Anxiety And Physical/mental Exercise

[Guest Panzer Attack!]

I think it's difficult for people to understand these dogs exist until they meet one. I used to poo poo 'naughty' dogs too until I ended up with one. There is a reason most veterinary clinics in Australia stocks anti-anxiety medication, and I know I was SHOCKED at just how many animals need drugs or certain routines to even begin to function 'normally' (and what is normal, anyway?)

People never used to have meds either, and were never diagnosed with disorders BECAUSE THEY WEREN'T KNOWN ABOUT. Dogs display behaviours (Nekhbet even used the word manic in her post :)) and humans have to interpret them cos the dogs can't exactly tell us what's going on!

I'm not saying for a second that all, most, or any more than a small minority of dogs have disordered functioning, but to flat out deny its existence is quite shocking. Especially if you work with animals for a living.

I hate how Corvus gets ragged on here for having a difficult dog. They aren't little black boxes for christs sake.

[corvus]

It's okay, PA. I haven't shared that much about what we've done with Erik here before and this is exactly why. I knew what I was getting into. Some people on this forum have repeatedly and consistently believed the worst of me despite not having enough information to make those judgements and sometimes in spite of information to the contrary, and will continue to do so because it suits them. We'll know who you are because you'll stupidly defend yourself with some cop out like calling it how you see it, not realising that I didn't actually accuse anyone in particular. Frankly, I can't be bothered with it. It's not worth my effort and emotional investment to defend myself and it won't make any difference anyway. The consequence is that I stop posting so much and go away, which suits this minority down to the ground. I'm certainly not the first one that has been taught to shut up and I won't be the last. This forum misses out on a lot of cutting edge information and knowledge because a small minority seems determined to preserve DOL as their own little world where they can dictate a reality that suits them better. Meanwhile, people are made to feel like it is all their fault that they have a dog who is a bit (or a lot) special needs. It is damaging in the extreme, both to the people and the dog. Some people medicate because they can't or won't change the dog's behaviour. Other people medicate because their dog's symptoms are clinical and the dog is suffering. They medicate because they care and they can see their dog is deeply unhappy. We decided to medicate because we were weren't sure that Erik was coping as well as he could be. We reasoned that hypervigilance wasn't very fun and if our little E did not have to experience that if he got some medical support, then simply trying some medical support to see would be worth it. This was based on advice from several qualified people with plenty of experience in this area. Some were quite impatient with me for deliberating so carefully. Anyway, as it happened, other things helped more, which is why he's not currently on medication. It is not off the cards. Early intervention with medication is widely encouraged. It can halt a problem in its tracks and improve the likelihood of a fast recovery and thus a minimal time on the medication in the first place. And minimal stress.

It's not fair on dogs or dog owners to declare they are getting too little or too much or even just the right amount of exercise or activity based on some pre-conceived notion of what "Dogs" need or don't need. I only brought it up because I had my own pre-conceived notion that working line dogs were very very active and would obviously need more exercise than my Vallhund. Ask the freaking dog in question. That's our job. If anybody truly cares how I went about analysing Erik's behaviour and identifying makes it better and worse, I will happily explain it. I will happily describe how to objectively measure these things, what to measure, and what it means. If you're just here to take a cheap shot to make yourself feel big, I hope it's very satisfying for you. For myself, I'm very proud of my little bundle of energy and how far he has come from that wired puppy and I'm more than happy to share anything that might help others on a similar journey to the one we took. You can always PM me. I get e-mail notifications that I probably check once a week or so and no matter how busy I get with studies I've always got time to help others.

[Weasels]

FWIW I love hearing little stories about Erik :)

This thread has made me realise how lucky I am - I have one fearful but lazy dog and one busy, alert but confident dog - if I had both the fearful and the busy in the same dog I would be in a world of hurt!! As long as we accept that dogs have a personality there must be a continuum of personality traits among dogs, which will generally follow a bell curve distribution. The tails of the distribution will be rare, but extreme

[Jigsaw]

Corvus!

