Help for Your Fearful Dog: A Step-by-Step Guide to Helping Your Dog Conquer His Fears

Help for Your Fearful Dog: A Step-by-Step Guide to Helping Your Dog Conquer His Fears | Nicole Wilde | A great book

books:

Help for Your Fear...

	Help for Your Fearful Dog: A Step-by-Step Guide to Helping Your Dog Conquer His Fears Nicole Wilde Phantom Publishing, 2006 - 432 pages average customer review:based on 34 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

A Must Have if you have a Fearful Dog

Nicole sent me a copy to review months ago and I've owed this review for a number of weeks.

I have two fearful dogs and I love this book! Nicole breaks down what a fearful dog is versus an aggressive dog. We learn how to break down our dogs fears into recognisable signs and levels so that we can keep track of our dog's progress. She shows us the kind of charts that she used for her dog as well as client dogs.

Anyone who has read any of my other reviews knows that I love pictures and this book as plenty of them!

The book is broken up into three sections. There's learning up front on what to look for, some on nutrition and exercise. Then we learn about skills that we need to train our dog to have to be successful in carrying out the last section of the book - the various guides to dealing with specific fears.

As someone mentioned, Nicole also goes over medications - prescribed and alternative that you can use with your dog.

We enjoyed Nicole's visit discussing this book at CSDogBookReview in December 2006.

for more information click here

A great book

Nicole's book is a comprehensive manual for anyone who owns (and works with) fearful dogs. She outlines basics of desentization and counterconditioning, training, as well as complementary "alternative" approaches to help the dogs learn how to trust their owner and environment again. Once the dogs can trust that they'll be safe, then they can relax - and I am seeing this with my dogs as we are working on the concepts outlined in this book.
As for Lee Charles Kelley's review, to let the dog bark at his fears to cure him, I mean please, how ridiculous is that. Cursing at the spiders won't cure my fear of spiders. The methods outlined in Nicole's book are working for my dogs and me and we're having fun to boot!

for more information click here

A great book handles a difficult topic.

As a dog trainer and behavior consultant who has read all of Nicole's books, I say once again, "Brava, Nicole!" to this most recent addition to my library. What makes her work especially appealing for me (and for my clients, to whom I'm referring the book) is her clear organization of material and straightforward, upbeat style. Let's face it: this is a daunting and highly misunderstood issue for many humans who live with fearful dogs. Nicole addresses the subject with deference, yet offers comic asides where appropriate. Thank you, Nicole, for your generous insight, compassion and humor.

for more information click here

Fantastic

I loved the book! Nicole did a great job explaining a difficult topic. Her book is easy to read and yet comprehensive. I'm using the techniques with my own fearful dog with wonderful results. I highly recommend this book for readability and it's approach to problem solving.

Useful but too Ideological

Owners of fearful dogs often have a difficult, dispiriting time with their pooches. They want to soothe and calm the animals they love, but many of them have been told that it will make the dog more frightened overall because kindness and affection will only reinforce the poor dog's fears (which is true, sort of*). It's a tough situation to be in. I know. My dog used to have full-blown panic attacks. He'd react with terror to any little noise he heard on the street (though he was fine in the park).

How did I get him over it? I'd love to report that I did it by using the methods Nicole Wilde discusses in this seemingly comprehensive and all inclusive book, but sadly they didn't really work. And I tried them all, believe me. Back when I was going through my "Karen Pryor phase" I was very gung-ho for all behavioral science techniques, until I gradually discovered they really weren't very effective. This is sad, because I'm sure the techniques Wilde espouses actually DO work with some fearful dogs some of the time. If so, more power to those who succeed with them. My problem with the book isn't with the techniques themselves. Most of them are harmless, they're just more ideological than really useful.

Wilde is in the "positive training" camp, which is the latest fad in dog training. Granted, the so-called modern, "positive" approach is a heckuva lot better than the old, fear-based model of training. But from what I've observed "positive" trainers tend to focus too much on external behaviors, they overuse extrinsic reinforcers (like food), and they don't understand the underlying, emotional cures for fear.

