How to build a dog's confidence on walks?

Dogs learn from positive association. The best way to help a shy or fearful dog gain confidence is to expose them to what frightens them at a low intensity. Pair this exposure with something positive, like a tasty treat. Build up trust with your dog before bringing them to public settings like the dog park, a friend’s house, or a dog-friendly restaurant or brewery. Putting your dog in a stressful situation will set their progress back. Go slow and give them time to gain confidence and trust. If your dog reacts aggressively — such as barking, lunging, or growling at other dogs — don’t feel too discouraged! Remember, it’s all about taking things slow and working with your dog as they gain more confidence. Sometimes, interactions with other dogs are unavoidable, like out on a walk. Give yourself some space by going to the other side of the street or moving off the path.

To build a dog's confidence on walks, use repeated exposure to the scary thing so that it becomes less novel and more routine, this is called desensitization. If you want to get your dog comfortable with, say, going to a popular park, first bring them to a quiet corner of the park and allow them to see and hear other people and dogs from a safe distance. Observe their body language closely to get clues about how they're feeling. Over many short sessions, you can move incrementally closer to the busy walkways and more crowded areas, always watching the dog for signs of discomfort. If your dog is anxious about meeting new dogs, ask a friend with a well-socialized dog to help, with both dogs on leash, take a walk parallel to each other, far enough apart that the dogs can’t touch. As your dog gets more comfortable, you can gradually move them closer to each other. Always remember that if your dog seems overwhelmed, you’ll need to figure out a way to decrease the stimulus to the point where it’s not scary to your dog, and then move on from there. Proceed at whatever pace your dog appears to feel safe. You can enhance the desensitization sessions by adding really yummy treats, called counter-conditioning, this technique involves the animal experiencing a very tolerable exposure to a stimulus, followed by a delicious treat. Implementing desensitization and counter-conditioning effectively is all about timing and knowing when to move forward and when to go back to the previous step.

For a dog who is generally pretty laid back but becomes uncertain with the presence of new things, all of the basic commands—the place command, a sit/stay, a down/stay, the heel command, and recall—can be helpful depending on the context. We can invoke the familiar obedience patterns to help him cope and help him feel more confident. If our dog is freaked out just by the sight of the playground, we might stop at a distance and prompt the dog for a sit/stay or down/stay to take in the new scene. By using the sit/stay or the down/stay in that moment, we’re providing guidance about what the dog should be doing in this moment of uncertainty, and if those patterns are familiar, that also brings a measure of comfort and a bit of confidence to the dog. Once you’ve approached the playground you may also be able to use the place command to prompt your dog to get on it. Your dog will be hesitant at first, but again, while he might not know about the playground he does know about the place command. He’s already confident with the place command and by using it in a moment of uncertainty, we can help him feel more confident. This approach is different from simply exposing him to the playground without utilizing his known skills and patterns. With known commands and patterns in the mix, he can feel confident in what he’s doing while he starts to realize that this thing that makes him uncertain isn’t such a big deal after all.

When you are out on walks, try to maintain the distance from people that your dog is comfortable with. This might involve safely crossing the road so that strangers don’t try to approach them head-on, walking on quieter routes, or going out at quieter times. It’s useful to understand the smallest distance from a person that your dog is happy with. To do this, imagine your dog has a bubble of personal space around them. Try to keep a diary and watch your dog carefully when you're on walks to identify any patterns in the people they struggle the most with and the distances at which they start to find it difficult to cope. Stay calm and try not to pull on the lead. If you see a person and suddenly tighten the lead and change your behaviour, this may indicate to your dog that something is about to happen and make them more alert. Try to remain calm and relaxed and don't anticipate stress before it happens. Change your dog's response to people using rewards, to change the emotion that your dog feels when they see someone new, find something your dog values very highly, such as a specific tasty treat, and then associate that with strangers. As you walk, watch your dog carefully and as soon as they notice a person, calmly acknowledge that they have seen them with a marker word such as ‘yes’ or ‘good,’ and then reward them with a treat.

Helping a anxious dog is best accomplished in small incremental steps. Bringing in new people who join or take the dog for walks will be a powerful part of her transition from fearful dog to a confident one. If these people give her space, don’t try to engage and stick to walking at first, the variety and practice can help this fearful rescue dog gain confidence in herself and humans. You can learn how to use this positive dog training method to build up a scared dogs confidence. By giving attention within 3 seconds any time the dog does a desired action while marking it with the command word, the guardian can help her increase her confidence and start offering desired behaviors. Just like humans, dogs get a boost of self esteem when they master new skills. Id love for the guardian to teach the dog a new trick or command a week until she knows 10 or more.

The idea is to take every opportunity you encounter on your daily walks to help your dog to overcome small scary challenges to your dog’s confidence, and increase you dog’s trust in you. The very first step is to start working your dog through things he/she gets spooked by (like bins, plastic bags, or rattling objects – obviously not people, dogs or moving vehicles!). Allow your dog to approach the object at his/her own pace, keeping the leash relaxed, until the dog is comfortable sniffing and examining the object. The second step is to start marking and rewarding the dog for approaching, smelling, and pawing the object. By making it into a game you can increase engagement, acting like as a team building exercise! Go looking for scary objects on the walk and use your environment as an obstacle course that you can help your dog successfully go through. The two main behaviours I use are touching the object with two paws, and jumping up on different objects and holding a Sit or Down Stay. When you have been playing or doing trick training with your dog outside, I always like to end the exercise on a calm note. I always sit down with the dog for 10-15 minutes and help it to relax while calmly taking the environment in.