Lighten Up Dog Training

07/01/2025

06/01/2025

IS FRUSTRATION SUCH A BAD THING?

Wouldn’t it be ace to go through life without any negative feelings whatsoever? To feel nothing but joy and delight, wonder and peace?

It often makes us wonder what the point is of negative emotions.

Yet frustration has a central purpose: it motivates us to take action.

Author and podcaster Mel Robbins says that in order to take action, you’ve got to be frustrated enough to say NO MORE!

Without that level of frustration, we often find ourselves tolerating the intolerable.
This new year, the high winds meant we had a relatively peaceful night. There was a short flurry of fireworks around midnight. I’d already been able to give Lidy medication to cope with whatever might happen and I was playing music all night to mask the bangs.

I thought we’d got off lightly.

Because they’d been thwarted in celebrating with bangers, the next three nights were unexpectedly awful from sundown to well past midnight. There were unpredictable bangs well past new year. It made it impossible to medicate Lidy before they occurred and would have meant medicating her from the Saturday before new year right through the week until school started again.

This year, I was frustrated enough to say NO MORE!

It’s just not possible to live with a dog who is sedated for over a week. Nor is it acceptable for me to live with a dog who trembles at the slightest sound because the bangs have sensitised her to all kinds of noises from high winds to dustbins moving, from car doors slamming to the clay pigeon shooting and ‘sport’ shoots.

I said NO MORE! Not again!

Even though I live in the middle of the countryside, I realised it was not enough. Medication was not enough. Training & desensitisation was not enough. Background noise was not enough.

So next year, Lidy and I will be in the quietest parts of Europe for firework season. I don’t know how else to help her feel safe. And I’ll be campaigning vigorously to bring an end to unlicensed bangers that destroy the peace night after night for the world around us. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have a single night here and there with licensed displays. I find it utterly abhorrent to live in a countryside area where the animals are terrorised, where sheep break out of their fields and panic, where dogs shake and tremble for days afterwards, where horses bolt.

But I needed that frustration to motivate me to change. Without it, I’d just have tolerated my dog spending weeks on end panicking because she’s sensitised to unpredictable bangs.

Sometimes, we’ve got to have a giant kick up the arse to motivate us to make a change. Frustration fuels that change. So when you feel that frustration about a situation involving your dog grab you, make a note of it and use it to fuel your journey to a less frustrating life.

What are your frustrations on behalf of your dog? And, more importantly, what change is it motivating you to make?

05/01/2025

✨ LAST MINUTE HEADS UP! ✨

This 12-week online Lighten Up Dog Training course goes live Monday 6th January 2025 at 8am.

Have you got your place?

Places on the ‘Success With Impulsive Dogs’ course are available now. If you live or work with:
🐶 Dogs from working lines
🐶 Dogs who are extra-sensitive to the world around them
🐶 Dogs who get into trouble with other dogs
🐶 Dogs who are highly responsive & quick off the starting blocks
🐶 Dogs whose behaviour is sometimes just a bit BIG
🐶 Dogs with all the BIG feelings..... This might be the course for you.

If you want to know more, stick SUCCESS in the comments and I’ll send you a link. If you've been waiting for doors to open, wait no longer!

04/01/2025

🐶🐶 THIS is why your dog doesn’t listen on walks 🐶🐶

Yesterday, I was doing a spot of tidying up outside the gates after the wind at the weekend. As I was finishing up, a lady walked past me with two dogs.

I could see one of them was concerned about me.

He was intently focused on me, his stare hard, his posture tall. He was already pulling on the lead, his front legs almost off the floor.

I moved inside the gate, seeing that he was clearly uncomfortable. As they approached, his stare hardened. Then he began to bark.

“No!” his guardian said. “Be a good boy!”

Her dog wasn’t listening to her at all. She pulled him hard as they passed the gates.

“Sorry about that!” his guardian said. “He just likes to say hello!”

I smiled. Her dog did not want to say hello. More than likely, he wanted to share a few choice words about my presence, and none of them were polite.

He was a cute little dog, though. I knew exactly why he wasn’t listening to her.

The truth is that dogs who bark, rear up or lunge on walks aren’t listening. It’s hard to accept that often, dogs who don’t listen on walks are often dogs that haven’t been listened to.

