22/05/2026
Emotions infect backwards through time. So events which preceeded an unpleasant experience can become affected by the same negative emotion. Why does this matter when we are trying to address a behaviour issue? It matters because purely adding positive reinforcement into the environment in which the original aversive experience happened will probably fail. This is why we will usually start addressing an issue in a different environment. Sometimes this can be seen by clients as 'avoiding' the issue, which is far from the truth...we are purely changing the environment to make emotion change possible before gradually moving back to the original environment.
A recent example of this is a lovely young labrador that I have started working with. He has become reluctant to get out of the car at his normal training venue, probably due to being startled by a loud noise shortly after leaving the car. He has even picked up on cues that this is a 'training' situation (training vest etc). His lovely owner is committed to working through this to help him learn to trust her that it is safe to leave the car. So she has started training in a different venue, doing a different activity, not even putting training vest on. At his first session he was very worried about leaving the car, once he did manage to get out he had fun with some no pressure training. Second session he was still worried but less so, managed to exit the car more quickly, we played some games of 'get in the car...get out of the car' then again went and did some fun training. I'm looking forward to the day when he is completely relaxed and enthusiastic about leaving the car for training.
Sometimes we have to back pedal on our long term goals in order to move forwards. Sometimes we have to shift environments to help our dogs, rather than being single minded about confronting an issue head on in the original environment.
