Course Details
Having one reactive dog in an otherwise calm household brings its own special challenges, where we juggle helping the dog who needs us most while also protecting the well-adjusted dogs' behavior from worsening. It can also be stressful when one dog is struggling, and that can affect everyone -- including you! You need strategies for managing the household, taking everyone out for walks and hikes, and making sure that reactivity isn't disrupting the whole family or worse, becoming contagious!
In this presentation I'll be going over how to support your reactive dog effectively and ensuring that the younger dogs in the house don't follow suit and the older ones don't get forgotten while they're quietly well behaved.
Reactivity can be challenging on its own, and it's time consuming to separate all our training, so let's explore ways you can meet everyone's needs and combine efforts while using the group dynamics for the best.
About the Instructor:
Amy Cook, Ph.D. (she/her) has been training dogs for over 30 years, and she has been specializing in the rehabilitation of shy and fearful dogs for over 20 years.
She is a Certified Dog Behavior Consultant through the IAABC (CDBC), a longstanding professional member of the APDT, and was one of the first trainers nationally to become a Certified Professional Dog Trainer (CPDT-KA) through independent evaluation.
Amy returned to school in 2006 to get her PhD in Psychology from UC Berkeley, where she studied attachment theory, child development, stress and the role of social support. Her own research focused on causal inference, olfactory navigation, and the dog-human relationship and its effect on the problem-solving strategies dogs employ.
She is the developer of The Play Way, a play-based therapeutic intervention for behavioral issues in dogs, and is the co-developer of The Social Approach, which emphasizes pragmatics and proxemics to promote conflict reduction and relationship improvement between people and dogs.
