The BIG Mistakes People Make When Training A “Shy Dog”

Welcome back to McCann Dogs. I'm instructor Robbie. Do you have a puppy that sometimes a little bit less than willing to engage with you or a dog or a puppy that sometimes freezes and isn't sure what to do or maybe they get worried about something and then they flee and try to leave town? Well that's this puppy right here. I first met this little puppy Diva who's an 18 week old border collie just three days ago and when I saw her she was very unconfident to say the least. She was lying flat on her belly and she was not able to move. She was not willing to move. She crawled over to me as if to say save me save me. She is a puppy who's actually looking for her forever home right now. She's a leftover puppy from a litter. All the other litter mates have found homes and are on their way but little Diva here has not found her home yet and I'm sure she will but I knew when I saw her that she needed a little bit of help so I volunteered to take her and just give her a little bit of life experience and what I want to do is I want to help her to build her confidence so that she can blossom into the wonderful little puppy that I know is living inside there. I'll bet you're thinking that the answer is to get this dog out here and do lots of socializing with her, meeting new people, meeting new dogs, going to lots of different places but that's not necessarily the right thing for this particular dog. She needs help and she needs us to build her confidence slowly. What I don't want to do is put her in a situation where she's overwhelmed and create even more feelings of anxiety for her. The first thing I need to do is I need to build trust. We need trust before we can build confidence. Once Diva learns that she can trust me it'll help her to become more confident not only in herself but in me as a leader. I want her to understand that I'm never going to ask more of her than I know she's able to give me. I need her to know that she can trust my direction and look to me when she's unsure about something. When I first brought Diva home three days ago she had very little interest in food lures and for the first couple of days we just spent a little bit of time getting to know one another and just hanging out no pressure. But now that she's becoming a little bit more comfortable with me what I'm doing is I'm starting to work a few exercises with her with some food lures to help her learn to be confident enough to move in close towards me. So I start just by showing her a little treat. When she's interested in the treat I back up a couple of steps. Yes. And then I reward her. Good girl. So that way she learns moving towards me is worth her while. Try her again. Show her a treat. Get her attention. Back up a couple of steps. Yes. Good girl. Awesome. And just that in itself moving towards me. Me standing over top of her. I'm a tall person. That can be a little intimidating for a young puppy especially a puppy that doesn't have a lot of confidence. Now that little exercise might look very basic to you but it's actually very meaningful. What it tells me is that she's willing to follow the food lure and she's willing to take the food. That is a step in the right direction for this little girl. If she was really worried food would mean nothing to her and the fact she's taking the food and she's willing to do something for it tells me that we're heading in the right direction. Once she's comfortable with that I can then move on to making it even more challenging. I can show her a treat. Draw her to me with my other hand. Take a hold of her collar. Yes. Good girl. So she gets used to having a hand coming down and reaching for her which again for a lot of unconfident or worried dogs is something that's very scary. I want her to learn hands reach towards you. Something good is going to happen. Leadership is often a very misunderstood concept in the dog world and to us here at McCann Dogs leadership is about providing your dog with good information and giving your dog good direction and helping your dog understand what's expected of them. This leash is a safety net. Because I don't know what would happen if Diva suddenly got spooked or scared and I don't know that I could call her back to me I need to make sure I have control over her at all times. So I have a collar on her. I have a leash on her and if you have a dog or a puppy like Diva that might suddenly get spooked or scared you want to make sure that you have this control for safety reasons. I was just out taking Diva for a little walk around the property and I ran into instructor Shannon. Instructor Shannon and I do a podcast together and I thought two brains are better than one so I thought we'll invite Shannon in here and we'll chat a little bit about Diva. Diva has not met Shannon yet and you can see she's just kind of quite content to hang out here on my lap. So Shannon what do you think people do in many cases with worried dogs when they're not sure about greeting someone? I think the biggest mistake that people make is they try to force themselves on the puppy versus letting the puppy come around naturally and come to visit them naturally. So I've just come and I've sat down and how nice that she has decided to come and say hello to me on her terms. And I probably wouldn't have gotten this same response had I come rushing in and tried to feed her or tried to pet her or touch her right away. But it's so nice that she's decided that me sitting here beside Robbie is an inviting thing and I think that that's a really important thing is letting the puppy come around to it naturally versus you know sometimes people think oh dogs always love me and they have well-meaning intentions but it can go drastically wrong for the puppy really really quickly. Yeah puppies have a lot of a lot of pressure put on them inadvertently by people who obviously love dogs and want to the dog and want to greet the dog but I think a lot of people overwhelm the dog and a dog like her she would be overwhelmed very easily and it would not do much at all in terms of helping build her confidence if anything it'll put her off even more. Definitely and what what we really need to remember when we're dealing with a little bit of a shy puppy is that even though you know me and you know I'm friendly and you know I love dogs and you know