The Importance of Proper Energy Before any Activity

Making sure your dog has the proper energy before he embarks on a difficult task such as walking through the neighborhood calmly is essential to any chance of success in this area. Take things in small doses and make sure your dog is calm before he even gets to put the leash on! It took me years after I started training dogs to learn this. I have four dogs or more at my house at any given time. Teaching my dogs that excitement gets them nothing and calmness gets them everything is the key to keeping dogs calm. Whether you are trying to teach your dog to walk at your side without lunging out at dogs or people or if you are simply looking for quiet behavior inside the house. Energy is the key. 

Excited Energy
Tense muscles, vocalizing, intense stare

Calm Energy
Notice the ears back, eyes are soft, muscles are relaxed. She still has good attention on her handler but she is not striving to make something happen quickly. This is good energy for beginning any activity with your dog.

We need to reinforce or reward calm and ignore excitement. I repeat, ignore excitement! Fussing at or yelling at your dog for being excited won't have the same effect. It might have some calming effect but it will not teach your dog to be calm to get a walk or a treat or anything else he is used to getting excited for. If a dog learns that you will put his leash on to go for a walk, give a treat, let him out into the back yard or let him up on the couch no matter how excited he is, he might get the idea that he made you do it by being excited. Dogs learn by analyzing what happens, before what happens happens. This means that your dog notices what he thinks (and is often right about), is cause and effect. If he is excited just before you put the leash on he may come to believe that being excited is what MAKES you put the leash on. Also, if he is excited before he leaves the house, how much more excited will he be when he gets outside with all the distractions around him. You always have no place to go but up. No matter whether you leave the house calmly or excitedly or anxiously, you will go up with all the outside stimulation. So why not start lower?

Set yourself (and your dog) up for success. What do you do just before you go on a walk? Do you ask Fido in a high pitched voice "Hey boy! Are you ready for a walk?!!". If your dog is prone to getting overly excited or not, that sort of thing will push him toward a higher more excited energy level. You might have trouble putting the leash on after asking him that. If you had just walked calmly to the leash without talking to him or giving him eye contact he might have just stood still and let you put the leash on him.

Well, maybe you have conditioned him to the leash being a source of excitement? If even the sight of you touching the leash causes his tail to go straight up in the air and for him to start whining, barking or pacing around or jumping, you need to go back to square one. Desensitize your dog to you picking up the leash.

Pick up your dog's leash many times during the day without acknowledging him at all. Don't look at him or talk to him. Just go pick up the leash. Mess with it a little and then put it down. Your dog will soon realize that picking up the leash doesn't always mean he has to get excited. It doesn't even mean that we are going for a walk. It might not even mean anything. If he remains calm you can quietly, without excitement, give him a treat or pet him calmly. Having the dog calm, not just still but truly calm with his heart rate normal, his tail down and his ears relaxed is the proper energy for your dog to have before he leaves the house. If you haven't accomplished this, you will not have success on your walk. This is the foundation for a great walk. There are other things to learn about the walk but this is the most important thing to fix before you even start to take your dog outside on a walk. Never put a leash on an excited dog or he will become more excited when he goes outside and it's all downhill from there.

How can we expect our dogs to be calm if we aren't calm! Calm can be taught. It is not just a genetic trait. It is a learned behavior too. In dogs and humans, we can change the walk, one human, one dog at a time!

Power Paws Dog Rehabilitation and Training Contact us at:powerpaws@live.com or 321-302-4142