10/09/2021
I thought it might be useful to talk occasionally about training and dog behaviour on here 🙂 It’s especially relevant at the moment as Bella, our new 9 month old ‘mostly-Labrador’, is definitely in need of a bit of rehabilitation to become the good doggy citizen I know she can be!
Today I’m thinking about ‘stress stacking’, which I find such a useful idea. If you have a tricky dog, sometimes they react to things that they’ve been fine with before, or perhaps it seems inexplicable how one day your dog is so well behaved and the next they make a complete spectacle of themselves 🤦♀️
Think about it like this - if 10 is the point at which your dog loses their mind and kicks off, it doesn’t mean that the thing they lose it at needs to be a 10 on its own. Bella finds walks a bit stressful at the moment as she gets very over stimulated, having been under stimulated during some really important months of development. So just stepping out the front door with her harness and lead puts her at about a 3. When we first started walking her 2.5 weeks ago, she was probably at about a 7 with the stress of a new home + the walk. She was lunging and barking at people, let alone dogs, yet I know she is very people and dog friendly. So what was going on?!
If people are only a 2 or 3 (she’s excited and interested to meet people) then on their own, they’re nowhere near enough to trigger her. But if she was already at 7 from stepping out the door, then let’s say a motorbike in the distance adds 2, a 2 from a person walking past is enough to trip the switch! In just 2.5 weeks we’ve come down from there though and she is now absolutely fine to walk past people. She’ll still jump if she’s allowed to get really near them, but we don’t allow this to happen on the walk unless we know the person and that they’re OK with a bit of leaping about! What’s happened is she’s now more like a 3 at the start of the walk as the new home stress is a lot better, and she’s got a lot less intense about going for a walk. So a combined number of, let’s say, 6, is not enough to start the nonsense! Dogs are still very high, but the number is coming down all the time - a dog across the road used to be enough of trigger all on their own, now Bella doesn’t even blink most of the time. Unless of course, that number has already reached close to 10 for other reasons!
Anything can add to the stress stacking, so you need to know your dog to know where they are and how much it’ll take to tip them over. Bella can only be on the lead at the moment as she has no recall, which means she’s not getting enough exercise from walks alone. So we often do a bit of training before we go for a walk to take the edge off her mental energy (but don’t do anything that’s going to get her ‘pumped’ as that’s the last thing we need!), and we do an awful lot of chasing balls in the garden afterwards to burn off the excess energy. Any extra energy she’s carrying is just going to add to the stress stacking when we next go out. And we always make sure that if we’ve had an encounter with a dog that has wound Bella up, we take a few minutes to play ‘find it’ (just get your dog’s attention and lightly say find it! Then chuck a treat on the ground for them to find. Repeat, making sure their focus is on you and they don’t have to run around too much to get the treat) before moving on, so that the stress number comes down a bit.
I have found the concept of ‘stress stacking’ so useful to explain why Bella behaves like she does sometimes, that I thought I’d share 🙂
