It isn't just the hallway at the training facility that is Azza's gauntlet.
It occurred to me while walking Azza and Skeeter this morning that every activity that I do with Azza outside of the house is like running a gauntlet. I have to be on continual alert for dogs, cats, sqwerls, foxes, deer, ground birds. I need to be aware of an array of inanimate objects, their current positions relative to the last time Azza saw them, or whether she has ever seen an object like that before. She is usually okay with individual people walking, running, and riding bikes around us, but if they are moving oddly or holding their arms in a strange position, that will be a problem for her.
I need to be ready to act: ask her for a displacement behavior (must have treat already in hand), increase her distance, or physically restrain/constrain her. Usually all three have to be applied at the same time. Not easy!
She displays anxiety and fear and its accompanying preemptive aggression but there are relatively predictable patterns to the behavior. And one of these patterns is that the episodes of stress are getting shorter. Her bounce back "muscle" is getting stronger: she is able to return focus to me and accept a treat sooner and sooner after the threat presents itself and is dealt with.
For example, she can now walk over metal sewer plates in the sidewalk without even hesitating or looking at them. After I dragged her across them for a couple of weeks, she at last learned a new command: walk on it. She can spot them quite a distance away since she's relatively tall and would begin to slow walk and drag behind as we approached one. Then she would gingerly step on them only after my verbal command "walk on it", skitter off them as fast as she could then look to me for a treat. Now she doesn't even appear to see them, doesn't even bother to give me an ear flick as she crosses them with a normal gait (I suspect given her heightened sense of alert that she knows full well they are there but she has decided that they no longer represent a threat that needs to be acted on). It took a full four weeks of rewarding daily gauntlets of multiple sewer plates to get her to this point. But the progress is real and documentable.
Eighteen months is about the time that predisposed dogs become overtly aggressive; the feral desert dogs are no exception. Azza has just passed that milestone. I can't detect any shifts in her behavior at this time--and we continue to run gauntlets every day.
5 comments:
Azza is SO lucky to have fallen into your household. There are very few people - in the world, possibly - who could be handling and training her so amazingly well, and gotten her buy-in on the whole thing. You are going to be a GREAT vet!!
Yay Azza, and yay you!
I agree. Azza should count her lucky stars for having such a great shot at life and learning how to enjoy it.
I'm so pleased she is doing so well and that she is proving to be such a good little dog. Boodle misses her, as does Nellie but they have become very good friends with each other which is lovely to see. He actually got nose to nose (and bum)with the stoats the other morning which proved to be a very happy meeting!
Hi there, good to see you are settling in so well. The first time Savvy put her brakes on at a metal obstacle, I couldn't figure out what was up with her til we approached it again. It's like it gives off vibes that we humans don't see. Lots of treats did the trick. Azza is very like Savvy but I think she is calming down a bit. Hates windy days! Good luck with everything!
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