There are times when you should not give attention or affection to your dog. It may seem counterintuitive, but when a dog is scared, in pain, or their mind is somehow unstable, you should not give them attention. Turn and move away, or go on with what you were doing like you didn’t know they were there. If you give them attention at this time, it feeds their instability and worst case, can even give the dog an irrational superstition or fear of something associated with the incident.
I learned this principle many years ago from David Bowman, a very knowledgeable VDD dog fancier. A cute young Drahthaar pup he had tried to jump into the back of his truck, it missed and whacked its face on the tailgate and landed on the ground like a sack of flour. I immediately raced over with an, “Aaaaawwwww, poor puppy.†David sharply stopped me with a command like he would give to an errant pup. He pulled me back and we just watched the pup. The pup got up, shook it off and trotted over to us. David explained to me that there were times when you shouldn’t give affection to a dog, or they would develop and unreasonable fear of some object, action, place or other thing they associated with the event. The more anxiety you show in the situation, the more it will feed the instability.
In such a situation you should move on like nothing ever happened. Keep the dogs mind moving forward. Come back later and retry the action. David and I walked over to the other side of the yard for a minute, the pup trotting along. We gave him a few minutes to check out that part of the world and let his mind move on to other things, and then David then circled back to the truck and loaded the pup up without problems.
There are lots of times when you should praise your dog, but also times when you should withhold attention. When the dog’s mind is unstable or fearful, turn and move on like you don’t even know they are there. It is my belief that as a social pack animal, they surrender their fears to you, the pack leader. If you are not afraid of something, they feel that there is no need for them to fear it and they move on.
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