They’re often dogs who don’t feel comfortable around other dogs or people, and their concerns have not been acknowledged. Sometimes, their concerns have been ignored. For a dog that looks like a small teddy bear, I’m sure there are many people who have ignored his concerns about being touched or handled by strangers he doesn’t know.

I’m often thankful for my dog’s shepherd appearance and muzzle.

Strangers cross over the road when they see us. Her faith in me to protect her from being handled by them is never violated.

Our first job when our dogs freeze, stare, pull, rear up, lunge, bark, spin, growl, snarl or snap is to listen to what they’re saying.

If they can’t listen to us asking them to move on or to walk nicely, then our question for ourselves is, “when has my dog been ignored for what they’ve felt in the past?”

It’s also important to understand that it’s not always all fear or anxiety.

If you want to start listening to your dog so that they listen to you on walks, you can download this free guide to help you understand why your dog is struggling.

Stick BARKY in the comments and I’ll send you the guide.

03/01/2025

02/01/2025

BEWARE: this post is for grown-ups so it probably isn't for you 🤣

Why do societies love and respect some dogs, yet despise others?

Sociological theory has some answers as to why XL Bullies become victims of legal sanctions where Labradors, Spaniels and German shepherds do not.

An episode of Engrenages, where a doberman belonging to a security guard who bites a child and a Malinois who finds millions of stashed cash in a chair was the seed for some reflection on how we think of dogs.

This free post from the Lighten Up Substack archives is a long read to keep your brain cells occupied in the winter evenings. Grab a cuppa!

Every month through 2025, I'll be sharing one of the posts usually behind the paywall.

This one is one of my favourites! Link below. Let me know what you think.

29/12/2024

😎 You can grab your spot on the Success with Impulsive Dogs course NOW.

🐶We go live on Monday 6th January 2025.

🤔Wondering whether it's for you?

27/12/2024

What is normality anyway for our highly responsive dogs?

25/12/2024

23/12/2024

Honestly, serious dog content IS on the way...

Well, I asked you a while back what you wanted more of.

Video, you said.

You'll live to rue the day, I swear.

Anyway, I set about it with the seriousness that the task required. I have learned many things off the children of YouTube who make many pounds and dollars using editing software in ways that make my eyes water. I have studiously taken notes and set about the task you set me in a business-like way.

I did spend the weekend recording A-rolls and B-rolls (get me with my fancy lingo) and scripting wisdom and insight to squash into 60 seconds.

Then I spent today like an 11-year-old let loose with Corel Draw and Microsoft Publisher, deciding what fonts looked nicest and doing inappropriate things with this decade's Word Art.

And like any serious human being, I prioritised bloopers and outtakes to share with you.

There WILL be a couple of other videos this week.

I realise I do have to take a professional air and not just do silly stuff because the Men of Malinois and Camouflage get upset and think I am incompetent rather than the fact I live with a dog who knows a head nod means she needs to get onto the other couch and to ignore most of what I say unless it comes French style ;)

But I have enjoyed being silly, so thank you for bearing with in the thinning of content. Now I know where to download tuba soundclips from, the world is my oyster and I feel ready to "go video" in 2025.

Thanks for the shove ;)

20/12/2024

WHY I CREATED THE SUCCESS WITH IMPULSIVE DOGS COURSE

Back when I was mapping out the whole Lighten Up journey, I realised that not all reactive dogs fit the 'anxious or fearful' bill.

I remember one collie I worked with, Lupin. As soon as Lupin saw another dog, he hit the deck. Within a minute or two, he was leaping up and scream-barking at the other dog. His guardians were finding it impossible to manage.

His guardians had been told that Lupin's low posture was fear. I can feel all the collie specialists here shaking their head in disbelief. Yet this belief had been instilled by a trainer who said he lacked socialisation with other dogs and he needed more of it to get over his fears.

He needed to face his fears.

The collie specialists among you are much more likely to entertain the belief that this was simply a collie hitting the ground and staring because he can't control the movement of other individuals - maybe rooted in some anxiety, and maybe not.

Those of you who've done the Frustration Masterclass will see the intention to stalk, chase and herd in there - those frustrated motivations causing all that conflict, particularly with the lead.

