Nobody wants to have a “problem dog”. It’s embarrassing to have a dog that reacts in public with barking, lunging and other behaviours that people are uncomfortable with, or who barks and jumps all over your guests. It can take a not insignificant emotional toll on the humans involved with such a dog.

There is also an emotional toll on the dog herself. She is the one who is living with her fears, and trying to deal with them in a world where the individuals who decide her fate do not speak her language. The dog is not choosing to be anxious, or to misbehave – she simply does not have the ability to cope with a given situation in the manner that we expect, or she does not understand what our expectations are. Next, she may panic, and she will then act out her panic (in the form of barking, lunging, biting, etc), unable to reason logically about what she does, or process the information from her environment.

At that stage, it is quite useless to try to tell her to ‘be quiet’ or to ‘behave’. She is unlikely to hear us, and she will certainly not be able to process what we are telling her. It would be like telling a person that is afraid of spiders to just “calm down and don’t worry about it” as the spider is crawling up her leg!

Dog training in general, and behaviour modification in particular, requires understanding, patience and consistency on the part of the owner and trainer. We need to be aware of our own feelings of embarrassment, as well as the possibility of increasing frustration. It is not easy to separate our personal feelings from the dog’s issues!