I would like to talk about a case I worked on recently and what we did for this dog that seemed to be helping make huge improvements.
If your dog is reactive at windows or fence lines to cars pulling up to your house or guests arriving than I hope that this article and instructions helps you work through your dog's reactivity. If you get stuck at any point or feel your case might be different than this particular situation consider signing up for the coaching program level and I can help build a systematic approach that fits your circumstances.
First things first we did an assessment and initial consultation to start building a program.
Virtually, I watched as the pet parents set up a situation where they pulled a car into to the driveway. The dog went 0-60 barking to the front door. Then continued to leap at the door barking continuously. We confirmed that it was indeed the car that was triggering the barking hysterics by asking if there was any vehicle that could come up the driveway without triggering the dog. It didn't matter if it was the dog's family vehicle or a stranger he had the same reaction for both.
The dogs reaction would change when greeting the person after the car was parked but the reaction the vehicle remained consistent.
Once I felt we had a good understanding of the dog's trigger and the reactions were predictable. We could move to the second step of implementing management.
I want to pause here to mention that this particular dog and pet parents were already doing a phenomenal job of meeting this dogs needs and offering quality enrichment. They did lots of nose work games, fetch, and trick training. They took hikes and walks when they could and had already worked really hard to overcome his reactivity around people when out and about. The problem was now only at home.
Management to reduce all reactions to cars will look different for your home but this family got really creative! We implemented a plan to avoid having people drive up their driveway unannounced. They are lucky enough to not get many visitors anyways so it was easy for them to just plan accordingly when guests were coming over.
We found that being spontaneous about how guests arrived had some positive benefits of avoiding the barking outburst but also keeping this dog from getting into a rut. In a sense making him work through his coping skills when presented with novelty. This was done by taking the dogs for a walk and meeting the guest at the bottom of the driveway then walking up together. Taking this dog out back on leash to potty while a car pulled up to the front of the house. Putting him in a car and driving him down the driveway to meet the guest and driving back together.
The end goal was to avoid any reactive behavior by making the vehicles arrival look dramatically different than it had in the past. This effectively broke the behavior contingency that previously generated the unwanted barking fit.
With the reactivity and behavior rehearsal under control through management we can start to re-introduce the original trigger through systematic training set ups.
For these training sessions you will need a helper willing to be on the phone with you and drive up the driveway. If you are looking for a helper you might be surprised by the responses you get if you just ask around. Don't be shy. I have seen local facebook groups supply people with plenty of willing helpers. Or maybe a 16 year old is looking for some extra cash and you can pay them a small sum to help you for an hour.
For this particular training protocol we don't use treats. I do recommend recording your sessions. Not only can KAS give you feedback on your session but you can review the footage and use it to prepare your next training session.
Training sessions will consist of a number of repetitions looped together. (This process is called looping, go figure.) Each rep is a single trial of the car approaching and retreating.
Here is the template we used for 1 rep in our 10-15 rep training session.
Car begins driving up driveway up to 15 MPH [⏱️START TIMER]
Car stops 15 feet after Marker 1
Pause for 10 seconds
Car reverses down drive
Car reaches the base. [⏱️ STOP TIMER]
Take a 1-3 min break. Remember to not rely on the dog's behavior to dictate how long the brake is. You can wait for a subtle let down but if that doesn’t happen within 3 minutes keep going.
(Underlined text means it changed rep to rep. Continuing with the theme of spontaneity.)
You will see we mentioned marker 1. During our assessment phase the pet parents placed markers on the driveway at vital points. In dog training lingo these markers are known as Thresholds. Our goal is to move them back all the way to the house. To move them you will want to re-assess their locations once a week or every two weeks. The dog determines where markers are placed, NOT YOU!
During assessments you will have the vehicle approach at a slow speed or speed you feel is comfortable for your dog. You want to be able to tell the vehicle to stop precisely when needed so if they are going too fast you might trip past threshold. The driver could get out and mark the point in the driveway where you said stop instead of where the vehicle stopped to avoid putting the marker too far. A poorly placed marker could dampen your progress and may be one of the issues with the protocol.
The dog is in charge of where those markers are placed! While preforming an assessment you will watch your dog closely for any sign of alert or reaction. In this dog's case he would twitch his ears, then throw his head up and look around the room, if you looked closely his eyes were wide and showing some white. Following this signal he would explode into barking. We placed the markers and stopped the car where his ears flicked. Marker 1.
When working through a desensitization protocol such as this it's important to remember to take days off! Rest is critical for learning. It can be tempting to push your dog every day even multiple times a day but please resist the urge to do this. More is not necessarily better. Your dog needs to fully recover from the stress of the training session.
A well designed protocol will have you thinking that your dog is fine because they seem so calm during training set ups. However, just because they are not reacting does not mean they are not experiencing stress. Learning itself is stressful so I encourage you to leave space for your dog to learn and rest.
On that note you also want to not push your dog each and every day. We want to toggle the difficulty of each session so that the dog doesn't begin to predict a pattern. Since we live in the real world where random things happen, people drive different vehicles and at different speeds. We want your dog to be prepared and resilient in diversity. Training at the exact same time of day, with the same vehicle, same speed, and windows closed you might be able to get the car to the house but the moment you have a guest try to drive to the house the training will fall apart. The dog learned the pattern for that particular situation and did not generalize the skill.
This is another reason why it's so important to change the distance to be easy, medium, hard and in unpredictable order. Change the speed of the vehicle slightly. Then tie in other variables. For this particular case we needed to tie in working with the window open and closed. We got a very different reaction depending on how much the dog could hear the gravel in the drive way.
There are so many personalized factors that go into a case like this so if you are struggling to build your own training program we can help you at the coaching level. I hope that this gave you some ideas about how to reduce reactions in your dog to cars pulling up to your house.
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