Take me back a decade and I'd have probably tried some desensitisation or counter-conditioning. In fact, I think that's exactly what we did in a way. We started teaching Lupin some new skills around other dogs so he could habituate to their movement and we worked at a distance. But I also know how much front-loading of frustration skills we did. That worked really well to help Lupin go on walks around town like your average dog.

As Lupin began to find some success, his guardian took him to an agility club. Every single person in the class had a collie. Lupin lasted 10 minutes before he was sent home by the trainer running the class who, despite being a breed specialist, did not understand his behaviour. Nor did she understand how to help him around it.

Lupin ended up back with me.

I was seeing the same thing with shepherds and spaniels. At the time, I was working a lot with a couple of French ring trainers. These guys had ranked really highly in national competitions. Their Malinois were machines. Their German shepherds excelled. They were simply magnificent. Because these guys cared a lot about shepherds, they came a bunch of times to the shelter. I'm sure they won't mind me saying that it put every skill they had to the test, not least because the shelter did not permit the use of punishment, shock collars or prong collars.

Of course, my colleagues had bred and reared their dogs. One of their champions was fifth generation from their own kennels. They'd known their puppies from birth. They knew their parents, their grand-parents, their great-grandparents. Right the way back, in fact, to their great-great-great grandparents. They'd seen those puppies open their eyes, hear their first sounds, bite their first toy. They hand-picked dogs from litters they thought showed talent to be a winner, and they spent anywhere between 2-6 hours a day training their dogs. They didn't need to use much punishment - or much reward for that matter. They had dogs who lived in their groove, doing the things they'd been selected to do. Optimal dogs living optimal lives with optimal guardians who knew their stuff inside and out.

But in the shelter, we don't have many of those optimal dogs. We have dogs who are both locationally and emotionally lost. Dogs who didn't have a relationship with us. Relationship carries a lot of weight with shepherds. They're shepherd's dogs, not sheepdogs.

What I got to share in was a moment where some of the best 'breed specialists' in the land realise that they're out of tools.

I realised that's what had happened to Lupin as well.

So what was missing? Not knowledge of the dogs, surely?!

Kind of...

Knowledge of types of dogs, not breed. Knowledge of the ways in which they connect across breed in terms of how those dogs respond to the world, how they view the world, how they tick. Lots of selectively bred dogs behave in predictable ways when they're out of their groove... those are the dirty breed stereotypes we all know - car-chasing collies, shepherds who've bitten someone on the arse, spaniels guarding yesterday's porridge, terriers digging their way into next door's garden to disembowel a chinchilla they caught a whiff of five months before...

How they spin out, when they're out of their groove, that's often predictable in terms of breed.

WHY they spin out and how to help them fit back into their groove with our support, that needs us to understand what makes them tick.

But impulsivity is poorly understood. It's a dirty word. It's a word I didn't even want to stick on my course title.

I'd have preferred the complex mouthful of "environmentally sensitive, highly responsive, highly motivated dogs".

And nobody would have known what I meant.

That's another reason I wrote this course. Instinct and drive reduction theories don't even begin to explain why dogs do what they do. They don't help us understand the dogs we live with and work with. They're overly simplistic theories that don't even begin to touch on the complexity of our dogs. Nor do they offer solutions.

So I wrote a course I wanted to study. A course that would help me understand dogs like those I've lived with and worked with.

There was another reason as well.

So often, when our 'impulsive' dogs get into tricky situations in life, they are surrendered, abandoned or rehomed. I think of Flika, my ancient Malinois here. Seven homes. Two stays in the shelter. Their behaviour gets them into stickier situations than any other dog. The very behaviours we've selected them for become a liability.

"Wow - a tenacious, persistent, persevering, goal-driven bull breed who just doesn't know when to quit?!"

"Wow - a husky living in a pet dog home?! Seven trips to the pound to pick them up?!"

"Wow - a spaniel who gets into the dustbin every day and raises merry hell when you try to remove them from last night's fish bones?!"

And because breed understanding isn't enough, they're often the ones who trainers end up saying, "Well, I wouldn't usually recommend a .... but.... "

They're the very dogs who end up in the hands of people who resort to punishment because they have no idea what kind of support they need.

The more we understand their thinking, however, the more solutions propose themselves to us.

