You are walking your puppy when suddenly she puts on the brakes and flops to the ground. You tug on the leash, tell her that it’s ok, and finally drag her. When dragging doesn’t work to get her going, you pick her up in frustration and carry her. This scene is repeated every day at the vet’s office, the grooming salon, the pet store, getting into the car, going up/down steps, meeting a stranger and any number of other scenarios that trigger your puppy’s fear. You find that the more you drag her, the more you have to drag her. The more you have to drag her, the more likely that her small fear can develop into a phobia.

A technique used by a popular dog training tv show for fear issues is to use “flooding” on a dog. Flooding is a psychotherapeutic technique used by psychiatrists to immerse a person in their fear as an attempt to demonstrate that given enough time the person’s mind will not stay anxious and when nothing bad happens the person will calm down, thus realizing there was no reason for their fear. Let’s say you have a fear of spiders, so the psychiatrist locks you into a room with thousands of spiders surrounding you. You remain locked in the room until you no longer have a fear of any spider falling or crawling on you. This is flooding. This flooding technique, long ago tried by the dog training/behavior community, was also long ago abandoned by the majority of applied animal behaviorists because of the high probability of psychological repercussion. Whether used in the human or the canine world, flooding is NOT a safe and reliable technique for anyone to use on their dog but an applied animal behaviorist. In other words, the average pet owner (and television celebrity) should never use flooding. It has a high failure rate for most dogs, and can also intensify the fear. That fear can lead to fear aggression; fear aggression can lead to fear biting. It might appear to have short-term success, when actually it has triggered long-term behavior issues you have yet to see.

Desensitization and counter-conditioning, on the other hand, are highly successful techniques to turn fearful into fearless. Desensitization is a way to expose your puppy to low levels of her fear, at the same time she is being counter-conditioned to the fear by changing her association from a state of fear to a state of calm.

First you need to determine where the fear triggers. You don’t need to know what triggers the fear, but you do need to find WHERE she becomes afraid enough to refuse to walk. Maybe it’s near a trash can, a dog barking inside a house, a dog racing along the fence, the smell of the vet’s office, the commotion of the store doorway, walking through the parking lot, or the leap into the car. Again, it doesn’t matter what you think is triggering the fear. Only that you identify an object or area where she becomes afraid. Once you find that fear trigger, you walk her away from it to a spot that is safe; a spot that is just before the point she puts on the brakes. When she’s in the safe spot, she can look at the fear trigger without her brain going into such a state of stress that she can’t learn. Walk her to that safe spot, let her watch the trigger while you reward her with some treat tidbits, then walk her away from the trigger and stop for a few minutes. Walk her back to the safe spot and repeat the process. The more you show her that the trigger isn’t fearful, the closer she’ll be willing to venture until she sees that there is nothing to be fearful of.