A wise man once said, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’.  When we see other humans in fear, particularly children, our hand goes out to comfort them, to tell them it will be alright and try to make the fear go away.

Well, the same doesn’t apply to dogs because your dog always relates to the current situation they are in. And that is precisely how positive reinforcement training works.

To our dogs, ‘affection’ is a reward. By comforting a fearful dog, you are rewarding the dog for what it is doing in that moment…which ideally is being scared. So basically, you have rewarded the dog for being scared. You can neither explain the dog that they shouldn’t be scared, nor can you let them know that the fear would go away and it won’t hurt them. Let’s understand that dogs don’t have reasoning power, all they can associate at that point in time is that the pet parent is being affectionate, or they are being rewarded for being scared. Hence your dog assumes that you want them to be scared.

Nervousness can seemingly come out of nowhere and become a pressing concern. You love your dog and all you want is to see them happy but seeing them dealing with nervousness and anxiety can be quite upsetting.

Fear, anxiety and nervousness in dogs are common behavioural problems seen in many city homes.  The cause of nervousness vary from dog to dog. While some of the causes are genetic but a majority of the time it is created by the family members themselves. This is what we call as ‘Behavioural Nervousness’.  It’s very taxing to handle such a dog and my heart goes to the family members but trust me the key is to show ‘patience’ to help your dog through its issues. As it is rightly said that patience is not the ability to wait, but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting.

Seeking help from a professional trainer will help you in several ways – as a parent, you learn and understand a measured approach to gain and improve your dog’s confidence and reduce the level of fear and nervousness.  And the bonus is you get a well-structured, positive approach to help your dog build its confidence.

Obedience Training is fun. It builds up your dog’s confidence as it lays a good foundation for your dog to look to you for direction when it is unsure.  In addition, desensitization and counter-conditioning play a major role too as we use positive methods to change the dog’s emotional and physiological reactions from fear to happiness.

When your pet turns off his calm mode and flips his hyper switch, you’d swear and wished that you shouldn’t have seen it…they would rip every corner of the the house, flip around things, bang themselves into every human and goes wild eventually. ‘Fear’ starts to have a different name suddenly. A very hyper dog can be frustrating at times, but we need to understand that he’s not doing this to put you against the wall. Their behaviour needs a modification and you can correct it.

‘Energy’ is always referred in a positive context but in this case, too much energy is the core reason! For a city dog, a 15 minute poop walk is not satisfying enough to burn his energy. The reason they become destructive indoors and uncontrollable outdoors is because of the burst of chemical reactions in their body which triggers them to act in a hyper manner. Although hyper behaviour indicates boredom but is not always the case. Sometimes a stimulus can also be the reason…like watching another dog going out for a walk from the window, or kid’s playing football, birds chirping etc.. The stimulus arouses your dog and they don’t know what to do and hence reacts in an unfriendly manner.

Now when all of this behaviour goes uncorrected, the dog is under the impression that they are behaving in the right way. In such cases, we need to deprogram the dog of all the unwanted behaviour and reward them for the wanted behaviour. We always feel that rewarding is showing love to our pets but trust me, rewarding at the right time is the key. Simultaneously as a pet parent, you would also be trained to judge their body language, needs and how to correct them from this unwanted behaviour indoors and outdoors.