08/29/2025
Paw-stitive Outcomes: Ginger! 💙
Ginger is an almost 2-year-old Aussiedoodle. She loves chicken nuggets, long walks, her caring guardians, and their grandson, who is a frequent visitor to her home. As you can see, she is also irresistibly cute!
At about one year of age, Ginger began exhibiting some concerning behaviors toward her guardians. She had always been a slightly nervous puppy, especially when meeting new people and with certain types of handling. But then Ginger began to show guarding behaviors, such as growling, snapping, and body blocking, around sometimes perplexing things, like her leash, random rocks in the yard, and even certain rooms and hallways in the house. So her guardians came to us for help.
Ginger was clearly struggling with lots of conflicting emotions and a high baseline level of anxiety. Her aggressive behaviors appeared to be an attempt to prevent potentially scary outcomes and to have some control over her environment. Utilizing behavior medication was helpful to reduce Ginger’s baseline level of anxiety and distress. However, she and her guardians benefited most from working with our head trainer, Lorenzo, to understand the motivation and emotions behind the behaviors and establish proactive strategies to help Ginger feel safe.
Now, Ginger and her humans are relieved to have a much less stressful household and they are enjoying their time together. Ginger’s humans have done an incredible job understanding and implementing the strategies they learned to support Ginger and to keep everyone involved safe and secure.
For Ginger, prioritizing the relationship with her guardians instead of attempting to “correct” the unwanted behaviors, as well as providing patient and predictable ways for Ginger to make her own choices throughout her daily routines, made all the difference!
Way to go, Team Ginger!