As are we, all dogs are individuals and have individual needs both physical and mental that need to be supported. We cry out desperately to those dogs' owners who do not exercise or try to do more for their dog, that their dog needs more both physically and mentally. Why is there criticism when someone, like Corvus, has invested a large amount of time finding what her dog needs are and the best way to support them. Isn't that what most of us who are really interested in our dogs overall well being do?

My own dog is pretty hyper and wired, certainly bounced off the walls as a pup! We do have an off switch but without management of her environment, triggers can set her off on stereotypic behaviours. She generally doesn't turn the off switch on by herself, although with age she is improving.

[Kavik]

Zoe is the one of my dogs who was very 'wired' and highly strung - naturally at the high end of the arousal curve and easy to get overaroused. Now that I know more, I think it is possible that her dog aggression started as overarousal and frustration (she would carry on at a distance but be OK when actually meeting a dog, but then became aggressive on meeting as well). So certainly I understand having a high needs dog. I think if I knew then what I know now about engagement and working with arousal and getting them to be able to think and work when highly aroused I could have managed that better, and we would have had a more productive and peaceful relationship. She is still reasonably active at 13 - will tug, chase a ball and enjoys training, so I do use her as a practice dog with new stuff I am learning :laugh: She has mellowed with age though and her senses aren't as sharp - which in her case is not always a bad thing :laugh:

[Cosmolo]

I'm interested too Corvus.

I have some interesting personalities in my pack- extra exercise makes no difference to my fearful dog. My Jack Russell has a great off switch BUT can go on 5 x 1 hour walks in a day and still be ready for more. It's not that he won't settle because he does but he can take as much exercise as you want to give him. None of my 4 other dogs could deal with that amount of exercise.

[kayla1]

I agree with what others have said. Nobody should be made to feel bad because of efforts they have made to improve the wellbeing of their anxious dog.

We used to have a lot of threads with corvus and others discussing the various training methods etc. I learnt so much from those threads, being able to see the differing opinions and training options. But we don't seem to see the healthy debates anymore, and I think it's a real shame. If people with differing opinions are driven out, we lose a valuable learning opportunity.

Corvus I am also very interested in knowing more.

[huski]

I only brought it up because I had my own pre-conceived notion that working line dogs were very very active and would obviously need more exercise than my Vallhund.

A good working line dog is extremely active, but exercise wouldn't tire them out like training does. Realistically if you tried to use exercise to tire out a WL dog you will be exercising them forever! so tiring them out isnt the goal so much as giving them drive satisfaction, an outlet for their drive to work. I also think a good working line dog should have a solid temperament, they definitely shouldn't be anxious and they should be able to learn easily how to turn off. Managing a dog is a big part of owning one, IMO.

[Kavik]

with performance work, my goal is not to totally tire my dog out anyway. When I take my dog out to work, I want him to give me 100%, he can't do that if he is too tired, so I want him reasonably fresh for our sessions. I do several sessions a day, plus a walk most days. (the days I don't walk Kaos I walk Zoe, she is dog aggro so I can't walk them together, Diesel gets walked with Kaos).

ETA: Also a good working dog has an off switch. If a dog works itself up into a frenzy and won't settle down when not working, they will use up all their energy being frantic and not have anything left for working. Not to mention driving the owners nuts, I don't think farmers would like a dog that is frantic.

Edited October 28, 2012 by Kavik

[hankdog]

Yes Panzer I had always been lucky enough to have "good" dogs as well. Jake temp tested badly in the pound but I thought a few weeks of being walked and exposed to dogs and then obedience school and we'll be all sorted. You certainly need to live with a difficult dog before you really get to understand the level of micromanagement that is required. I would certainly ask that everyone who has a difficult dog please post about what has worked for you. I avidly read every bit of advice and experience shared and am very grateful for it.

