As I said, Reeva has this, aggression problems. But the thing is that, at least I think so, her main problem is stress. And I had these wonderful ideas of teaching her LLW, and clicking for calming signals and calm interaction with other dogs etc. But it wasn't working. She was just ignoring my clicks. Her arousal level was so high that she couldn't concentrate on anything. I contacted Turid Rugaas and she told me that I have to take short relaxing walks with her. And I laughed. First 5-10 minutes we were out in our walks, she was impossible. And our walks were very far from relaxing ones.
The thing is that at home she is very relaxed and I would say – a perfect dog. But, when we were going through my neighborhood, with the leash and everything, it was terrible. Sometimes I had luck: we went out to the street and she was calm: but then just one thing (a bird, a car, a cat, not to mention another dog) was enough to make her stressed out again. So, one day I was outlining protocols for helping a dog with separation anxiety to someone and this idea formed in my mind: what if I could do something similar with Reeva? If the act of going to
the walk makes her stressful, can I desensitize her to that?I guess it would look like this:
1. I indicate the moment she changes her behavior to excited/stressful one. Is it when I take her leash, put on my 'dog shoes' or what?
2. Do the same thing over and over until she stops reacting on it.
3. Move on to the next thing I do and repeat the step 2 with that
4. Reach the moment of opening the door and going out to the street with the dog who thinks everything is so boring because she know she'll go right back to the house anyway.
5. Work on spending more and more time outside with a calm (bored) dog until I get to 5-10 minutes.
6. Take short calm walks outside.
So, do you think it could work? It wouldn't restrict her exercise because she is hardly walked now anyway (it was very hard for me to go out with her, it's even harder for my parents). I have a big
garden and another dog so they run around a lot.
Could my method help her being calm outside? I'm not sure what am I going to do once we reach that, probably LLW and then trying to get her to be calm around other dogs (again lots of desensitization needed: she gets excited even if other dog is like 300 feet from her. But this is a start. Is it a good one? I'm freaking out at the moment because I can't try it (I'm a bit to far).
