It’s the situation we all dread: Our service-dog-in-training (SDiT) or working service dog has a negative experience. Maybe your dog is attacked by another dog or you go to an event that turns out to be louder or more chaotic than you expected. Maybe something that is usually OK goes bad, such as the door to the wheelchair lift shuts on your dog’s tail.
Here are steps to take to assess, recover from, and prevent negative experiences for your service dog or SDiT.
Recovery
First of all, allow time for yourself and your dog to recover. If you or your dog were physically injured, you’ll need time to recover before you focus on training and behavior.
Try Not to Predict
It’s natural for you to immediately worry about what this will mean for your dog’s career, but try not to. How this event affects your dog will depend on a number of factors, including your dog’s age and temperament, and how they interpreted the event.
Factors that Affect Prognosis
Generally speaking, if your dog is over two years old, has had a lot of exposure to the stressor before, has a confident and relaxed temperament, and you use low-pressure, reward-based training strategies, there is a good chance that they’ll make a full recovery.
For example, let’s say you’re in a car accident with your five-year-old service dog who has always enjoyed riding in the car and has been riding in your car for her whole life. Neither you nor your dog have significant injuries. After a short recovery period, your dog may be fine riding in the car again. This was just a “blip” in her years of positive experience with car rides.
On the other hand, suppose you have a 8-month-old dog who is friendly with dogs but doesn’t interact with them often. He tends to be overexcited when he sees dogs on walks, pulling and barking. If he is attacked by a loose dog on a walk, he’s more likely than the dog in the previous example to suffer a negative impact. Because of his youth, limited previous experiences, and heightened sensitivity, he may have a negative association with other dogs now.
Puppies often do not show stress at the time of a stressful event. They may not show the negative impacts of a trauma until days, weeks, or months later.
However, these are just generalizations. Every dog and situation is unique. It’s impossible to predict how your dog will respond to a negative event. Sometimes our dogs make associations we don’t expect.
Two years ago, my car went out of control, sliding back and forth across both lanes on a snowy, steep country road. I eventually brought the car to a stop with no damage. Both of my dogs were were crated in the back. They both looked fine. It never occurred to me either would have behavioral damage because there was no impact. However, I was screaming in fright while the car was sliding down the hill. Later, my younger dog showed stress (panting, wide eyes, and pawing at the grate) every time he was in his crate in the car, while my older dog showed no change in behavior. When I switched my young dog to a car harness instead, he was completely fine. His negative association was with the crate in the car only. He was fine in his crates at home and fine in the car as long as not crated.
Decompression Time
Give your dog time to destress. Depending on the dog, we recommend a week or two. Don’t ask anything of your dog, just make it positive and easy, give them a lot of mental space.
Increase positive enrichment — nosework, play, shaping games, exercise, ambles in the woods on a long line, food puzzles, massage, chews where they can exercise their jaws and work out her stress. Provide lots of praise for ANY good choice, or anything else that makes your dog happy and relaxed.
Return to Training with Care
It is critical that you use only rewards-based methods with a dog who has undergone a stressful event. Any type of corrections or use of equipment that causes pain or intimidation will be counterproductive — even scolding. If you’re new to this type of training, start with an online class like our PEARL DISC class to learn the ropes. We’ve heard from many clients who “crossed-over” from balanced training to rewards-based training in our PEARL class because of fear or reactivity issues in their service dogs. They report a huge change in their dog’s eagerness to work and confidence level.
When you return to public training, try to select environments that are familiar and low-stress, and quiet. Use a very high rate of reinforcement. Reward effusively for every little thing. Pay close attention to your dog’s body language. If your dog shows any stress, remove them from the situation.
Note: If you have not studied dog body language, take some time to do this now. It’s an essential tool to maximize your dog’s recovery. We cover dog body language for service dogs in our level one service dog course, PEARL DISC, because we feel it greatly enhances an owner-trainer’s ability to train and handle their service animal.
Over time, slowly start to return to different environments, but don’t take your dog back to the place that caused the stress until they are doing well at several other places first.
Always give your dog the option of leaving. In fact, before you enter, you can take a step or two toward the entrance, then turn around and run happily away. Do this a few times, moving in a little further over time. See if your dog wants to continue to go back in, or if they just want to stay outside.
If your dog has trouble re-entering a particular environment, but they really like other dogs, you can try to find another dog as a mentor. You’ll need a very confident dog who LOVES the kind of environment where your dog struggles. Make sure that your dog and the mentor dog already know and like each other before taking them to that environment. Then take both dogs to that type of environment, with the mentor dog walking slightly ahead. Make the trips VERY short, and repeat several times.
Preventing New Traumas
Sometimes there’s nothing you can do to prevent a recurrence. But if you know your dog has particular sensitivities, you can sometimes prevent sensitizations in the future.
Sound Protection
If your dog’s distress was caused by particularly loud noises (e.g., a rock concert, a movie about war, etc.), please leave your dog home for those events in the future. If you need your service dog with you, consider conditioning them to noise protection devices, such as Mutt Muffs before entering noisy environments in the future.
Beware of Trigger Stacking
Stressful events can have a multiplying effect. A trip to the vet for shots followed by a slightly stressful event will make that outing much harder. Going to a loud location two days in a row will make the second one much harder to take. Before asking your dog to stretch themselves, provide a couple of days when stress is low, with ideal levels of exercise and enrichment to help them rise to the challenge. Make sure to give lots of positive enrichment and down-time after, too!
Pay Attention to Subtle Body Language
Dogs can be stressed even though they are acting quiet and calm. Subtle signs like lip-licking, yawning, scratching, sniffing, panting (when it is not hot), wrinkles or a “worried” look on their face can tell us that even if our dog is behaving well, the situation is actually too much for them.
Be Ready to Leave
Sometimes we think our service dog is ready to return to a particular environment, and when we’re there, we see that they’re stressed. Or, we’re not sure if they’re OK or not. In either case, the best decision is to remove your dog from the situation. If you’re not sure if your dog was stressed or not, see if they are eager to go back in or if they seem relieved to be out. If you won’t be able to remove your dog, don’t bring them to the event yet.
Will I Need to Career-Change My Dog?
It’s natural to want an answer to this question, but nobody can predict the future. The only one who can tell you is your dog — eventually.
Regardless of whether your service dog is able to return to work or not, you will need to go through these steps to give your dog every opportunity to recover. Follow the steps in this post and work with an all-rewards based trainer for professional guidance. GO SLOW. Eventually, your dog will show signs of returning to baseline or of continued stress. That will guide your decision. A credentialed, all-positive trainer who can objectively assess your dog after several months can be a huge help.
If you’re in this situation and you’d like some support from expert service dog trainers, please contact us.