Fight Or Flight: Using Counter-Conditioning - a podcast by Ty Brown

In this post, I’d like to speak about a little-known dog training strategy: counter-conditioning. I was working with a client today whose dog has a lot of fear-based issues. We always start tackling this problem with obedience and structure, which go to the root of the problem. This dog needs to have a calmer mind, so that’s a big part of what we’re working to develop. Even with only two sessions under our belt, this strategy is really helping. We’ve been mapping out some strategies to use long-term, and I realized these were some great strategies that I should be sharing with you!

Essentially, counter-conditioning consists of associating something positive with an area of fear. The early scientists who discovered this philosophy helped a young boy conquer his fear of rabbits. They started by holding the rabbit a certain distance away and allowing the boy to eat his food. Gradually, the rabbit got closer. The boy enjoyed eating, so he associated the rabbit with pleasure and got over his fear.

We counter-condition a dog in a similar way: by associating something positive with one of the dog’s fears. The idea behind counter-conditioning is finding a dog’s threshold. You want to figure out how much of a stimulus they can take before they get scared. In the example I’m going to use in this post, this dog is afraid of a variety of things, including men. Maybe it’s a man putting his hand over the dog to pet it. Maybe it’s simply a man being in the room.

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