Ellie,

The Rottweiler X

This young girl spent 8 months on anxiety medication, all because the vet did not understand what he was looking at.

I am so pleased the owner took my advice; changed vets and got her weaned off the medication.

Well, she's well and truly off medication, and she's a different dog; bright and happy - this I can work with.

Yes, she does have some issues, but nothing warranting medication.

I enlisted the help of my dog, Zelic, an entire male Rottweiler, for the second session with Ellie to gauge how comfortable, or not, she would be working around another dog.

Zelic provided a masterclass in canine behaviour, as he immediately adjusted his own body language, showing Ellie that he was not a threat to her.

I'm seeing less anxiety and more confidence in this lovely dog each time I see her.

During this session we continued to build confidence, that includes putting her in stressful (within reason) situations she has to deal with by working through it. If we always protect the animal from these situations, then they never learn how to deal with the stresses they encounter every day in their daily life which does nothing to alleviate the anxiety nor building confidence.

Stress inoculation is extremely important, but you need to know what you're doing!

What you see here is only a fraction of the things we did, you do not see her walking confidently through a cafe, and loing "sit/stay" in said cafe, all the time ignoring all the going ons,

Nor do you see her paying no attention to all the dogs we encountered, the electric scooters zooming by, all the time displaying a neutral body language.

Heh - and yet, some people claim "balanced" trainers like myself cannot deal with anxious or aggressive dogs as "we just shut the dogs down", so it's much better to medicate them when their preferred training "methods" fail.

Does this dog look shut down to you? Look at the enthusiasm in those recalls!

Koda

Koda is a 4 year old Stumpy tail Cattle Dog with a bit of a chequered past. We don't know much about his background, but we do know that he's got some issues - that's for sure.

Koda can be very reactive towards other dogs, he literally screams, sounding like he is being seriously hurt - or worse - without the handler doing anything else but holding the leash!

He lacked structure in his life, and without having enough firm, but fair boundaries in place, he pretty much thought he could do whatever he liked.

Kudos to the owners, they did understand that they had to make some serious lifestyle changes and they also needed to change their mindset from looking at him like a "fur baby" instead of what he actually is; an awesome dog.

They had already been through three different trainers before coming to me, not seeing much progress, if any at all.

This is definitely a work in progress - there are no quick fixes, but, as log as the owners do what's required, then progress will follow.

Picture, middle, left;

Not the first session overall, but the very first session we brought in another dog to start the counterconditioning/desensitising process.

The "helper" is my own dog, Zelic, a 6 year old, entire male Rottweiler, who is off leash in the photo.

The photo was taken at the end of the session, where Koda went from "loading up" when Zelic was approx 30 metre away, to this.

Picture, bottom, left shows the end of the following weeks session, in which a friend, yet again, stepped up and volunteered her time and her dogs to help a reactive dog.

Again, we went from a trigger distance of around 20 metres at the start, to what you see in the picture.

Both the Staffy and the Collie are really calm, balanced dogs, which is a must for this kind of work, but they also give off different kind of energy, which is also something we want.

It is important to note that we have paths on either side of us, and we had a number of people walking their dogs past us.

Long way to go, but we are seeing some progress.