*INSTANTLY* Improve Dog Training Results By Managing Dog Threshold
if you don't understand what I'm
going to explain in this video, it's going to be extremely difficult if not
impossible to properly train your dog. Okay, that might have been a little bit more dramatic
than it needed to be, but keeping your dog under threshold is so important during training that
you really do need to understand this concept. I'm going to do my best to explain dog threshold
in a really easy to understand and entertaining way. Let me ask you a question: has your dog ever
“lost it”? Something happened and your dog either completely shut down, they tried to run away, or
they began barking and lunging like mad.
If so, you likely found yourself in a situation where
your dog's threshold was exceeded. What does that mean and why should you care? In this video I'm
going to answer a bunch of questions including: What is a dog's threshold? How does a dog act
when they're over threshold? Why can't you properly train a dog when they are over threshold?
Why shouldn't you punish a dog for going over threshold? What affects a dog's threshold? Why
is threshold incredibly important for setting up successful dog training? And lastly, what
should you do in the moment if your dog does go over threshold? Understanding all of that
will dramatically change your dog training and vastly improve your results, so I hope you stick
around! What is a dog's threshold? If a stimulus is strong enough that your dog has noticed it,
but they haven't had an emotional response, we say that their threshold hasn't been
exceeded.
Over threshold is exactly as it sounds. The trigger is strong enough that the
dog is now in distress and they're reacting rather than thinking. The dog reached a tipping
point and they crossed it. Okay so I often tell clients is to picture a door threshold. Here I'm
standing in my hallway, here I'm at threshold therefore I'm straddling the two rooms, and
here I'm in the bedroom. For a dog's threshold, you're instead moving from one emotional state
where the dog is emotionally coping, to another where the dog is no longer coping.
How does a dog
look when they're over a threshold? I frequently get asked how to know if a dog is over threshold.
It's a common misconception that when a dog goes over threshold they will always be barking,
lunging, growling, or trying to bite. Those are the behaviors that we say are at the top of the
canine aggression ladder. To be fair these are the signs most commonly noticed by dog guardians and
they are a sign that your dog is over threshold, but they're not the only ones. Something that I
commonly tell people to look out for is if your dog is showing disinterest in food rewards when
that dog is typically highly food motivated in other settings such as at home.
One of the common
arguments that I hear against force-free training is the dog isn't interested in treats during
training, and therefore force free won't work. I want to help you understand why that's not
true. I want to show you two clips of Louie who is one of my reactivity and aggression clients.
In this video we're working on reactivity to dogs and you can see that he's very interested in the
treat rewards that I have. Next, watch this clip. Even with me having the treat right in front of
his nose, Louie couldn't care less about it.
In both videos I'm using the same treat, so why is
there such a different response? I'm going to use spiders in my human analogies because they're
one of my biggest fears, but when you're picturing this please substitute whatever your biggest fear
is. That could be sharks, clowns, or even your mother-in-law. Normally I love donuts. Do you want
a donut? Thanks! If I'm offered one, I'm typically going to want it. But what if you offered me
a donut when there was a spider on my head? I would have no appetite.
If you moved that spider
to a distance that I could handle or you gave me a chance to move away from it, the interest in
the donut comes back. If your typically very food motivated dog is completely uninterested
in treats, the first thing I want you to ask yourself is if you're trying to train them when
they're already over threshold. Other signs the dog is over threshold can include: taking treats
frantically or harshly when it's out of care character for that dog, completely freezing or
pancaking, in some cases intense over excitement such as mothing, jumping, or zooming around in
a frantic manner, or an inability to get your dog's attention with methods that typically work
such as a loaded marker word.
Dogs are individuals and they display stress differently, so each
dog's over threshold will look a bit different. I often try to get my clients to think of their
dog's threshold kind of like their own personal bubble. Try to picture yours. There's a distance
that somebody can be from you where you would barely even notice them, a distance from you that
feels appropriate for comfortable conversation, “hey how's your afternoon? “Not bad, working
on my video!”, and a distance that is way too close for comfort. How we respond when somebody's
right in our face definitely differs. You might vocalize your discomfort with the person being
in your bubble, you may push them away to get a little bit more space, or may freeze because
you're uncomfortable.