To give you one example of how emotions can help your dog, years ago, when my Dalmatian Fred was having his panic attacks, I had a conversation with the owner of a Sheltie named Duncan; his dog had been frightened of thunderstorms but had gotten over it.

"How?" I asked.

"One day he barked at the lightning and that's the last time he was ever scared of thunder."

Brilliant, I thought, then applied that idea to Freddie during one of his panic attacks. I'd already trained him to "speak" on command, so the next time he got terrified by a sudden noise, I gave him the command. As soon as he barked his tail and ears came up, he relaxed, and was no longer frightened. Is this technique mentioned in Wilde's arsenal of positive training tricks? No. Presumably because it wouldn't fit her ideology, which is that you need to address the dog's "triggers", the stimuli that spark his fear response, and start making positive associations with things that normally frighten him. Believe me, I tried that approach with my dog. I've had numerous clients since then who've tried it with their dogs, and we all found out it didn't work very well. What DOES work is giving a dog the necessary emotional skills to fight back against his fear. Barking was one of them.

Some other techniques Wilde doesn't mention: Fasting the dog for a few meals to increase his prey drive (which again, gives the dog the skills to fight his fears, and which is what finally cured my dog of his panic attacks entirely). Or making the dog push into you while hand feeding her, which also builds her drive/confidence. Or getting the dog to chase you around the yard or the park. Or rolling over on your back and letting her jump on top of you and bite your nose (the way a papa wolf builds confidence in his pups). Wilde does mention tug, which is probably the closest thing to a dog training cure-all there is, yet only gives it a few paragraphs, and gets one of most important rules wrong: she says you should SOMETIMES let the dog win when the fact is, tug works best when you ALWAYS let the dog win, and praise her enthusiastically for winning. All of these natural, emotionally based methods (except tug) don't gibe with the treats for tricks mentality of ideological trainers, but they're all extremely useful in curing fear and panic. And they always work. That's because the natural emotional benefits of a strong prey drive--not teaching the dog about "consequences" or that you "control the good stuff" or "desensitizing him to emotional triggers"--is the real mechanism for all learning in canines. And because giving the dog a positive outlet for his aggression will always cure his fear. Always.

Kevin Behan, author of NATURAL DOG TRAINING (which is a book I DO recommend, and highly), has been using this approach for over thirty years. I've been using it for close to fifteen. (Fred may have been the first dog to benefit from my use of the natural approach, but he's not the only one--far from it). And we've both had great success in treating all forms of fear, panic, and anxiety, without resorting to the use of drugs, as most ideological trainers and behaviorists do far too often. (Wilde devotes a section of her book to the "benefits" of drugs.)

Don't get me wrong; you may find HELP FOR YOUR FEARFUL DOG beneficial. It's fun to read, well-written, and in some ways very informative. Still, some of Wilde's suggestions, while seemingly positive, can actually CREATE fear-based behaviors in dogs. Puppy classes are a perfect example. It would never occur to an ideological trainer that there could be anything wrong with a puppy class, but I'm constantly working with dogs whose fear problems developed because their owners put them into a "positive" training class before their pups were emotionally developed enough for training. Wilde also neglects to mention the growing evidence that clicker training can cause hyperanxiety in some dogs, and that there may be a direct correlation between use of the clicker and food-related behavioral problems such as uncontrollable scavenging and counter-surfing. (And even though her view of a dog's "socialization window" has been de-bunked and is now outmoded, it fits the "modern" ideology so it stays in.)

Take heart, though. If you buy this book and religiously apply these methods and they don't work, don't despair. It's not due to a flaw in you or your dog, it's due to a fundamental flaw in the "positive training" mentality, which is more focused on ideology than on what's good for the individual dog.

Lee Charles Kelley -- MWA, DWAA

*The real reason soothing doesn't work isn't that it reinforces the fear, per se, it's because it "infantilizes" the dog, and prevents him from learning how to successfully fight his fears on his own.

for more information click here

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, page 6, 7

products you might be interested in