I'm safe in her mind exactly the fear is real in her mind so if I overwhelmed her that's just going to rehearse that fear versus letting her decide to check me out and work on her terms. Hey girly oh my goodness you're a cutie pie. Now one of the things I noticed right off the bat when I first met Diva three days ago is that she tends to be a bit of a submissive peer so when she's unsure about something especially if she's greeting someone she'll get really low to the ground and she'll pee and a lot of people think that it's a house training issue when it's not it's not something that she can control it's an unconscious thing on her part she's just basically saying I'm not looking for any trouble here. When puppies greet Shannon what do you what do you find a lot of people do that causes the submissive elimination in puppies? They come into the puppy's space too much and that becomes overwhelming in terms of pressure and they lean over top of the puppy and that will often cause the submissive elimination so what Robbie and I have set up here is the ability for her to come over and rehearse saying hello without any of that stuff happening so we're sitting down low I'm making sure that my interactions with her I'm not leaning over top of her and I'm trying to moderate the volume of my voice as well so that that doesn't startle her. You need to be your puppy's advocate and this might lead to some unpleasant situations or uncomfortable situations with certain people. I was at the park yesterday with Diva I took her there just for a little bit of exposure not to walk her but just to hang out close to the car so that she had an opportunity to see a new environment and as I was hanging out with her some people walked by and they asked if they could come and see her and as soon as they approached her without my permission she started to get a little worried she got low to the ground put her ears back she tucked her tail and she started to move away which clearly told me she wasn't comfortable with the person approaching or the people approaching so I had to just ask them just to stop and give her some space. Now luckily for me they were quite content to do that and they just stood from a distance talked to us for a little while and then after a while I could see that uncertainty start to turn into curiosity and I can see the ears start to come up I can see her looking towards them I can see the tail starting to wag it was still a little low it was still a little worried but after a couple of minutes I can see her getting braver and braver and then in the end she chose to go visit them so it was a great situation for her where she wasn't overwhelmed by people coming over into Now even if Diva hadn't gone to visit those people it still would have been a great socialization opportunity for her. Many people think that when we're socializing dogs there has to be interaction and that's not necessarily the case. Sometimes all there needs to be is exposure just her seeing those people and realizing that life is good even when those people are nearby. When we're dealing with building puppy's confidence there is no schedule. I think that people need to be very very careful to go at the puppy's pace to make sure that they're not overwhelming the puppy and recognize that there's no formula for this there's no two plus two equals four each puppy and each dog is going to be different when it comes to building confidence. Absolutely and so when I'm working with her I'm looking for those little green lights I'm looking for those signs that tells me she's getting more confident and then I know as we progress I can ask a little more and a little more and a little more because she's going to learn to trust in my guidance because she'll understand that I'm a leader and again I'm not going to put her in a situation that's going to cause harm to her so she'll learn to trust me it'll help give her self-confidence as well. We're walking a fine line here. While we don't want to push the dog into a situation that they're uncomfortable with there are going to be times in your dog's life where we have to help them through something and a perfect example I think of this would be the vet. Absolutely. I mean how many dogs do you know love going to the vet? Sure there may be there may be some but I'm going to guess that the vast majority of dogs or puppies are a little unsure at the vet and so Shannon you know what would you say about that in terms of helping the dog? Yeah and it this whole process is about reading the dog and knowing when to push a little bit when to make process progress and when to sort of step back but at some point we're going to need to say you must and we do it in a kind way but for things like the vet chances are she's going to be overwhelmed by her first trip to the vet but it's part of life she needs to have an examination we need to make sure she's healthy so we're going to bring along lots of coping mechanisms hopefully by that point she's really eager to eat food and we can bring along her favorite treats and make it a really pleasant experience for her and we can also talk to the vet and say look this puppy is overwhelmed can you be easy with this puppy and just you know warn them beforehand to make sure that she has a nice pleasant experience. We want to soothe and help the dog through it and sometimes we can create a bigger issue for the dog by coddling them and babying them and basically reinforcing that fear so if the if the dog's worried what we don't want to do is is soothe them and praise them and tell them what a great job they're doing being worried we want to let them know we've got your back but you're going to be okay and again that goes back to the leadership issue we want the dogs to know that we're you know we're there for them we're going to help them through it and we're going to do the best thing we can for them. We talked a lot about some challenging situations with puppies in terms of building their confidence and if you'd like some help that's specific to your own puppy join us in our Puppy Essentials program. If you'd like more information click the link below. We talked a lot about leadership today and if you'd like some more tips on how to be a good leader for your puppy click that video right there. And on that note I'm Instructor Robbie, this is Deva, happy training!