Managing Behaviour Problems
Behaviour management is the concept of arranging your environment in a way so as to prevent exposure to a ‘stimulus’ (i.e. a person, object, animal, noise, thing etc) that is leading to an undesirable behaviour from your dog. Often people call these stimuli “triggers” because they appear to trigger the dog’s undesirable behaviour.
When training a new or alternative behaviour it is really important that we first ensure that our dogs do not continue to practice the old behaviour that we do not want. As the saying goes - practice makes perfect!
If the behaviour keeps happening it means something is telling your dog that the behaviour is effective at achieving their goal. I.e. I am scared of strangers, so if I bark everytime someone passes by the house and they keep walking it means the barking has worked! So, I keep barking! No amount of shouting at me to stop will change the behaviour, because clearly it is achieving my goal and that is more powerful.
Another example might be the dog that jumps up to greet people. If every time they jump up to say hello they are greeted with hands touching them (pushing them away) or voices speaking to them (tellign them no), we have just taught the dog that yes - jumping up gets you attention! If you find the being pushed away and shouted at scary, then it is still attention but now it is also kinda scary - so the jumping up might become more intense and eratic, because you are now not only desperate to say hi but you are a bit scared of what might happen.
Through putting management into place we can prevent the problem behaviour from occuring, which not only helps us to live with our dogs (because the undesirable behaviour stops) but it also means we can stop it being practiced and train a new behaviour in its place. For some issues, management will be all you need to do. For others, you will need to train something else in its place and slowly reintroduce the stimulus throughout your training programme. Eventually stripping your management back until it is not needed.
Management options will depend on the problem behaviour however may look like:
- window fog or other visual barriers at windows to prevent visual access to stimuli
- baby gates to prevent physical access
- leads to keep dogs at a distance to stimuli
- walking at quiet times
- avoiding walking in certain areas
-not using the scary tool (i.e. brush, bath, car etc)
If you are struggling with a behaviour problem and need help with setting your dog’s environment up for success to manage the situation effectively, please do not hesitate to get in touch! We will guide you through management techniques as well as training to help you to modify your dog’s behaviour and prevent it from continuing to occur.