Another way to think about this is that some people will scream when they're
scared on a roller coaster and other people will just freeze. Both can be equally over threshold,
but the outward response is different. Just like there's differences in human reactions, there's
differences in how dogs respond or show it when they're over threshold. Why can't you properly
train a dog when they're over threshold? When a dog is over threshold, they are in distress.
They're not properly thinking or processing. Let's say that you want to teach me a math equation
and for whatever reason you want to do that when there's a spider in the house. If that spider
is far enough away, I can still focus on what you're saying.
I can learn because I'm not over
threshold. I am aware of the spider, but I'm not having an emotional response to it yet. Now, what
if you again put that spider on my head? There is zero chance that I would be able to think clearly.
At that point I'm simply reacting. Imagine that as I'm flailing around trying to get it off, you
explain the math equation to me. How much of what you said do you think I'll remember and have truly
learned? Literally none because at that point my brain is too consumed by my emotional response
to the spider on my head. Dogs are no different. When a dog is over threshold it is not the time
to try to teach them anything.
This seg-ways into a side point: Why shouldn't you punish your dog
for going over threshold? Occasionally after I've given that analogy to clients, one might point
out that they have watched dog training shows such as Caesar and the dog was trained while over
threshold. This style of training always includes some form of punishment such as using a prong or a
shock collar, or harsh leash corrections. This is actually called suppression, and I'll link a video
in the description explaining why it's a bad idea. When your dog is over threshold and therefore
reacting accordingly, they aren't choosing to “be bad”. They're having an involuntary emotional
response. Think of the spider on my head analogy. You might freeze with terror if that happened
to you.
Personally I would be running around, flailing, probably cussing trying to get that
spider off of my head. If I said something in that time that offended you or if I accidentally
hit you I didn't do it intentionally; I'm reacting not thinking! You could somehow inflict enough
punishment on me for my behaviors that I learned to shut down while the spider was on my head.
At that point you have suppressed my response, but not the emotions that I'm feeling.
I'm still
terrified of that spider, even if I don't feel like I'm allowed to show it. A dog's reaction
while over a threshold is them showing that they cannot handle the situation that they're in.
Punishment may prevent them from displaying their emotions, but it does not actually improve
their emotional state. It's really important to recognize that. Punishing a dog's response to
going over threshold is like taking the batteries out of a smoke detector during an active fire and
thinking to yourself “There, I fixed it!”. No, you did not. You only turned off the warning
signal. The fire is very much still there. Using punishment to train a dog might make for what some
people consider entertaining TV, but it isn't good dog training because you're not addressing the
root of the issue.
What affects a dog's threshold? Let's continue using my spider analogy as a
substitute for a dog's trigger. Are all spiders created equally? No. Will all interactions with
spiders produce the same response in me? Also no. Why? There are obviously aspects that are going
to make it more or less likely that an encounter with a spider will push me over a threshold.
Let's look at some of those! How many spiders: one spider will scare me less than a cluster of
spiders.
The intensity of the spider experience: for example- is it a large spider or a
little spider? Is the spider stationary, or are they running towards me? [Music] Duration:
how long do I need to be exposed to that spider? Am I just walking past it for a couple seconds
on the sidewalk, or do I need to sit next to it for a long time? [Music] Familiarity: have
I encountered this type of spider before, and if so was the experience a good or a bad one?
Frequency: do I get a break to calm down between spider sightings, or is it a constant onslaught?
Trigger stacking: what kind of state was I in prior to the spider sighting? Was I relaxed or had
separate stressors already built up to a tipping point? Trigger stack in is really important,
so I'm going to make a separate video about it, but if you want to learn more now I'll link
a blog post that I wrote down in the video description.
And lastly, distance. This one is
very important. How far away from me that spider is has a tremendous effect on how triggered I'm
going to be. If you think logically about this, you can understand why all of these factors would
have a massive impact on your emotional state. If you encounter a tiny shark while you're swimming
versus a large one, you're going to feel much differently. Similarly, your mother-in-law being
in your home will put you in a much different emotional state than if she's far away at her
house.
