In this workshop, I’ll share an additional layer to behaviour plans we have developed and piloted over the past 3 years focussed around practical strategies to give dogs agency, a feeling of control over the environment. This is one of the most impactful changes in behaviour plans we’ve made in the past few years. I’ll be explaining the science as well as showing you practically how to do this with dogs and where these strategies would sit in a behaviour plan. This learning impacts: 

• Reactivity transformations
• Working with anxious/worried dogs
• All dog / puppy training
• Building out confidence and learning to new environments 

One of my favourite topics is the science of judgement bias — the characteristic of individuals that influences whether they perceive an event to be something to worry about or not — and how this influences behaviour problem development. We’ll be diving into the three broad ways you can grow optimism in a dog and how this can send ripples through the dog’s life and transform their behaviour for the better. 

Pressure-sensitivity in interactions with owners is one of the most relationship-challenging struggles for pet dog owners and is also one of the most common struggles experienced in dog sports. This presents at a low level as dogs not engaging in training interactions or becoming worried about interactions through to the extremes of dogs that appear shutdown, are unable to eat in the presence of people and even refuse to come into the house. This talk will have huge lightbulbs and takeaways for pet dog owners, professionals, shelter teams and dog sports competitors. 

In this session, I’ll share the toolkits you need to:

1. Be able to train and modify the behaviour of pressure-sensitive dogs
2. Prevent dogs from becoming pressure-sensitive in the first place
3. Transform pressure-sensitive dogs into robust, real-life ready companions 

An underlying driver of so many behaviour struggles is the dog’s internal arousal regulation system and how fine-tuned it is (or not!). Many dogs go through life having BIG responses to small events, skyrocketing from 0 to 100 in arousal level. This creates struggles as benign as overexcitement and boisterousness through to more serious consequences such as reactivity, explosive panic and even seemingly unprovoked aggression. In this talk, I’ll dive into what this is, why it happens and, most importantly, what to do about it in a very practical way. You can teach these dogs to develop an internal dimmer switch rather than a light a switch and I’ll show you how. 

One of the most challenging bottlenecks of progress in reward-based training and behaviour is when there has been a long history of rehearsal of the behaviour struggle or it’s very hard to limit rehearsal while the plan is taking place. Examples include…

• separation anxiety plans where the dog still needs to be left home alone before they are ready
• creating calm and appropriate walking behaviour when a member of the household insists on taking them out and playing crazy fetch with them
• a necessary vet visit when the dog’s cooperative care skills aren’t yet ready

And this is to name just a few common scenarios that crop up that otherwise would be complete roadblocks without a solution. That’s where heroes and villains come in and that’s what I’ll be diving into in this talk and giving you everything you need to be able to work with them!