@zobers Sure!!!! Our trainer's credentials are "CPDT-KA, Certified Professional Dog Trainer - Knowledge Assessed" which involved working under another trainer for about 300 hours or so, and then testing/knowledge assessments.
Two books that she recommended and we are using to guide our reactivity training: Karen Pryor - Pattern Games and "Mine" by Jean Donaldson for resource guarding of me. Of note, after we started reactivity training, resouce guarding has gone down.
The first concept I really had to understand was how important managing the environment is - especially when you start training. This one was tough for me to swallow, especially when I was already overwhelmed with all the training and feeling like my adolesecent puppy was taking over my life (true feelings, I know i'm not alone on this one).
Basically, "Set your dog up for success."
Our trainer was straight forward - and she was right. For example, our dog would look out the window and bark at dogs passing by. The first step for management - she helped me put wax paper on the bottom of the window so he couldn't see out. I was distraught initially thinking, "Am I going to forever live in a dark house?" But....I started reading more about dog psychology, and found A LOT of parallels to child and human development psychology. Step noe - remove the triggers, and avoid them. Avoid them like the plague. Our dog could not walk by another dog on the opposite side of the street before without lunging and barking. So for the first week or so, we were constantly scanning the environment when we went out, and the second we saw a dog or thought there was a dog - we would high tail it in a different direction.
This was hard....really hard at first, especially because it meant walks were not fun for me. But I had to change my mind on that, and invest the time now to help him learn what we needed him to learn.
But once he was able to work in a trigger free environement, we started counter conditioning, and it only took about a week of consistent training (just whenever we went out for a few mintues at a time) to see a difference. The most important part was knowing his threshold and keeping him under threshold, not putting him in situations where he would likely react.
Once we learned and really understood that we needed to remove the triggers that would cause him to trigger stack and start going crazy mouthing and jumping, we started counter conditioning. The first thing we did was "Look at That" training (Karen Pryor). It felt so small at first, clicking and treating at EVERYTHING while our dog was looking at things outside, but I swear, after a few days of consistent hard core work - he started to relax outside.
I had never noticed it before, thinking he was just a 9-month old puppy, but he did not really relax outside. Yes, he would sniff, but he was also on the lookout. After we started "Look at that" training, he learned that he could see anything - any trigger and choose not to react. That doing nothing was an option.
We also worked on other pattern games by Karen Pryor. It feels so small, but it totally makes sense. When our dog learned that he could reliably predict a pattern, he started turning to me when he got stressed our uncertain outside, I would do our 1-2-3 pattern or the "Up down" pattern game, and try to get him back under threshold (or not) and we would continue. It was almost like it gave us a language to communicate with our dog and for him to communicate with us.
We don't use the word "no." Dogs don't understand english. I felt so silly for not realizing this at first, but "no" doesn't relaly tell him what to do or what we want instead. It just leads to a confused "stop" and it's not clear why we said it. Was it hte movement? the sniffing? the bird? He knows that "uh-uh" is an interruptor for serious things like - heading towards an electric wire in a pool of water level of "don't do that!" but we also learned that anytime we interrupt a behavior it must either be followed up by reinforcement (treats/positive reinforcement) or an alternative. For example, if he was attempting to jump on the couch to get something, "uh-uh" followed by "over here!!" and then treats.
The biggest thing we learned was about reading body language and thresholds. We learned that once our dog is over threshold - that's it. There is no learning in that zone. And we got really good at understanding when he was approaching an "orange" zone, to hopefully avoid the "red" zone - which was the point of no return.
We had to change our routine up a bit, but in about two months, our dog is now able to watch another dog walk by right next to him - as long as I'm managing it! The only times it hasn't worked I have not managed the situation properly (i.e. I let him stare too long at the dog, or didn't read his body langauge when he started to worry about the dog walking towards him too close, and didn't move away).
Whew that's a lot - but I love talking about this topic because our lives have definitely improved so much, and if were weren't fortuante to come across our trainer I don't know what we would have done!!!