[BC Crazy]

OMG So sorry Snook but I think I have accidentally deleted your post as I was trying to add to your post in agreement with you & the whole thing went into cyber space. Sincere apologies

Edited October 28, 2012 by BC Crazy

[Aidan3]

I am also of the belief that some dogs, like some people do have some sort of chemical imbalance going on & they need a little help to rectify it. Is it possible to 'train' that out of a dog as suggested. That I'm very unsure of.

That's a tricky question. If you look at enough of the literature you can see that all sorts of things can have an effect on brain chemistry, but nothing more so than DNA. Exercise is one of those things (doesn't need to be much, but it needs to be regular), there is a very encouraging literature on the effects of exercise in humans and other animals. Diet is another, nothing will deplete brain serotonin faster than feeding a bunch of large neutral amino acids with the omission of tryptophan (feeding a diet of corn is the usual way to do this in rat models). Changing overt behaviours can change emotional state, and this is usually necessary regardless of whether a decision is made to medicate or not.

At what point is something a brain chemistry imbalance? That can only really be confirmed post-mortem, but the preferable way to do it is to take an inventory of behaviour. If those behaviours are problematic and can't be resolved satisfactorily with behaviour modification alone, medication is tried. Further (objective) observations of behaviour confirm whether the medication has helped or not.

It's important to remember that it's not an "either/or" situation. A dog isn't either abnormal or normal, there is a continuum of behaviours and contexts in which those behaviours occur. Certainly if we see a dog who appears to be suffering and there is a likelihood that medication will help, a competent vet should be able to weigh up the risks of side effects vs potential quality of life for that dog.

The research tells us that effective early intervention improves long term outcomes.

[BC Crazy]

Interesting post Aidan2. I find Stella's emotional state has improved a great deal. She has always had daily regular exercise but I have added to it, some variety. She is walked for about 7 km's, she also swims for about 15 to 20

mins & we do some basic training & play fetch & tugs daily. I did have a lengthy discussion with my Vet of some 20 years regarding her behaviour & emotional state before I went home to give the hole 'medication road a trial' some

serious thought. Decided I would go ahead & just see how she goes. She has been much more relaxed & can get some mush needed rest in the afternoon which just wasn't happening previously. It certainly sparks some pretty serious

debate as we can see even on this thread.

Can I ask you what you mean by changing overt behaviours can change their emotional state?

Edited October 28, 2012 by BC Crazy

[Aidan3]

Can I ask you what you mean by changing overt behaviours can change their emotional state?

Yes, an overt behaviour is a behaviour which can be seen (e.g barking, lunging, sitting, heeling). If we can change the way that a dog reacts to a stimulus, that can change the way they feel about the stimulus, too, because overt behaviours feed information back to the nervous system.

For example, every time dog sees another dog he lunges and barks (reactive overt behaviour) and takes a long time to settle down after other dog has gone. Using another dog on a leash 10m away as a stimulus, we train reactive dog to walk nicely on a loose leash (calm overt behaviour) while other dog is there. We remove the stimulus dog, and reactive dog is still calm.

[BC Crazy]

Oh yes I understand that now thanks for explaining it. And yes Stella has many overt behaviours She does bark & lunge at other dogs, usually always submissive females only.Most dogs are fine. So it is very unpredictable.

If she is off lead she will charge at them barking. Not good So she is mainly on lead now days but she still goes off. I can sometimes with the help of LAT distract her but not 100% of the time as yet. She does calm down a

lot quicker though after the stimulus is gone than she used to, almost instantly. Really upsets me though as she gets so loud & angry, then she is just her sweet self in a second.

[Aidan3]

I can sometimes with the help of LAT distract her but not 100% of the time as yet. She does calm down a

lot quicker though after the stimulus is gone than she used to, almost instantly. Really upsets me though as she gets so loud & angry, then she is just her sweet self in a second.

