If your dog doesn’t feel safe around other dogs, it’s determining whether your dog feels it’s from a (significant) threat to them physically or simply they’re feeling irritated or angry…I will stay with them. I place my hand in a single spot on their back, with the same pressure I use when giving them a reset hug. This is especially helpful for my senior and disabled dogs to feel safe in complex emotional circumstances,
This morning I’m standing next to Lincoln (Great Dane) after he’s just finished eating. David, being 200 lbs and 3 feet 2 inches at his shoulders, tends to lumber slowly past other dogs and knocks them over as his long body snakes past them. Being that Lincoln is 9 years and 3 months old, it gives Lincoln anxiety at the thought of 4 year old David knocking him over. It’s not on purpose which means there’s no negative body language or other prior indicators of strong physical contact about to happen. A jolt as hard as David’s body causes is clearly why other dogs in his past have turned around thinking there was aggression…and to David’s interpretation that this dog he just passed has gone nuts for no reason and now David has to defend himself.
There’s so many storylines happening with Lincoln and David that I have to keep calm and remember that the other dogs are watching and listening. Dogs can hear who you’re talking to. They can hear which dog is angry and what’s about to happen. I have to make sure that I’m cognizant of all the dogs emotional concerns and address them when possible. If I don’t, this may lead to some dogs having unprocessed concerns that they were going to be next in trouble from me, and for no reason. How I interact with these dogs on the peripheral is important overall.
With Lincoln, I’m standing near him with my hand on his back. As I move around him, I keep my hand in the exact same place on his back. Like how a chicken’s head is stationary no matter how you move their body? My hand remains in the same place with the same pressure. This allows me to provide Lincoln a stillness (predictability) to my movements. I’m not fidgeting around Lincoln’s back nor nervously petting him.
In turn, this is less for Lincoln to be distracted by in his mounting efforts of trying to stay alert to one more thing, unnecessarily.
As David approaches, I move my body between him and Lincoln as a guard and as a buffer. I say Lincoln’s and David’s name based on whomever is elevating in their level of awareness. Since they both trust me, and over many interactions, I can move my body away from the middle to let David pass freely by Lincoln. Both dogs fully at risk of the other yet from my having proven consistent supervision, each dog has the opportunity to calmly and cogently process what they’re experiencing instead of becoming tense and ready to fight.
Lincoln has learned that my physical contact means that I am protecting him from a different type of danger to him, which is basically a senior dog not wanting to being knocked over accidentally. I continue proving to Lincoln I’m taking care of him by physically risking myself of being knocked over by David. This adds further to Lincoln’s trust of my consistency of proof of his familial protection. I brace myself when David does brush past.
When David sees me standing between Lincoln and him as he’s approaching us. To David, his intentions are innocent and focused. He’s walking to get to clean up leftover food in the other dogs’ bowls. In the beginning, there would be fights. Though I don’t eat meat, I feed raw since their evolutional survival is as carnivorans. David has learned, over time, that I will stop any fight by verbally de-escalating or physically intervening.
This has taught them both that I am paying attention during high-risk circumstances where the possibility of a negative interaction such as a fight is being monitored by my readiness to stop them. I have to be vigilant, especially in the beginning.
David has learned, through my physical interactions of standing between him and another dog, that he doesn’t need to be afraid of being attacked first. This teaches David that he can trust that I am protecting him, despite his previous life of not feeling safe within that familial structure. Changes for dogs can be quite profound and many dysfunctional dogs aren’t equipped to process complex emotional structures beyond their rudimentary logic and emotive familiarities. My methodology addresses how dogs process consciously.
The most important mistake we forget is how we slowly change our behavior with our dogs without even realizing it.
Domesticated dogs start as cute little puppies carried and loved constantly…as they age and get bigger, we can’t carry them anymore because they’re too heavy…we spend less ‘oooh ahhh’ time with them. This can create a number of dysfunctions affecting your dog’s self-esteem, self-confidence, self-worth and creates various dependency issues. Stemming from abandonment and insecurity traits. These budding issues, in turn, sometimes go from ‘cute and tolerable’ to becoming extremely dangerous behaviors towards other dogs and people. A dog that nips when excited to see you does so due to issues such self-esteem, self-worth and/or self-confidence dysfunctions. It sometimes shows as incessant mouthing and gradually gets concerning.
Before David arrived, he was weaned off of 80 mg Prozac and 750 mg Trazodone (from six months to 2.5 years of age). Being clear-headed allows a dog to cleanly process their psychological traumas aka dysfunctions in real time. Medicating David gave him the same experience as if you unknowingly consumed a drugged drink…your cognitive functioning is impaired and like a heavily medicated dog, you’ll keep struggling and fighting to understand what’s happening.
David needed to be in his natural predatorial state manifesting from his deeper dysfunctions. He knows how he feels without functional obstruction for each interaction that becomes a beneficial learned circumstance. Every dog needs to be fully present and conscious. The further along David learns he can trust me with a clear mind. He slowly learns if he can also learn to trust that other dogs aren’t out there to hurt him.
Lincoln learns that I’m consistent in my care and protection. Our cogent communication keeps his mind alert. My actions have proven consistently to Lincoln that I’m watching out for him by reading his body language and behaving intelligently to his physical communication. My socialization with him is the same today as it was when he first arrived almost five years ago. It’s not routine that dogs need…it’s consistency. And by how safe we keep them.
As dogs age, they aren’t able to physically keep up and they learn that.
They fall a bit more playing with the other dogs. On walks they begin trailing behind. In the house, they get knocked over by the younger dogs. By protecting Lincoln, including psychologically, I prevent him from feeling marginalized by his aging. He receives the same level of attention as David.
All these considerations and issues are part of the ripple effect of constantly correlating the participants familially and eventually individual psychologies. Each action is interpreted as psychological and emotional affectation, singular and collectively. With Lincoln and David and to the other dogs watching or to the dog in another room listening I have to keep aware of how they individually perceive my behavior in a potentially dangerous outcome.
This is no different in human interactions. Each dog observes what is happening ego-centrically. By remaining calm and even-toned in my interactions (and readiness to physically stop them), I know I’m being watched and how I might stop a vicious fight is actively observed by the other dogs. All my behavior must be consistent and familiar to them all in my own physical movements.
This and all my opinions refer to my successful work downtraining profoundly dysfunctional dogs in extremely risky environments. My simple techniques have been consistently successful with the most dangerous Great Danes in North America (The Vancouver Sun), to farmed ‘meat dogs’ from South Korea. My work predicates upon behavior is psychological aka consciousness in dogs existing at a dilutive scale (relative to humans being 100%).
