Clean Run - September 2013 - 45

Busting the Myths

Dealing

Fears
with

By Silvia Trkman, photos by Maja Rokavec
Fears are never easy to deal with. But
what makes dealing with fears even
harder is the tons of bad advice out
there. One suggestion I’ve often heard
is to ignore the dog’s fear and pretend
nothing happened. But how would
you feel if you feared something and
couldn’t talk about it to your best friend
because she would act happy and ignore your fears? Wouldn’t it make you
feel better if the friend listened to you
carefully, offered support, and tried to
help you out of the scary situation if at
all possible?
Another solution often recommended
is to take the dog right back to what
scared him so he can see that it’s not
actually scary. But it is scary. Once the
dog gets scared, he is not in a perfect
emotional state to see that things
aren’t scary. That’s much easier when
you’re not scared already. I hear you
saying, “But, I did exactly that and my
dog was just fine.” Of course he was.
Most confident dogs without fear issues can easily be handled that way
and they will do just fine. When something bad happens in the agility ring,
like crashing into a tire or falling off the

September 13

| Clean Run

dogwalk, it’s usually the handler who
gets scared that the dog got scared. But
most dogs are in so much drive when
they run that they don’t even realize
they crashed into a tire or fell off of a
dogwalk, even if it’s really bad. With the
adrenaline rush that comes with doing
agility, they don’t feel the pain just yet.
So yes, they will be fine if you take them
back to the obstacle immediately. I did
that with my Samoyed and he was fine.
I could easily do that with La, Le, and Bi.
But Lo and Bu… yeah, right!
When something scary happens, it
doesn’t matter what I do for La, Bi, or
Le—they will be perfectly happy to
do it again. However, when speaking
about fearful dogs, like Lo and Bu, I
learned an important lesson: if they get
scared, they get in an emotional state
that doesn’t allow them to see things
are actually not scary. Asking them to
immediately go back into the situation
that scared them was always counterproductive, despite the fact that I was
shaping it (clicking for approaching
the object, rewarding away from it to
let them escape from it, not asking for
more than offered on their own, etc.).

The longer and more patiently I worked
on it, the longer they were rehearsing
what just happened. So I learned to
not even check if the dog is okay right
away, but immediately start a “party”
and make the dog extra busy with her
favorite tricks—do some tunnels with
Bu and keep her as busy and in movement as much as possible. I then avoid
the scary situation for a while. After a
couple of weeks, I try it again. By that
time, things don’t look so scary anymore and since the dog never had the
time to rethink what happened, he’s
usually perfectly fine with it.
I handle scary situations the same
way. I used to think that the best way
to make Bu feel confident in trials was
to keep her with me so she could see
it’s not scary. But it is scary for her. I
learned that what works best for her
is to respect her fear, keep her away
from the scary situation in a safe place
(preferably a car), and then bring her
out to run at the very last moment. I
keep her busy with tricks so I don’t give
her time to notice all the scary things
around her, run the course, and then
run directly out of the ring back to the
45
Clean Run - September 2013

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