And that's why I wrote the course. I wanted to understand their ways of thinking, their cognitive processes, their sensitivities to the world... as well as how to help the dogs who'd fallen out of their groove find it a little easier.

18/12/2024

WHEN YOU'RE THE PARTY POOPER TO YOUR DOG

Lots of our 'impulsive' dogs are really poor at risk assessment. Not only have they several (hundreds of) generations of selection for boldness, we also know that if that risk is highly rewarding with relatively low chance of injury, then it's going to make it even more likely our dogs take risk.

I always like to think of Molly and Ralf when I think of non-impulsive dogs. Both were chilled out and easy to live with. However, Molly was a fan of big sticks. The bigger the better. If they were still attached to a tree, fine.

What she wasn't, though, was a risk taker. She enjoyed the occasional moment where she leaped to get a big branch just out of reach and would hang by it simply through the Power of Tremendous Teeth and bite strength alone. But she appraised those sticks like a champion gymnast on the parallel bars - never leaping for one that wouldn't hold her strength.

That, my friends, is an act of astounding and simple cognition that we simply take for granted.

How many dogs make it through the day without stepping on something that can't hold their weight? Without leaping onto a chair that can't hold them? Without grabbing a branch that then catapults them ten metres into the air and over next door's fence?

I mean THAT is quite something!

I think of my boy Heston and his love of rivers, balanced by his requirement that the water be slow enough that it didn't pull him off his feet, and shallow enough that he could put his feet on the floor.

I think of my spaniel Tilly and her love of checking out the table once all the humans had vacated the spot, capable of balancing most carefully like some trained athlete in Cirque du Soleil, on the back of a chair that was just about holding her, never quite toppling over, but not stable enough to support her if she jumped.

Both excellent at risk assessment.

I mean you've probably not stopped to marvel at the hundreds of ways your dog hasn't killed themselves today simply through excellent risk assessment.

For our impulsive dogs, it's like they didn't get the memo that That Thing, whatever That Thing is, could quite literally Kill Them.

Sometimes, the rewards are simply too high in the old stakes department. They're highly compelling. Sometimes, it just feels good to do. Other times, they simply haven't learned that stuff in life can hurt you.

But if you ever feel like you spend your entire life appraising your dog's poor life choices and sighing, having to intervene in every interaction, having to navigate them out of pools they jumped into and now can't get out of, off rocks they've isolated themselves on out in a fast-flowing river, then you may well have yourself an impulsive dog, as if you didn't already know.

If you've had the 'What are you even doing up there?!' conversation...

The 'I told you that wouldn't hold you!' conversation...

The 'Well, that was foolish, wasn't it?!' conversation...

But also the 'Will you stop doing that?!' conversation...

And the 'You'll learn the hard way!' conversation...

Or the 'You'll be sorry one day!' conversation...

Then your dog might be in need of a little social support to help them make better choices that don't end up with an early bath, a trip to the vet or, tragically, a much worse outcome.

Stick around - I've stuff for you!

14/12/2024

WHEN PERSEVERANCE IS PROBLEMATIC FOR OUR DOGS

Over the next couple of posts, I'm going to be talking about perseverance and persistence. For no good reason whatsoever, I'm going to distinguish between the two. Perseverance, for me, is the ability to keep going despite obstacles, doing whatever it takes to get the job done. Persistence is repeating the same intensity and behaviour.

Both are features of frustration. Perseverance means diversifying your behaviour if what you're doing is not working. Persisting means keeping going with the same one.

In usual circumstances, both are useful skills. A terrier digging a hole may come across thick roots and branches and may need to find a different way to get that hole dug. A husky pulling a sled needs persistence to keep going. We've not bred dogs to quit at the first challenge.

That can be troublesome for us.

A dog I worked with recently was a perpetual escape artist. He had both perseverance and persistence. I asked his guardian whether he'd keep trying to escape even if she was watching. He absolutely would.

Perseverance meant he'd do anything to get out. It was all fair game. In one video of him in the yard, he'd throw himself at the fence. He'd try and jump it. He'd switch to biting it and chewing it. Hed try and dig under it. He'd claw it.

We also saw persistance: keeping doing the same thing even if it wasn't working.

The problem, by the way, was next door's in-season dog.

