Three Essential Tips for helping your excitable dog today

Here’s three questions to ask yourself if you are struggling today with an excitable dog

Every day I work with pet parents to help them with their over-excitable dog. These are often teenagers or puppies, sometimes new rescues, but whatever they are, one thing is for sure ... that they can be a handful! 🐶

• They are pulling.
• They are bouncing.
• They are lunging.
• They are barking.
• They are being a right pain in the backside and an embarrassment.

Any of that sound familiar?

You know your dog is okay with other dogs / people / children … but that’s not what it looks like as you hang on for dear life as they are trying to drag you across the road like Geoff Capes dragging a truck in the world’s strongest man.

It’s hard work, the normal training everyone else seems to find works does not seem to work for you, and frustration is growing.

Take a breath!

It’s not great, but it’s very normal. It’s usually a mixture of training issues, breed traits, habits and overwhelm. It will probably take some time to work through, but it is possible and I work with clients every day with these sorts of challenges.

Three Essential Self-Check Questions

Here's a breakdown of what I often see and some tips on how we might tackle the issues:

Are you setting up for success … or failure?

If you take your bouncy teenager down the to a busy beach and want him to be calm, you KNOW what is likely to happen. Water, birds, other dogs, picnics, balls … it’s often too much.
These sorts of places can be quite exciting or overwhelming, and you may end up practicing habits that you really don’t want to happen such as calling your dog knowing they won’t come back.

Instead …

✅ Think about where you go and how you and your dog will cope and you will cope. If you want to practice recall, find a safe space, set yourself up for success, build up difficulty slowly. If you want to go out and let your dog have a blast, and it’s safe to do so for you and other beach users … then of course the beach can be a great place to go.
 

Are you getting frustrated?

Easy done, because one of the most common emotions that clients cite when their dog is struggling is frustration. The most frustration I see with clients is when they ask their dog to do something and they don’t respond.

Within a nano-second, the dog is asked again to do the behaviour “sit, sit, SIT, SIT DOWN!”.  Honestly, if we repeated cues that quickly with our family we would be looked at like we were bonkers.

I mentioned earlier about overwhelm. I see it all the time and it’s the easiest way to describe what is going on with our dogs … and it happens to us too.

Instead …

✅To get the best results from your dog, allow them time to process what you're asking from them. In fact, why ask anything until they have taken in the world around them and managed to disengage themselves. I spend a lot of time with clients waiting for dogs to process, and sometimes it takes a while. Yes, it may take time before they get right. So be sure to go slowly and stay positive.
 

Are you forgetting your training ‘in the moment’?

When we get stressed, sometimes our training goes out of the window. All those things that we have practiced seem to disappear  - we tighten the lead, we repeat things, we shout or our voices go so high that bats could hear us!

Sometimes all it takes is to take one step from the training area into the real world and clients change. They become more controlling, and it think a large part of that is about their own feelings of safety in that moment.

Instead …

✅ Simply breathe, take a moment, compose yourself. Take one step into the environment and pause and practice. That might be enough to start with. The more you practice your own behaviour and allow your dog to join in, the more likely you will be able to keep calm in these moments.

The simple fact is that these sorts of dogs can be hard work. I’ve been there with my own Labrador, Ben, whose energy levels seemed to be off the scale. It is easy to rise to that energy, but often that just puts you on a ride where it feels like there is no way to get off.

You will often see me on training walks with clients in the small town that I live. We walk slowly, we stop, we chat, we practice, we leave. These are 10 minutes sessions and then we go to process what we have experienced. It’s enough for the humans, let alone the dogs.

Then a few minutes later, if appropriate, we pop out again. Both the dogs and the humans are more relaxed with the experience. We are able to take in more information, observe better, help our dogs more. Praise replaces nagging. It’s wonderful to see.

Do you recognise yourself in any of this? If you do, don’t think there is no solution, get in touch and let's chat it through. 💕