15/12/2024
❤️🐾
Stop living in your dogs past.
It’s hard right?
It’s hard because we want to understand and try to feel what our dogs have been through or what they are feeling at a particular moment of anxiety or stress.
But what if I said to you, that you’re living in your dog’s past and they aren’t?
As a trainer working mainly with reactivity, seeing people live in their dogs past is quite literally something I see daily.
Particularly in rescue dogs but it’s not solely related to them.
We know that our dog has had 4 homes, has been abused, has a fear of people or other dogs, the list goes on and on.
As humans we have all the thought processes and complex emotions that allow us to fully reflect and unravel any particular Situation and we quite regularly revisit trauma or stressful situations in our pasts to allow us to deal with them.
Your dog however lives for the here and now.
They aren’t living in their 4 previous homes now, they’re living with you.
If your dog has a bad association with other dogs because it was attacked once, it’s more likely it’s just an association and they do not remember the actual event itself just the corresponding feelings that were attached to that event.
Let me use an example:
You go out 1 night and you are attacked at your local bar resulting in anxiety and apprehensions about going out again.
Over the next week or two, being human and having a much more complicated mind, we may be able to break the situation down and maybe come to the conclusion that if we go to a quieter town, different bar etc then we can avoid those situations and build up our confidence again.
Dogs do not have that ability.
The association is what it is and there’s no way of getting around it other than how we respond to it as their handler.
Only with the correct guidance from us can they learn and regrow the confidence in those situations that didn’t work out for them previously.
I’ve lost count of the amount of times a dog is trying to eat me and people say “he’s been through a lot though”
Ok, I’m not denying he has.
But he doesn’t think like that and the truth is he has teeth and he’s 50kg and if he somehow breaks free or we aren’t fully in control one day and make a human error it could cost him his life or maybe even worse another humans.
Dogs live in the here and now and by living in their pasts for them we are doing them a disservice and allowing them to be buried in their fears or anxieties for a lifetime.
Sometimes as humans we want to over protect and we’ll talk and think more about a dog being slightly uncomfortable during correction for a few weeks and completely ignore how stressed our dogs are daily.
I can absolutely assure you that it’s more stressful for your dog to come outside and be so highly stimulated by everything around it that it wants to kill everything that moves than it is to learn a couple of weeks of how to turn a slip lead pressure on and off.
Just an example.
A dog’s confidence cannot grow with an owner who is living in their past and will not move forward with them.
Being an alpha isn’t about:
- being mean.
- Your dogs being scared of you.
- Being too fearful of reprimand to put even a foot out of line.
But it does exist where many will tell you that it doesn’t.
What it really means:
- confidence in their alpha to keep them safe.
- Stability
- Trust
Dogs will naturally radiate towards the most confident and if you had a pack of dogs in the wild they would naturally gravitate towards the most confident dog for decision making and leadership.
I know first hand how much confidence structures and boundaries bring to even the most damaged dogs and only you can implement that into their lives.
I can assure you that dogs will be happier and more confident knowing exactly what you want from them than they are being allowed to figure it out for themselves.
Your dog can never move forward if you won’t let them.
The journey towards recovery for anxious and nervous dogs with bad histories behind them will always start with you ❤️🐾
Dog trainer and walker specialising in reactive and aggressive behaviours in dog’s 🐕❤️🐾
