Willow’s Training Diary
Willow spent a week staying with Honest Hounds founder Jessie in July. During her stay, Jessie wrote a daily diary of Willow’s challenges and how she overcame them and shared those in the Honest Hounds Education Zone. We have taken the first few days and compiled them here for you to read. The full videos and posts are available on the platform if you want to know more.
Who is Willow?
Willow hasn’t come to me for aggression or dog reactivity. Instead, her humans have recognised that her fizzy, intense golden energy has started to spill over into her being stressed… a lot. That stress is then feeding into their lives too, creating an increasingly small world for everyone. They want more for her, and they’re so dedicated to helping reduce her stress so they can all enjoy life more together. They have already done some great work and now we’re going to dive deeper into who Willow is and what she needs.
So why has Willow come?
Her humans want to:
Improve Willow’s confidence around other dogs
Reduce her fizziness in those situations
Build her general confidence and decrease her stress levels
These things are all connected. From the work we’ve already done together, it’s clear that Willow has a lot of feelings she doesn’t know where to put.
Her owners have been so dedicated and careful about doing the right things, but as a result she’s ended up under-socialised with dogs and a little over-friendly with humans. They’ve done so many things well, but the next step is about helping all of them feel confident in each other again so their world can open up.
To the untrained eye, her behaviours might just look like typical “cute” golden retriever energy, but her default is very much the fuck around stress response. That shows up as throwing herself on her belly, flighting to the end of the lead, zoomies, and having very little confidence in herself.
Whenever you take a dog in for training, there are always a number of small things to work on. But there’s also the bigger picture that underpins everything. For Willow, getting her off lead and helping her feel confident and calm around other dogs is a huge part of her puzzle.
This week we’ll be focusing on lots of things, but we’re lucky to have her humans staying nearby and meeting us each day so we can keep building on everything together. The big goal is to get everyone feeling confident enough to drop the long line and trust that Willow can make good choices.
The First Day
The first day is mainly setting routines in place and gathering information about the dog.
You can see from the video that Willow is very fizzy and doesn’t really know how to just “be.” All I did here was stop as we walked to see if she could spend a few seconds just hanging out.
Her humans have done a great job of starting to work on the Conditioned Relaxation so I will be using this as a base to build on but I really want her to just be able to hang out and not be full of fizzy, anxious energy.
She finds it very hard to be tethered currently and at home this has been leading to mouthing and chewing the lead. I added space today and we had a few moments where she laid down (these were reinforced) but this will be something we do each day too. I added in the social chewing aspect evening to help the task be a little easier for her (and to see how she found that).
The biggest thing I noticed today is that Willow is unable to just sit near you without clambering over you. The combination of needing the human validation and the need to control the situation is a real sign of stress and combines with the whole picture to present a girl who isn’t sure who she is in this world and the goal this week is going to be developing clear boundaries and clarity for her while also adding in lots of breed specific exercise and socialisation with her kind to help her see it can be cool to be chilled.
What a lucky girl she is to have such awesome owners who want the best for her. Looking forward to getting stuck into tomorrow!
Day 2
The first full day is all about establishing boundaries and routines. The whole point of “reset rules” is to strip things back so we can start to form new pathways for old behaviours. When I started my journey with Jess, after Atlas’s stay with her, she tasked me to take Atlas and do a long challenge together, explaining that it was a great way for us to bond and grow together, building resilience.
Leaning on this, I decided to start our day with a long run. Willow is really skittish around other dogs, loud noises and anything that she doesn’t expect, which is a good indicator of high levels of stress, her body is always in fight or flight mode. Because of this I felt like getting her moving and burning some energy would be a good way to help her feel more regulated.
Sure enough, after about 10k she had settled in and was far less “spooked” by noise and more comfortable when being passed by my dogs, other dogs and people. We did 16km in total, and by the end, she was trotting along with my dogs, having a blast, and it was so nice to see!
The “Yes But” Attitude
When we have a dog who is showing “anxious” behaviours, it can be really easy to let that be their identity, rather than seeing them as just behaviours and part of a bigger picture. We prefer to see it as lacking confidence and resilience; these leave us less focused on ‘anxiety’ as a label and more able to focus on the dog moving into a better headspace.
The other important thing is that two things can be true. Willow can be a little bit uncertain while also being very strong minded in other areas and there are a few signs I am seeing where she does a lot of “yes buts” and her signature move is to plant herself on the floor, belly up, and refuse to move. This has now become a habit and because it looks “submissive”, we tend to feel sorry for the dog - leaving them in that state.
The key example of this is that her owners mentioned that she was going to go out with the dog walker - something that would have benefited her hugely as such a fizzy girl, but they had to abandon the hope when she wouldn’t get into the dog walkers crate in the van. But every time we say “ok we won’t do that because you planted yourself,” we reinforce the option to dictate the situation and for her to be stuck thinking that getting in the van is surely the worst thing ever, when in fact it’s not a big ask and actually leads to much more fun. Plus this week, she has to get in the van, so we have to find a way to work through it which will help her build confidence in being able to do the tough stuff and she is now hopping in with much more confidence.
Some of the demanding behaviours I have seen:
demand barking when I put her in my van first and I’m getting my two in because she wants out.
Whining in her crate when she’s bored of being in there.
Whining because there was some food on the side she wanted to get to.
Leaning into me, excessively.
ZERO personal space, she will climb all over you if you’re sitting down and will not take no for an answer if you move away, or ask her to move.
Rushing out the crate, even when she has been asked to wait.
Recalling when it suits her but pretending that I am invisible when there is something more interesting even though I am attached to a flexi!
These little moments all add up each day to a very confused dog. She’s not a dog that wants to “lead” but she will still do her best to stick in what feels familiar.
Social Learning
The other thing we are working on is lots of social learning with my dogs. The downtime and uptime is very structured during a board and train but as Willow’s goals are rooted in lack of exposure too I am using time throughout the day to let her just ‘exist’ with Athena (note, this is still a training session and I am watching and reinforcing and always ready to step in if I need to). It took her a while to work out the game but eventually we got some co-napping together which was lovely to see her feeling safe enough to relax.
In the evening, we also went down to the beach to do a flexi lead walk and started to work on some recall with the vibration collar as this will be a good tool to give her humans some more confidence in dropping that long line as she can be easily distracted. Today was just about pairing it with her normal recall and food to get her used to the sensation so there will be lots more reps of that throughout the week.
She also had a brief little run and was sniffing the same spots with my two and then had a brief moment of play with Athena before she decided it was a bit too weird - here’s to that developing more!
For the rest of the training diary, join us on Honest Hounds.
