21/10/2025
Letting Nellie make her own decisions lead to her settling herself down and feeling at ease in a busy environment.
That comes from patience and understanding, not constantly keeping our dogs entertained.
We can use food to teach our dogs more settled positions, which can help the brain slow down but the anticipation of reward won’t allow our dogs to settle fully. There’s where the patience comes in.
Knowing our dogs and what situations they can deal with is all about the understanding. We can’t expect our reactive dogs to be able to fully settle in a built up area until we have covered a variety of situations of varying distractions and difficulties and they understand the concept of self regulation around such stimulus. Best case scenario if we don’t prep our dogs appropriately is “flooding”. Where a dog suppresses themselves because they are overwhelmed. This is a dangerous path to walk at times because it can build up a lot of pressure in our dogs which can lead to more intense reactions down the line.
