s sweet, timid, docile Italian Greyhound Jack was trotting down the sidewalk beside her, he looked like the best trained dog in the world. He ran beside the bicycle like he’d been born to do it, sensing her every gear shift and turn of the wheel as if the three of them — bicycle, owner, dog — were a single body. As soon as Jack saw another four legged creature though, he lost his mind. He barked like a wild thing. He ran in front of the bicycle tire. He pretzeled himself loose of and then escaped his harness. He attacked. This article is the first in a series about Jack and it explores the question “Where to begin?” when you have a problem like Jack.
It is easy to go through the list of interventions that Katie had tried and which had failed for Jack. The first thing Katie had tried was commanding Jack to stop the insanity when he encountered another dog. This availed exactly nothing. He was deaf to her instructions. At the first sight of another dog, Katie (who thought she was the center of Jack’s world), ceased to exist.
The second intervention Katie had tried was a muzzle. Putting a muzzle on Jack curtailed the aggressive behavior almost completely, but it also curtailed the run. Jack couldn’t focus on anything (not walking, certainly not running, certainly not the bicycle tire) but getting that darn muzzle off. He didn’t get the exercise he needed (a daily long, hard, and very fast run kept Jack happy) and he turned into a trembling, agitated mess without it. If the muzzle worked, Katie wanted to know how she could condition him to wear it without crushing his sensitive soul.
Katie knew that stopping Jack’s madness was going to be a multi-phased process. There was no way a behavior like this was going to be trained away with a high-value treat. Actually she tried that. When Jack wasn’t Jack he had zero interest in a treat no matter how sparkling, special, and tasty it was.
So she needed a plan. Katie consulted with Katrina, a certified dog trainer, and together they came up with a list of little things that would change the game for Jack while still getting him his daily exercise while he was un-learning some really bad behavior.
- Short-term fix: avoidance. To keep up with Jack’s exercise while the problem was getting under management, Katie would need to turn the bike around as soon as she saw a problem situation approaching. By bicycling away from a potentially bad situation, the bad situation would stay potential until things were better under control with Jack. This meant no passing pedestrians on the right (Jack’s side of the bike) and no passing other dogs whatsoever.
- Muzzle desensitization. Katie agreed to have Jack wear his muzzle every day, working up from one minute until wearing it didn’t seem to bother him. Katie agreed never to go out of the house with Jack without the soft muzzle at hand. If needed, the muzzle was a behavior disrupter that (unlike Katie’s voice) got Jack’s complete attention.
- Distance. After practicing these behaviors for 7-10 days, the next step in the journey would be to get out in the world with Jack but pull the bike well off the path when another animal was approaching and just keep him focused (“eyes on me!”) until the other dog had passed.
Did it work? Stay tuned! Katie and her trainer will report back in on Jack.
