Refusal on walks?
Often when I start working with a new dog, their owners tell me that their dog is not interested in treats on walks, won’t play with other dogs around or has gone off their favourite food. As a trainer, this is immediately important as this tells us a lot about what is going on for our dogs in those moments.
Stress
When our bodies experience acute stress (both ours and our dogs’!), we go into fight or flight. We produce a surge of adrenaline so that we are faster and stronger and our pain receptors are dulled, which mans we have a higher heart rate, higher blood pressure and higher respiration rate. For our dogs, this might activate during a firework display or when being chased by another dog. For a fearful dog, this response can be activated purely by seeing a dog at some distance away.
However, this response is not maintainable for more than a few minutes. We cannot keep increasing our blood pressure; we would die.
After a few minutes, we switch from an acute stress response (fight or flight) and to a chronic stress response. Adrenaline switches off and cortisol (the stress hormone) starts being released. And it is this state of prolonged stress that can be really damaging to our dogs.
If you picture a time when you were stressed and think about the effect that this had on your body. Many people lose their appetite, may experience auto-immune responses (like eczema), hair loss, poor sleep, depression, anxiety, weight loss/gain. This is the same for our dogs.
Also, when in a state of chronic stress, mammalian brains have a reduced sensitivity to reward. This means we are less motivated by things we would normally love and this is why our dogs won’t take cheese at the vet, won’t accept chicken at the groomers, why they won’t want to play ball in the dog park and why they may freeze when they are walking along a road that is busy with traffic. A high state of chronic stress.
If your dog is exhibiting this reaction of refusal, then this is a big sign that they are experiencing chronic stress. It may be that this stress has only lasted for a few minutes (for example if going to the vets for a one off trip) but what is a real concern is if this state of stress is prolonged over time. For example, a reactive dog who is being walked every day and exposed to their triggers multiple times, again and again, will constantly be flooded with cortisol.
So what can we do?
If you have a dog who is showing signs of refusal, linked with chronic stress, then it’s important that we look at strategies to reduce their cortisol levels as a priority. We can look at enrichment, distraction strategies and how to reduce exposure to triggers.
We also need to look at how to expand their capacity to cope with stress, so they have more room to hold stress before tipping over into fight/flight and then a chronic stress response.
All of this ground work needs to be laid before we can begin to think about reconditioning our dogs to the idea that their trigger is not scary. This means that we cannot help a reactive dog simply by giving them a tasty treat every time they see their trigger, as this is not helping them out of their state of high stress.
If you have a dog who you think may be experiencing chronic stress, reactivity or refusal, then click here to drop me a message.
