The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers
Evolution created a survival mechanism for mammals and maybe other creatures to deal with fear- or stressful situations, it’s a physiological reaction that we call a fight or flight response. Your senses note something scary, maybe your heart begins to pound, your breathing quickens, muscles tense, and or beads of sweat appear. With your pooch, it may look like a stiff body, staring, hackles up, vocalization, lunging, barking, and maybe air snaps. They may do this in response to seeing another dog, seeing a person they don’t know, or for our dog Boon, the evil garbage truck even if it’s blocks away, is cause for concern.
If Boon hears the nemesis garbage truck, the hair on the back of her neck may slightly puff up depending on its distance from her but generally it’s not full blown hackles (aka “piloerection”) because she switches into flight mode. Sometimes our pooch on wheels almost trips me up as she veers off into a completely different direction upon hearing a garbage truck in the distance. As she toutles off on her own away from the truck, all becomes good. I love that she figured out that the trigger aka garbage truck is going to lead to discomfort and makes a choice on her own to head out of dodge to avoid the situation. How cool is that? If you’ve seen your dog try to get out of dodge to move away from a trigger and now realize what’s going on – reward the heck out of it, yaaaaaah Fido you are choosing flight over fight and that’s awesome!
For a lot of dogs I work with, their go-to is fight and sometimes it’s at the point of embarrassment for the pet parent. To have a dog go ballistic in public can bring about not only feelings of embarrassment, but also frustration, despair, and some even say “I can’t deal with my dog who is being so aggressive”. The thing is in most scenarios, your dog may sound aggressive but they are not being aggressive. Fight or flight serves the purpose of creating distance between the dog and the stressful trigger. Generally speaking your dog is not trying to pick a fight, and definitely is not trying to be ‘top dog’ (a debunked myth which I’ll not go into here but wish would go away as a concept); they are merely trying to cope with the situation and get the scary thing to go away by being big or even scary themselves.
I like to teach dogs that flight is an option and one to hopefully supercede fight as their go-to response. It builds on what can be a natural response for a dog, generally makes the situation less embarrassing for the human, and it can help build other skills like being calm in the presence of a trigger. Most pet parents try to get or want their dog to be calm and quiet in the presence of a trigger. We often ask the dog to sit and look at us in an effort to get them to ignore the scary thing. I know for myself that sitting in a room and looking at a loose snake will not be easy but if I were sitting by the door and knew I had an exit route I would feel less trapped. If a dog knows they can choose flight as an option or know you will have their back and initiate flight, they often start to feel like they can glance over and see the scary thing and not lose it because they know they can get out of dodge if necessary. Once a dog has a flight skill then it often is easier to teach them that they have the ability to sit and calmly check out the thing that used to send them over the edge.
I wish I had taken a video of a dog who I worked with at the municipal shelter. This dog had more of a freeze response upon seeing another dog rather than a fight response but this response was also problematic. For example, if we saw another dog while in the middle of an intersection, he would kind of freeze and I had a challenge trying to move along a large 70lb pittie when the light turned green. When I started teaching him flight, his response was like the Tigger character in Winnie the Pooh, “the wonderful thing about Tiggers are their tops are made of rubber / their bottoms are made out of springs / they're bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy fun, fun, fun, fun, fun”. When I said his flight cue, he would immediately start bouncing up and down and be joyful about the prospect of bouncing away from his trigger – it was pretty dang adorable. He was happy and I loved that he had a new life skill on board.
Cheers, Tracy
