Teaching the Reactive Dog Class: Leading the Journey from Reactivity to Reliability by Emma Parsons

Author:Emma Parsons [Parsons, Emma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Karen Pryor Clicker Training
Published: 2014-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Where to Focus

More than any other dog training class, reactive dog classes require that everyone follow rigid protocols about where they can look and to whom they can give eye contact when dogs are present. It takes practice to feel comfortable with conventions that feel rude and to prevent an accidentally and innocently wandering eye from causing a dog to react.

Each student should focus solely on her dog—even if the instructor or an assistant is talking with her or coaching her. She should not be looking at the other students and should avoid making eye contact with their dogs. For Week 2, it’s critical to teach students nonthreatening or neutral body postures and avoidance signals so students can watch each student-dog team enter the workspace without causing disruption.

The assistants and instructor should not make eye contact with the dogs and should get used to coaching students whose attention is focused elsewhere—as it should be, on their dogs. You may feel as if you’re missing a large piece of the communication because you can’t see a student’s reaction to what you are saying; let human body language—and actions—be your guide to whether the message is getting through. At first it may seem frustrating to need to be alert and on top of what’s going on in the workspace when you can’t watch everything with direct focus. With practice, however, your peripheral vision becomes better as you watch student/dog teams out of the corner of your eye or with an averted head.

For the dogs, of course, the rules are the opposite. Your goal for them is to make them feel comfortable looking at other dogs, strangers, or whatever triggers traditionally set them off. But when they first start out in Week 2, the best place they can focus is on their handlers—or on the floor.

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