Behavior Therapy for Your Dog

Most of the time you don't understand your dog behavior. It's always important dog owner should be familiar with some basics of dog behavior therapy.

Gentle training and extensive rewarding of behavior has a restorative effect on dog temperaments and behaviors that have gone wrong.

In this article, you will learn Behavior-Therapy techniques: Game-playing, Relaxation, Desensitization, Counter-Conditioning, flooding, and Reward-Punishment along with some examples of treatment of real-life behavior problems.

Relaxation

Relaxation benefits your dog in these ways:

(1) It helps to keep your dog free of emotional distress much of the time.

(2) It quickly relieves the dog of an unwelcome emotion whenever one comes on.

(3) When used with some treatments, such as the counter-conditioning of stressful events (a simple procedure that you can be shown how to do, if needed), relaxation accelerates the effect of the treatment.

Some calming techniques that you can do are:

You should speak with your dogs with soft and slow tone, softly stroking the dog about the ears, head, neck and shoulders, or wherever it gives the dog pleasure; an occasional brief simple, comforting, light touch of the dog's head or shoulder; a slow, light scratching of the dog's back; lightly hugging the dog.

Counter-conditioning

If a dog that is apprehensive or fearful in the presence of certain persons or dogs, can become friendly and be happy to see them using counter conditioning technique

The technique involves the Stimulus-association Principle. This principle says that when a stimulus event appears consistently just prior to another event in a setting, then the first appearing event will take on some of the values of the one that follows. As a result of the "pairing," a change comes about in how the dog perceives the first-appearing event. The dog's perception of the second event in the "pairing" procedure, however, remains unchanged.

For example, a gun-shy dog can be rehabilitated by having each low-level sound of a gun be consistently followed by a tasty tidbit or other attractive event.

The procedure also works when a dog's reaction to others is anger and aggression.

Desensitization

Desensitization is an adaptation procedure. The dog loses his irrational fear of a stimulus event if he stays in contact with the stimulus and nothing bad happens, and perhaps, something good may happen. The Desensitization work should begin with a low-level intensity of the fear event, then a gradual increase in intensity as adaptation progresses.

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Reward and Punishment

With this technique, the dog learns to repress some types of undesirable behaviors. Whining and excited barking are good candidates for this procedure. In this example, "quiet" is strongly rewarded and "noise" is substantially punished.

Physical punishment, however, should be avoided because it may add to any existing stress and anxiety of the dog. The punishment procedures that work well singly or in combination are "delay of reward," "loss of a chance to earn rewards," "penalty work" and "removal to a less attractive setting"?a cage, for instance.

Flooding

When other therapies fail to quickly rid dogs of anxiety, discomfort and fear of a particular aversive event, trainers sometimes turn to "flooding" the dog with the event that induces the emotional impairment. If the dog fears gunfire, a trainer might anchor the dog close to a firing range. Sometimes the treatment works, but quite often it does not?and when it does not, a dog may turn into an emotional wreck.

Obedience Training and Temperament

The quality of life of the dog is likely to improve after he undergoes some meaningful obedience training in a few basic behaviors, as Sit or Down, Stay, Halt, Come when called, Walk on loose lead, and minding his manners.

When these are brought under good control, the owner is more inclined to give him quality time?do fun things with the dog, exercise him on strolls, and take him along on away-trips, thus making him a happier, well-adjusted, and confident dog.

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