Perseverance is problematic because when behaviour varies if it's not working, it makes it likely, through trial and error, that our dogs will fall on a behaviour that works. In the very first behaviour experiments, Thorndike put a cat in a box where the cat had to operate an escape mechanism like a pulley or a pressure plate to get out. At first, the cat would take a long time to get out of there. Then, as they learned what opened the door, they got more efficient. Once you learn what works, you're much likely to repeat that in the future.

That's where perseverance can be problematic for our dogs. They can accidentally fall on behaviours that get the job done.

It's a key factor in lots of behaviours that cause us issues.

I remember my first two Belgian shepherds, Tobby & Flika. Both had issues with doors. Tobby had clearly got some experience with locked doors, because upon finding it bolted, he started then to drag a chair across to a window. Thankfully I returned and the video showed what he was up to.

Perseverance at work: if what you are doing isn't working, find some other way to get your needs met. If you want out, and you can't get out, find another way. Keep trialling different ways until one of them works.

Flika, on the other hand, was persistence at work. She just kept going with the same behaviour. When pawing at the handle didn't work, she tried biting her way through the doorframe. Both were times when I'd just adopted them and I'd been gone less than a few minutes in the days before wifi and networked cameras that share video to your phone so you can get back to intervene.

Perseverance ends up problematic for our dogs when they fall on a workable solution quickly. We can end up engaged in a game of whack-a-mole where, as fast as we find management strategies to prevent them doing something, they're quickly diversifying their behaviours to find new things that work. Frustration is a powerful fuel for behavioural diversification, which is why I say that Frustration is the Mother of invention. She's great at helping us find new ways to solve old problems.

Many of our "impulsive" dogs can struggle with frustration. Even if they are very good at channelling it into diversifying their behaviour, the last thing we want is a dog who is an excellent problem solver when it comes to needs that simply can't be met. A dog who'll do anything to break out, to break into next door's chicken coop, to break into next door's yard to get busy with their in-season female... that's not behaviour that's easy to live with, especially if it's accompanied with lots of noisy vocalisation too.

One of the best things we can do with our persevering dogs is teach them that quitting is also an option, and how to switch goals. They can be so focused on their one goal that they find it almost impossible to switch goals, often getting stuck. It's this which leads to labels like being "hyperfixated" or "obsessed". In reality, it's just the inability to focus on something else if a need can't be met.

Of course, we should always ask if the need is reasonable. Hungry dogs who find their way into locked kitchen cabinets are driven by powerful biological needs. But a dog who wants to get out to kill next door's chickens is not a dog we can simply give so-called "outlets" to because they would involve harming other creatures and no matter how many chickens are in there, killing is for sport, not hunger. Only fatigue will bring an end to the behaviour. It is therefore not really a 'need' in any way we might think.

There are many things in life that we cannot do for hundreds of reasons. Knowing how to give up and find something else to focus on, other ways to reduce boredom or increase physical activity or social interactions, well, they would help.

For my two, one had free range to the garden. That helped. But for Tobby, he'd then try to get out of the garden. His needs were entirely social. Meeting his needs by always having another dog with him helped. It also helped him to know that having social companionship 24/7 isn't always necessary. We needed to look beyond the need and help him find other stuff to do rather than relying on other social beings.

What we do with a dog who'd problem solve their way through various behaviours, and invent a bunch of other ways that just might end very badly is help them learn to take their focus off one goal and go do something else instead. That can be surprisingly hard for a number of our dogs!

13/12/2024

THE WORLD DOESN'T HAVE TO DICTATE WHAT OUR DOG DOES

When I first met my dog Lidy in the shelter, some eight years ago, she was flotsam on life's tide - reacting to everything in the world around her. Dogs, cats, humans, cars... it didn't matter. Walks were not a peaceful time with her. She was torn from one thing to the next, tossed about by the world.

Learning how to live and work with dogs like this is not an art.

It's not some mystical process passed down by our societal elders.

You don't have to be a dog charmer to live with dogs who struggle with the world.

Nor do they have to be under your control every single moment of a walk, heel-walking their way through shopping centres, fixated on your hand or a ball or a tug-toy as their only way of coping.

One of the things that really helped me was learning to see the world as an opportunity for reinforceable moments.

The best example is my dog now.

