How To Train A Dog That's Reactive In The Car

On the latest episode of The Family Pupz Podcast, we asked the owner and head trainer of Sit Pretty Behavior & Training, Vanessa Charbonneau, what her training protocol would be to train a dog that exhibits reactive behaviors inside the car towards strangers outside of it.

Check out her answer above!

To learn more about how to train a dog that is reactive in the car, check out Vanessa's webinar, Chaos In The Car, here.

To listen to the rest of the conversation with Vanessa, check out the podcast episode below:

[TRANSCRIPT FOR THE VIDEO BELOW]

Family Pupz: Say management has gone well. You've reduced as much as you can to get them to stop practicing that behavior.

So let's talk training.

Let's say your dog loses it in the car. And as you point out, whining, growling, barking, lunging and biting at stimuli at the sight of any people nearby, let's say due to fear, let's say that is their trigger, right?

Taking into account they've done everything they can to manage the situation, as we just talked about, and make the lifestyle changes necessary. Could you take us through what your recommended training protocol would look like, for a dog like this, from, let's say, the first few sessions to, you know, graduation?

Vanessa Charbonneau: Yeah, if I've got a dog who's fearful of strangers, I'm really focused on that emotion, that fear. So in order for us to change this dog's behavior, we really need to address that fear, the underlying emotion, and we need to help them feel better. So not afraid of that person.

So that is my ultimate goal of those training plans is to help the dog be more confident and comfortable around those triggers.

Often times I will start these training plans, nowhere near a vehicle. So not in the vehicle, not even beside the vehicle. And we just single out that trigger of the person. And we start at a distance where that dog is comfortable and confident. And I always tell my clients, the dog needs to be comfortable and confident and relaxed every step of the way, or we are doing something wrong.

So we're not throwing the dog in a situation where he goes, “Oh, my gosh, there's a person, what do I do, what do I do? We're putting him in a situation where he goes, “Oh, that might be a person way over there. But I'm not really worried about it.” And we're starting there.

Once I've got some foundation work with people ,in general, so people, I'm starting to feel better about them, people are predicting really good outcomes for me, I have a different skill set that's going on here, then I might start to bring the problem context, the vehicle, back into the situation. And I might start to do that training in a parked vehicle.

So the person is still way, way, way, way, way far away. Usually, I've recruited a helper for this so that I can control what they're doing. So it's not people moving about willy nilly, I can tell them when to move, I can tell them how to move, how fast, and I start in a parked vehicle.

And once we're getting comfortable there, then we're going to shift our way back to the problem context of the actual driving of the vehicle.

Now, when we're doing training in a vehicle that is not parked, we definitely need to be recruiting somebody to assist us with that. So we need somebody be to be driving and somebody to be training because we cannot sacrifice our safety to accomplish that.

But once we've got some of that foundation work, so our dog’s feeling better about the strangers, our dog’s feeling comfortable watching strangers, when parked vehicle, it really starts to snowball, in a good way forward with a dog starts to generalize, “okay, people show up. I actually know what to do now. I feel pretty good about that. And I no longer feeling compelled to scare them away, because I don't really care that they’re here anymore.“

So I really peel it back to that base, the fear of the strangers, before I build it back up to that problem context.

Family Pupz: Yeah, yeah, I so want to highlight two points of what you were saying just to make sure that they really stick out.

Because, oftentimes, we can have almost like these two clashing ideas. Because what the person is saying is, “I don't care about anything else, I just need the barking and lunging and all these behaviors to stop”, whereas the mindset change and shift here is that we need to look at where those behaviors are coming from and all we need to care about is addressing this feeling, this underlying emotion, because once we do so, all these other things are just naturally going to dissipate as well.

Vanessa Charbonneau: Exactly. Yep. Yep, we have to address the emotion to address the behavior first. And I always tell my clients, you know, if we don't get rid of the fear, the dog is going to continue doing what it's doing, because it's doing it for a reason. And if that reason is no longer present, the dog doesn't need to react anymore.

Family Pupz: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the other idea of the training setups, and I feel like it's something that I just talk about all day, every day, because it does seem a little bit more of a foreign concept to actually, like, create that situation where you actually have someone come help you out and you figured out distances, you figured out ways to create these scenarios.

And this is where you start instead of thinking about, well, “let me just head out and I'm gonna, you know, try to work with the dog where we already may be a little more stressed, a little more reactive, we may not have paid attention to something or have no control over how the situation is actually developing”.

So really highlighting that idea of training setups and all the difference that it can make to a case is important.