Most pet parents have one or two things they wish their dog would stop doing. Maybe they bark at strangers, or maybe they are too eager to meet guests and jump all over them. When ever your dog has an unwanted behavior, and you want to replace it with a more appropriate behavior, counter conditioning is the training technique used.
Depending on what the dog is doing, desensitization is often paired with counter conditioning to help change the behavior.
How it Works
How counter conditioning works depends on what you are trying to achieve, and the emotional state of your dog. If your dog growls at strangers, it’s likely because they are afraid or unsure of them.
In this case, you know your dog’s trigger—seeing a stranger. You will want to desensitize your dog to strangers by letting them see a stranger from a distance your dog perceives as safe (even if that is a football field away) and rewarding them for viewing the stranger.
By pairing a stranger at a safe distance with a tasty treat, you’re countering your dog’s bad feelings (seeing a stranger) with good things (getting a treat.) Eventually, your dog starts looking forward to seeing strangers because it means they’re going to get a treat.
Eventually, you can close the distance. This is counter conditioning at it’s core.
On the other hand, sometimes we don’t want to change our dog’s feelings. If your dog is really happy about seeing strangers, but behaves inappropriately by jumping all over them, you’ll want to change their physical behavior but not their emotions.
In this case, the first step is to decide what you want your dog to do instead. Many people already know what they don’t want. Stop jumping all over people! Yet they don’t have a clear idea of what the dog should do instead.
In this case, we want the dog to sit politely to be greeted. Sitting is a great choice because sitting and jumping are not compatible—a dog can’t jump all over someone if they’re in a sit.
The first step, of course, would be to teach your dog a solid sit command and proof it as much as possible before introducing a stranger. We would then put the dog on leash so we can control distance, and show them that when they sit politely, the stranger will come and pet them, but if they don’t, they can’t access the stranger.
This quickly teaches them that the way to getting pets and adoration from guests is to sit, and that jumping and flailing around doesn’t get them what they want.
Key takeaways
Counter conditioning is the act of changing a dog’s behavior from an unwanted one to a desirable one. This can be done in a variety of ways such as desensitization and classical conditioning, or simply teaching a new behavior that cancels out the old behavior.
Similar Posts:
- Dog Vocabulary: Classical Conditioning
- Dog Vocabulary: Operant Conditioning
- Training Vocabulary: Extinction
- Dog Vocabulary: Barrier Frustration
- Training Vocabulary: Proofing