Mean jokes about mother-in-law’s aside, you're here because you want to learn about dog
training. Let's review those Louie clips again so that I can point a few things out. Why is Louie
responding so well to the training in this video? The dog is at a distance that he's okay with,
it's small, and that dog is calm. In this clip however the dog is much larger, it both barked
and growled at Louie, and it was running towards him. It makes complete sense, especially when
he was just starting his reactivity training, that these two scenarios would affect Louie
differently. So how is threshold incredibly important to setting up successful dog training?
Let's say that I'm watching a movie and eating popcorn with my husband while there's a spider
in the room. The green, yellow, and red bars represent our emotional state. When the spider
is far enough away, we're both in a green zone. We're fine and we're focused on the movie.
I'm
aware that it's there, but I'm still completely okay. Then this spider moves a little bit closer
into my yellow zone. At this point my stress is rising and I lose interest in the popcorn.
when the spider moves into the red zone I'm done. I've entered the fight, flight, or freeze
stage. I want you to note two things here: first, me lashing out and killing that spider is
still a fear-based response. Sometimes when we're incredibly scared our response is try to
neutralize the thing that is scaring us. I've had a few people question whether their leash reactive
dog is truly scared since they try to pull towards the other dog. They've heard terms such as
domination or being the alpha, and they wonder if that's what their dog is doing. They are not.
Sometimes we feel that the best way to handle our fear is try to scare off, harm, or even kill the
thing that is scaring us. All of those are still a fear-based response. Die! And second, the response
is individual. My husband and I are being exposed to the exact same trigger, but our emotional
response to it vastly differs.
Likewise, some people have a fear of coins. If you were to give
me coins and put them in my hand, I would enjoy getting the money. For people with a severe coin
phobia however, this would be intolerable. The point I'm trying to make is that our fears aren't
exactly rational, so why would we expect our dogs to be? Diesel loves other dogs while his brother
Louie is scared of them. That's okay! Louie just needs a little bit of extra help to work through
those fears. Similarly, if I wanted to work on my fear of spiders with a therapist we would do it
in a progressive way dictated by my comfort level. This is referred to as desensitization and counter
conditioning.
With proper exposure training, we could improve my ability to stay in that
green zone despite increasing intensity. I used a similar gradual approach to get Louie,
who used to be reactive to dogs blocks away, to be okay walking right past or right with one on
the sidewalk. My tutorials for the next few months are going to feature many of my reactive and
aggressive clients. I want to show you the genuine training plans that I used to keep the dogs
under threshold while I worked on changing their reactions to their triggers. Hit subscribe on the
channel if you want to watch those. What if your dog is pushed over threshold? The more aware we
are of our dog's triggers and of the factors that influence threshold, the easier it is to manage.
However, we do live in the real world there's likely going to be moments that your dog is pushed
over threshold.
So, what should you do in those moments? First, recognize at best that this is
a learning opportunity for YOU to play detective and determine what happened, but it is not an
opportunity to train your dog. Instead, leave the situation and remove your dog from whatever
pushed them over threshold as fast as you can. I was in a setting that was difficult to leave when
I saw the dog coming, so I did purposely film this clip with Louie to demonstrate his disinterest
in treats due to threshold. My normal advice is to just leave. Put distance between that trigger
and your dog so that they can cope.
Afterwards, take time to assess and reflect on what happened.
Can you recognize what caused your dog's reaction? Were there perhaps more subtle stress signs that
your dog was showing prior that you didn't notice? Was it trigger stacking? Play detective and try
to make a plan for next time. If your dog is going over threshold often and you can't seem
to puzzle together why, I do encourage you to find a qualified force-free trainer in your area.
Even if you only see them for a session or two, they can really help you read your dog's body
language and help determine what's going on. I've also included a few links for free or extremely
low-cost resources in the video caption that will help you understand more about your dog's body
language. If you've enjoyed this video, please leave a comment or hit like to let me know. If you
have any questions, leave those in the comments as well. I'll make sure to get back to them.
Happy training, I'll see you in the next video!.
