Clean Run - July 2011 - 40

Control Unleashed Case Study
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Sound Sensitivities
By Leslie McDevitt Photos by Mitch Grabert My friend Sue was ready for a new agility dog and she adopted an adorable small Border Collie mix named Pepper from rescue. Pepper bonded quickly to Sue and was a real sweetheart, but her noise phobia crippled her, making it impossible for Sue to take her to classes or train her outside of her own yard. I have always said that people who haven’t lived with a truly noise phobic dog do not understand the tremendous impact it has on everyone who lives in the household. My rescue Pit Bull/German Shepherd mix, Gordie, was the first dog I met that merited a clinical level, full-blown noise phobia diagnosis. He was housebroken, but could not do his business outside if he heard a car or any other outdoor sound. If he was eating and heard a sound in the house (it could be something as inconsequential as my cat batting a piece of paper in another room) he froze and could not eat for hours. Forget it if he heard any kind of sound when I was training him. His nervous system went into a self-protective frozen state, full-body shutdown, nobody home. Before medication, his life was a series of scary noises and many other environmental threats. Like many dogs with noise phobia, he also had a generalized anxiety disorder; these two problems often go hand in hand. A lot of dogs are sensitive to noises; they may alert to sudden sounds, or a certain class of sounds such as booming or staccato noises—maybe even to the point that they don’t want to play after hearing that sound. This happened in the case of a friend who brought her Belgian Tervuren to a Europeanstyle temperament test at her national specialty. Her Belgian (that had the best temperament of any Belgian I know) failed because he did not want to tug with a stranger after having a gun fired near him (we believe he would have wanted to play ball with the stranger, but that wasn’t an option). I hate to imagine what these temperament testers would have thought of Pepper on her first night of my Control Unleashed class. Dogs like Pepper and Gordie, who have true noise phobia, literally cannot function after hearing a sound—and it could be any sound.
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Training Dogs with

Background
Sue was an experienced trainer and handler who had been to many agility camps, worked with great trainers, and understood how to apply their techniques. She worked long and hard on motivating Pepper to do agility and play outside the backyard. Sue went to classes at an agility club and spent a lot of time taking Pepper to different buildings and trying to tug with her and play motivational games. Sue’s timing was good and her relationship with Pepper was good. But Pepper could not tug after she heard a noise. So Sue had to endure the “you’re not interesting enough so Pepper is blowing you off” speech from well-meaning people. If Pepper did not go straight into freeze mode when she heard a noise, she went into panic mode, where she ran around in circles and could not be caught.
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People who misunderstood what was happening interpreted this as Pepper having fun racing around and not minding Sue. But no matter how hard anyone insists, you cannot motivate a dog out of having an anxiety disorder. Sue brought Pepper to my Control Unleashed class, where I teach off-leash focus and self-control to dogs going into sports training, so that I could observe Pepper for myself. The first night of class I had students set up their chair and bag of treats and toys, their crate, and a mat. Sue chose the station farthest from the front door for Pepper. Whether by design or not, she was one of the last to set up so Pepper was not there for the initial chaos around the door. Once Pepper got settled and we
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Clean Run | July 11

Clean Run - July 2011

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