Your Dog Needs to Work Through Stress, Not Avoid it

No one likes to see dogs uncomfortable. It's human nature to want to comfort and protect nervous or stressed animals and even more so with our animals. In general, this is a great quality, but it's terrible for dog training.

Dogs are highly associative. This means they associate events and actions together very quickly. This is the basis of most of dog training. I say a word, you do a thing, you get a reward. The reward reinforces that behavior they are associating with the word until it becomes natural to do the behavior every time the word is spoken.

Of course, words aren't required for this either. Nearly every dog I've met knows how to get you to start petting it as soon as you stop for a second. They paw your hand. We start again and they get rewarded with more pets. We just trained them to ask for pets by pawing our hand. That might not be the desired association, but it's what we taught it.

With all that in mind, let's think about what happens in our dogs mind when we comfort them while they are stressed or nervous. They cower, shake, or nervous pant, and then we give them some "Awwwws" in our best baby voice and promptly give them all the snuggles. Instantly and subconsciously, the dog starts learning that it gets a wonderful reward every time it is nervous. It just learned that to get pets, it needs to be more nervous, not less.

This is the opposite of what we wanted.

We comfort our dogs in the hope that they'll learn to be less stressed, but the exact opposite happens.

So how do you get a dog to reduce its stress? Make the uncomfortable situation normal instead of novel. 99% of the time, our dogs have no reason to be stressed. Being alone or in a crate is not a problem. It's just part of existing. Behaving around other people, animals, and in chaotic environments is as well. The solution isn't to avoid those parts of life. It's to normalize them.

Step one is let the dog feel stress. Let them work through it and spend enough time around the stressor that it no longer has that impact anymore. Dogs can learn to self sooth just like we can, but they never learn that skill if we don't give them the chance to.

Step two is check your own energy. While your dog is stressing about some situation or object, how are you reacting? If you're nervous and anxious, your dog is going to notice and justify their negative response too. The dog won't realize what you're stressing about (the dog) and what its stressing about (that weird piece of concrete by the road) aren't the same thing. They just feel stress, see you stressed as well, and think that was the right response.

Your job is to act as normally as possible. I talk about leadership with our dogs all the time and this is another perfect example of why. When you're the leader and you're calm, the dog can check its response against yours and will start to realize it should get more comfortable. This process isn't instant, but it helps so much.

I'm currently working with a dog that is a little stressed in the crate when it's alone. What's my response? Act as normally as possible, and let the dog live in there as much as possible. She comes out for walks, food, and training, but outside of that, she's going to be in the crate until it feels as natural as her dog bed.

Before you worry that the dog is in prison instead of training, it gets many hours out every day, tons of interaction, and is constantly tired and ready for naps from all the training. If she wasn't in the crate sleeping, she'd be on the floor or in a doggy bed sleeping.

The more time she spends in there, the easier it gets. There are a few minutes of nervousness and then she settles down. And each day it happens faster and faster. By constant exposure and my neutral demeanor around it, she's learning that there isn't anything to be stressed about.

Stress for our dogs isn't a bad thing. They don't need medication or coddling. They need to learn to work through it and accept the non-threatening situation they are currently so worried about. Don't be afraid to expose your dog to stress. That's how it learns. Life is stressful for people and dogs alike and we all need to learn how to work through it.