That's a really good sign. Careful with the idea that you're trying to "distract" her with LAT, though. I think that's where a lot of what could be highly effective training falls down, we're not trying to distract - we're trying to reinforce calm behaviours. By definition, this means we should be seeing an increase in those behaviours. If it feels like we're distracting, then we're probably over threshold and going backwards.

[corvus]

Firstly, wow, I didn't actually think several people would ask for more information! Guess I'd better deliver!

Along the same lines as what Aidan was saying, it's really important to record behaviour. If nothing else, have a short list of 'warning' or 'problem' behaviours you can use as indicators of whether you are doing a good job or not. I look for behaviours that tell me how my animals interpret signals in their environment. For example:

* Alert barking - for Erik at least I track the kinds of things he alerts at. The important bit is the sounds that he sometimes alerts at and sometimes doesn't. If he's starting to alert to a large percentage of the things he only sometimes alerts to and he's doing it a large percentage of the time, I can assume he's not in a good place emotionally.

* Recovery time - I've used this one and flight distance for my rabbits and doves as well. I'm always aiming for very short recovery times after a disturbance. So if Erik gets up to bark at something, I take note of how quickly he can settle again afterwards. And again, whether he fires up again soon after or if he's able to switch off. It ties into the alert barking.

* "Where's the danger?" - animals that are worried keep a sharp eye on everything happening around them, looking for threats. They interpret neutral things as threats. BC Crazy will know all about this. When it gets bad like it did with Stella it's called hypervigilance. Erik went there for a short while, although not as bad. It's what prompted us to do something more than training and conditioning. He would be snoozing next to me on the couch when he'd hear a sound outside and he'd be on his feet barking and scrambling to the door before he was even properly awake. It's not a nice place to be when you can't even relax properly when you're snoozing. He'd have an ear still on listening for danger. One of my doves was here a few months ago due to some ongoing harassment from the other dove. Poor fella stopped training all together because he couldn't stop constantly checking where the other dove was. When I introduced a third dove to try to solve the problem, he was taking food from me again the next day and training again within 5 days. A couple of months down the track all three are still living in harmony. Monitoring. So you can see it can be brought on by different things. My dove's hypervigilance was happily solved by changing his environment, at least in the short term. I doubt Stella's would have been solved without medication. Erik's appears to have been solved by increased activity, but we added medication to the treatment because we were not sure what was going to work. Medication was not a last resort. It was part of a serious hit at a serious problem. Early this year we dropped Erik's morning walks and the hypervigilance crept back.

* I have a few other indicators that are Erik-specific. Poking, whining, and circling are all things I saw go up a lot when he was in his hypervigilant period, so now if I am seeing them a bit I start looking for the problem. Sometimes whatever it was seems to get fixed on its own. It's ongoing monitoring. I do it with all my animals.

I'm not sure that it's clear exactly what I mean by exercise. It's physical and mental. I just kinda toss them in together because I do them together. I take the dogs out for a run and play and give them some training as well. How much they get depends on how much they want and how much I feel like giving. Sometimes a tiny bit, sometimes most of the outing. By 'activity' I mean other stuff to do at home. Mostly it is chewing, but he also gets toys like Kong Wobbler sometimes. It was suggested to us that when an animal is showing inappropriate or abnormal behaviour centred around one body part we should try giving them more to do with that body part. So for a month before we started E on Clomicalm and daily chewing I recorded just about everything he did with his mouth so we had a baseline measurement. So, barking, chewing and licking. I recorded duration, how many times he did it, and for barking, what kind of barking. Then I started the Clomicalm and frozen Kongs and kept recording for the next month. There was indeed an improvement. It wasn't as much of an improvement as I would have liked. We gave the Clomicalm another month to make sure and then took him off it and kept monitoring. I think there was a slight increase in anxiety when we took him off and then he settled again over a couple of weeks. A while later in an effort to improve things again after unsuccessfully dumping some of the exercise, we doubled his daily chewing quota so now he gets all his food as bones or frozen Kongs. It amounted to about 2 hours of chewing a day at the time. Now he's better at frozen Kongs it takes him maybe an hour to 90 minutes to consume all his daily food in frozen Kongs. Minus the stuff for training. He gets that maybe 2-3 times a week and sometimes he only gets half his food that way. I'm not entirely sure this is enough because he seems to very slowly start building in the indicator behaviours over a few weeks if I don't give him a big rec bone. With a fairly consistent cycle of rec bones and the likes he seems steady. He's also maturing, so that has probably helped us.

