When Slowly Is Faster
TRAINING
Alex Walker relates her journey towards counterconditioning her reactive rescue dog,
A
Leo, to accept and even enjoy a nail trim
s a new trainer, “the fastest way is the slowest way” was something I heard more than my fair share of times. However, it was not until I adopted my very first “reactive” dog that I actually understood the intention behind this famous phrase, and how slow the “slowest way” actually was. Let me take a moment to introduce you to my first rescue dog, Leo. Just over 1 year old, he was pulled by a critical care rescue purely by the luck of the draw. He had generalized demodex, ingrown rear dew claws, and was labeled fear aggressive by the organization, yet in spite of all this was a very sweet dog. That sweet dog became a terrified dog, however, the evening of our first attempted nail trim. I quickly learned that, to Leo, there was absolutely nothing more terrifying than a nail trim. He would scream, gator roll, and attempt to bite. At the vet, even the most basic exam became impossible. I will be the first to admit that, at the start of our journey to train a voluntary nail trim, I did just about everything wrong. Like many pet owners, I was impatient. I was worried for my dog as his nails (like all dog nails) just kept growing with every day that passed. Walks outdoors helped maintain only his back nails and, of course, even these walks did little to impact those unruly rear dew claws. Feeling desperate I resolved just to “get it done.” I enlisted the help of a couple courageous friends and family members and one evening I lured an unsuspecting Leo into my bedroom. I will save you all of the gory details. In the end though, not only did I get nothing “done,” but I had scared my dog so much that he refused to even enter my room for the rest of the evening, and to this day I still have to contend with this experience. Because of it, Leo is often suspicious of change and hesitant
Leo easily picked up on the new behavior of "scratch," and was soon happily filing his own front nails
Rescue dog Leo was terrified of nail trims, so author and guardian Alex Walker created a scratch board to get his training started
to trust even the smallest movement in criteria. Often, what would seem to be the addition of a simple step instead takes on its own level of slow and consistent work. This is extremely at odds with how Leo tackles other training tasks and I believe this is largely due to his early negative emotional responses associated with the experience. In any case, that one truly terrible evening was more than enough emotional learning for the both of us so, first thing the next morning, I did the same thing we ask our clients to do: I consulted with a force-free trainer. Although this consultation could not magically convince Leo to love nail trims, it did help me build a plan. The very first step of this plan was to schedule a meeting with my vet to sedate Leo and trim his nails to a safe length without all the associated panic. From here, I would hit the ground running and begin to slowly desensitize and countercondition him to the process of a voluntary nail trim, one toe at a time. I learned very quickly that even with my shiny new plan in place, I still had a lot to learn and in the beginning I stumbled quite a bit. Looking back now, I realize the biggest problem and the largest obstacle I had to overcome was me. I often found myself pushing Leo too far too fast, and the closer I got to that goal behavior the faster I tried to move. I made the mistake of jumping on every sign of success with little hesitation and very little consideration for the pace of my dog. This not only constituted a failure on my part, but each time I pushed a little too much we both experienced that classic one step forward and two steps back. Only when I finally stopped getting in my own way and started to respect the pace Leo was BARKS from the Guild/May 2017
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