Instead of the odour of cats causing her to become hypervigilant and to ignore me in the off-chance she might miss one of her feline enemies dropping down from a fence, the odour of cats is now a cue to come back and walk next to me.

And because I couldn't smell the cats, when she smells cats, she comes and touches my hand to let me know.

Much better than her going into hypervigilance mode and me not realising, or not being prepared in the occasional eventuality that one would dash out from behind a bush.

Today, she tapped my hand and told me there was a strong cat smell. I thanked her and we walked closer than we might normally. Within a couple of minutes, we passed some bins. Unseen to Lidy was the huge black cat sitting on top one of them.

What else this has allowed me to do is increase the amount of odour required for reward.

This is the same process used in scent detection. Imagine having trained a customs & excise dog to sniff out cash only for them to alert you every time you pass a person with a single 10€ note in their pocket!

I don't want Lidy telling me that she smelled a cat when the last cat through the place was 24 hours ago. I want her only telling me about ones that are a clear and present danger, lurking under cars or on top of bins.

We learned this in the same way my friends in customs work teach discriminative skills: alert me to the big piles of cash, not the small ones. Don't tell me about the tiny remants of illicit products on the edge of some dude's bank card... tell me only about the 2kg stashed under the plastic trim or up in the car roof.

Turning the world into cues to do something else instead is about the best way to give our dogs back control.

I've been reading a lot of studies recently about the ways in which simulations and virtual reality are used in helping people overcome phobias and fears. Giving them actions to do in situations where unpredictable events happen or where the object of their fears is present seems like a promising treatment approach. The idea of dogs in virtual reality suits seems a bit futuristic - though I've no doubt someone is doing it somewhere! That said, the notion of practising what you do when X happens in controlled environments is not new to me: it's about the best way I know to help dogs who struggle with the world.

There are caveats to that.

We must change contexts a lot.

Dogs are such contextual learners that what they learn can be tied incredibly to the environment in which they learn it. I taught Lidy to touch my hand with increasingly strong odours of cat in the home, in a completely controlled environment that included carefully controlled levels of odour.

Okay, not THAT careful - I got my neighbours to wipe their cats with cloths for increasing periods of time until she was able to tell me the difference between a cloth that had wiped a cat once and a cloth that the cat had been sleeping on for days. But careful enough. We didn't just do this in the home, because if we had, the learning would have been tied to the home.

We also needed to bridge the gap from simulation into real life. That meant moving from situations where I had deliberately left cat odours or knew where cat odours were likely to situations where only Lidy knew where cat odours were.

This meant learning to trust her call.

And, do you know what?

She never lies.

She never tells me there's a cat when there isn't.

And she never tells me there's no cat when there is.

Useful!

This sounds like it'd take weeks of advanced training. It didn't. We had one goal - to touch my hand when she smells cat. And we just practised it. Short blasts. 5 trials every other day for about ten weeks. Then we refined it. All the time, we were practising in all sorts of different situations: on the move, on walks, in the home, in the car, in other people's cars, in other people's gardens.

We did everything as if it was a controlled simulation. Now, the world just seems like a controlled test to her. When we come across a cat who's sneaked around a building, it's just another reinforceable moment when she has the opportunity to get 10 out of 10 and a gold star for telling me there's a cat.

And the same for her car chasing. Instead of telling her to chase and bite them, cars just say 'go sit by the side of the road'. The consequence of that is a really good game of 'hide the salami' (get your mind out of the gutter, Gail!). Sit, then I'll hide some sausage or salami for you to find. Only when there's a car. If you do that and there's no car, no salami.

And the same for dogs.

And because it's reliably paired up, we can then start to phase out times when less of a big moment, so the only reinforceable moments are the BIG ones. Yesterday, Lidy coped with three huge Newfoundland dogs. That was a reinforceable moment. The tiny old dog bimbling about that she saw for half a second? Not a reinforceable moment. It gives us the ability to fade out less noticeable events so that our dog comes to see them as insignificant - not worthy of paying attention to.

There are so many ways that we can turn the world into reinforceable moments for our dogs. Instead of being tossed around on life's tides, pulled from pillar to post by their nose or their eyes, they get to choose other behaviours. The world is simply a system of red lights and green lights that tell them when the good stuff will happen.

Life saver, I promise you!