I think that after watching what he does when he has a giant rec bone to chew on and what he does when he is staying with my parents where he has access to a much bigger yard, my feeling is that he is just a more mentally alert dog than most. If he's not sleeping or snoozing he is looking for something to do. It doesn't have to be something active. Kivi will go "Okay, if we're not doing anything I'll go to sleep." Erik goes "Erik's bored." If I don't give him anything to do he will amuse himself for a while, then give up and go to sleep. But if that goes on for a few days he will get more and more restless, and be harder and harder to settle and we start heading towards anxiety again. It's pretty clear. The dog gets bored. Given he gets increasingly harder to convince to engage his off switch the more days of boredom he gets, it seems fair to me to just give him stuff to do. I'd rather be dead than bored. I get restless and agitated when I'm bored as well.

So that's Erik. He's not the same as every dog with an anxiety problem, so what we did won't be specifically helpful to many with anxious dogs. The point of sharing is to help people drill down to find the cause of the anxiety if it's not obvious. We did a lot of tweaking one thing at a time and then observing the effects. The idea is to make a prediction and test it. If over-arousal is the problem, the behaviour should decrease if we can bring the arousal down. Generally I think if it's not making things worse it's fair to try something new for a month before you decide if it's worthwhile or not. I still go back to massage, the Thundershirt and rewarding quiet down-stays from time to time, using one or the other depending on what I think he needs at the time. I also yell at him when he's annoying me. If anyone thinks I can work through pesky barking without getting cross with my dog then they think I'm a better person than I am! Giving him a cuddle is vastly more effective than yelling at him, and improves my mood a lot as well. But I still yell at him. What can I say? I'm only human.

[corvus]

Snook, you have really struck gold with your trainer!

[hankdog]

I see a lot of similarities with "jakes bored" can I ask more about frozen kongs, you mean the red rubber ones, do you just put mince inside and freeze. Jake really enjoys his morning walks but if I have to delay he starts mouthing on the house. Literally just start having a disinterested light taste of chair, table or whatever he's next to.

[corvus]

I see a lot of similarities with "jakes bored" can I ask more about frozen kongs, you mean the red rubber ones, do you just put mince inside and freeze. Jake really enjoys his morning walks but if I have to delay he starts mouthing on the house. Literally just start having a disinterested light taste of chair, table or whatever he's next to.

Yep, we stuff the normal red Kongs with mince and mashed vegies with a little yoghurt or cottage cheese, then freeze. It's just their raw mix. If you feed kibble you can soak it in water to soften it enough to stuff into Kongs and then freeze.

Most days both my dogs come looking for me at about 4:30pm because they think it's time for their walk. Kivi's just as likely to be the one to get up and come over first than Erik is. They know when it's time for walks. Be careful not to confuse anticipation/frustration with boredom. Make sure you take into account the whole picture.

Just to be clear, the aim with the exercise is not to wear the dogs out. It's enrichment more than anything. A chance for them to properly stretch their legs, have a play, do some training, and take in some new sights, sounds and smells. The comparison with WL dogs was not purely exercise, it was stimulation. If we're talking in terms of "drive satisfaction", Erik gets tonnes of that. That's pretty much the whole point of all the enrichment. Giving him outlets for all the 'drives' that otherwise get channelled into inappropriate behaviour.