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| Tajji running full-out after the ball |
Our new-to-us retired seeing eye dog, Tajji, has been making
good progress with her reactivity to other dogs and sometimes to people. A
great deal of this progress has occurred in the “Reactive Rover” class taught
by Sandi Pensinger of Living
With Dogs in Soquel, CA. This does not necessarily mean Tajji can and will
take what she’s learned (“good things happen when I look calmly at another dog”)
and apply them to other places and other dogs. Dogs do not generalize. To them,
every situation is unique. This is why practicing in as many environments and
with as many diverse combinations of stimuli is necessary.
At the last formal meeting of the class, only two dogs
attended: Tajji (with both of us) and George-The-Labrador (with his surprisingly
spry 90 yo owner). We practiced with a small (real) dog decoy behind a blind.
This means that the little dog was behind a three foot high screen, and her
handler brought her out where the “student” dog could see her. At first, the
exposure was just a peek-a-boo, then standing still but constant, then moving. Movement draws a dog’s attention and is
therefore more strongly stimulating. The student dog was rewarded for calm
behavior by getting to run away, then praise and a treat. The retreat is a “functional
reward” – that is, the thing that makes the dog nervous becomes farther away, and
since dogs are highly sensitive to distance, the dog becomes happier and calmer.
Gradually, we waited until the student dog disengaged
with the decoy: a Look-Away, a lip lick, or even the sideways flick of a perked
ear. All these things signal that the dog is not longer “locked and loaded” on the
decoy. The dog has chosen to step
back from confrontation. A Look-Away is particularly powerful because a direct,
fixed stare is threatening. We then reward our dog in the same manner as before
for lowering the tension of the
visual encounter.
At the end of the class, both dogs were doing so well that
Sandi offered us two additional sessions with just these two. Instead of a
small decoy handled by one of her associate teachers, each dog would be the
decoy for the other. This sounded promising for several reasons. One is that
Tajji is more reactive to small dogs than to large ones. George-The-Labrador is
basically your happy-goofy Lab who’s had a rough time (his dog-buddy and his dad-monkey
died within a short time of one another, and his mom-monkey moved to a
different location); his threshold (the distance at which he reacts) is much
shorter than Tajji’s – that is, another dog can get much closer to him before
he is stressed. Thirdly, each dog comes to the field to play, so the passing of
time reinforces “this is a happy place” associations.
We began the session with peek-a-boo exercises for Tajji,
who was behind the blind. We’d lead her out so she could just barely see around
the blind, let her get a peek at George, who was hanging out with his owner,
and zip her back to visual safety. Gradually, we lengthened the distance and
time of exposure until we could lead her out from behind the blind and walk
toward George (at a diagonal because head-on is more threatening). After a time
of this, we put the dogs back in their car crates to think about things and
chill out.
Our second round included walking the dogs in a big (excuse
me, B-I-I-G) circle in the same direction, staying on the same diameter. After
they relaxed a bit, we had them sit and marked the places with flags, then
walked them around to the place where the other dog had sat and let them sniff
(with much praise and many tasty treats! Smelling another dog = good!)
At the end of the class, the dogs were about 30 feet from
one another, watching each other but not fixedly, and fairly happy. I say “fairly”
because Tajji was not entirely relaxed, but she was able to manage her anxiety
herself. This is a huge improvement over her barking and lunging at the sight
of another dog 250 feet away.
Stay tuned for our next report!
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