THIS is training a reactive dog under threshold. For a bit of history on this video, ozzy used to be extremely reactive to the neighboring dog,their yard, and the fence. This has to do with dog reactivity and a little barrier frustration. The video you see is where we are in our training for this, but if youd seen him six months ago, the video would have looked drastically different. He would have been throwing himself at the fence with his hackles raised and eyes wild, foaming at the mouth while barking frantically and causing quite a scene. Through slow, strategic training, we've been able to get to this point. Training for reactivity should not look like a fireworks display of emotion and chaotic behavior like on the television shows. In reality, desensitization should be an extremely slow, boring process, because the dog should ALWAYS be under threshold. Think of threshold as a dogs emotional bucket. When the bucket is full, that dog has reached threshold. When the bucket over flows, that dog is over threshold, and that is when we start to see reactive behavior like frantic barking, lunging, snapping, etc, depending on the individual dogs emotional state. We don't want to flood our dogs (overflow their bucket) with the triggering stimulus and expect them to "face their fears". When a dog is over threshold, we see a spike in cortisol, the stress hormone, and the activation of their amygdala, the part of the brain that controls arousal like fight or flight and big emotions. Since the call to action of the amygdala causes the prefrontal cortex to become dysregulated and communication to that area of the brain is disrupted, a dog being flooded with triggers is NOT LEARNING ANYTHING except to be more scared. Dogs don't face their fears, and they dont "see that nothings gonna happen". Dogs are NOT HUMANS. Through using scientifically derived evidence, we know that training methods like desensitization and counter conditioning while under threshold are the most succes
