Emotional Overload: When American Dirus Dogs Shut Down

Oh no!

What’s happening??

My skin begins to bubble.

I feel my body lifting off the ground.

My hands and feet quiver.

Short calloused hands and wide flat feet appear.

Deep weathered lines emerge on my face.

My long hair shortens into a buzz cut.

A pouch with many pockets filled with high-value food rewards materializes around my waist.

A clicker pops into my right hand… a slip lead into my left.

CLICK!

I have now transformed into…

duh… duh… duhn

“dog trainer mode”

Welcome to dog training class, everyone!

Now, let’s get started on today’s lesson: Emotional Overload.

…

An emotionally sensitive dog, like an American Dirus dog, can become overwhelmed by three different types of pressure:

1. physical
2. spacial
3. emotional

Physical pressure is the direct physical manipulation of a dog’s body. (i.e. pushing butt down to sit, tight leash, etc.)

Spacial pressure is the indirect manipulation of a dog’s body based on proximity to an object. (i.e. one foot away vs. twenty feet away)

Emotional pressure is the direct manipulation of a dog’s emotional state using body language or startling sounds (i.e. staring)

When training an American Dirus dog from the Dire Wolf Project, or any other emotionally sensitive dog, it becomes important to be hyper-aware of the dog’s state of mind in order to increase confidence levels in highly stressful environments and to minimize the various pressures that can cause a sensitive dog to shut down, leaving it unable to focus/perform due to increased anxiety.

In other words…

BE AWARE, DON’T SCARE!

And you must, build trust!

An emotionally sensitive dog can also associate a negative emotion with an unrelated physical object or space.

This is called: “superstitious association”.

Psychologist and animal behaviorist, B.F. Skinner, first described superstitious behaviors in experiments with pigeons in 1948. He set a feeding mechanism to trip at variable intervals that had nothing to do with the actions of the pigeons. The pigeons nonetheless started repeating behaviors that had been “accidentally” marked and reinforced by the feeder.

Negative or positive behaviors that are accidentally reinforced are called:

superstitious associations.

Say, for example, your dog is walking down the hallway when a poorly hung picture falls off the wall and shatters onto the hardwood floor. Your dog scampers away in fear. From that moment on, your dog is unwilling to walk down the hallway. It WRONGLY made a connection between “walking down the hallway” and “picture falling”.

This is superstitious association.

Any dog can develop these types of associations, but our emotionally sensitive dogs are prone to doing so.

At the same time, American Dirus dogs have excellent memories.

In other words, they don’t forget, especially when something has a high degree of emotion attached to it… either positive or negative.

SO…

Help your dog associate positive emotions when in stressful environments.

Exactly how to do this, with both puppies and newly rehomed adults, will be addressed in my upcoming Canine Culture Shock dog training series.

But you can watch an expert dog trainer, Tom Davis, build trust with an overwhelmed giant emotionally sensitive dog (not an American Dirus dog) that unfortunately found itself in a highly stress-filled shelter environment.

With patience and trust-building, he is able to completely transform this dog’s overwhelmed state of mind into a calm and secure one… all caught on video!

Here’s the link:

https://youtu.be/jxpQXvS-j3k

NOTE: Notice the frantic pacing of the working hound dog behind him and all of the excited barking surrounding the shelter enclosure. This type of environment is typical of shelters and is THE reason why we personally retrieve any American Dirus dog in need. Our emotionally sensitive dog breed would mentally break down in a stressful environment like this.

Jennifer Stoeckl is the co-founder of the Dire Wolf Project, founder of the DireWolf Guardians American Dirus Dog Training Program, and owner/operator of DireWolf Dogs of Vallecito. She lives in the beautiful inland northwest among the Ponderosa pine forests with her pack of American Dirus dogs.