Anyway, I have spent the last 5 weeks ish trying to desensitise him using a lead and treats but we aren’t getting anywhere. The bigger chickens have told him off but the little ones don’t have the gumption. I met a woman with two cockapoos the other day who said with hers she filled a bottle with stones and every time they ran after the chickens, she threw it down/shook it hard and shouted, “NO!” The dogs stopped chasing and now live happily alongside the chickens. I have now read your article.

My question is how to train the pup out of this behaviour? Am I just going to have to wait for the chickens to meet a sticky end or try to rehome them before it’s too late? They are my girls and I love them dearly so really would rather keep them, but at the same time better happy elsewhere than dead on my lawn.

This is the most useful insight. I have a young dog who barks and lunges at other dogs when in the car and I started using a rattle bottle today. After reading this comment I will stop as although I am desperate for the behaviour to stop I don’t want to punish confuse or make her worse.

The clicker is an event marker – it tells the dog he got something right and that a reward is on its way. Some people use the word good instead.

You can indeed use a sound as an event marker to predict punishment, some people use a finger snap or the word ‘bad’ for this.

But that isn’t how rattle bottles and training discs work. They are forms of punishment, not event markers. They have the potential to ‘punish’ a dog because many dogs find them aversive or upsetting. Whereas event markers are meaningless in isolation. They have to be paired with an aversive or a reward in order to be used in training

The way you can differentiate between an event marker and the punishment or reward it is being used to predict, is to ask yourself if the dog found the noise aversive the very first time he hears it. So for example, the first time your dog hears a click, before you pair it with rewards, it is usually meaningless to him.

The same is not true of rattle bottles and training discs. Most dogs dislike them the first time they hear them. Hope that helps . 🙂

Punishment very rarely if ever actually addresses the cause of that behaviour only the symptoms of the issue.

For example if your dog is barking at traffic or other dogs – it’s because they’re uncomfortable about the situation. Training the dog to think that when it barks at other dogs a scary noise occurs, doesn’t make them feel any better about the situation.
Undeniably it’s harder and more work to teach the dog to feel better about the situation, but surely knowing that your dog is comfortable and feeling in that environment is so much more rewarding for you and your dog?

Using punishment can have some worrying underlying affects that you may well not see in your dog until later making them unpredictable and just unhappy.

Take your pup out of the class. It’s obviously too much for her right now. The more she practices the behaviour the worse it will get. Plus, if they’re using aversives I don’t think it’s the best place for her to be. Meanwhile:
– Go to the park every day, sit on a bench with your pup, watch the world go by. Give her treats for seeing dogs at a distance. If she reacts to the dogs they’re too close, You’ll get a feel for what her ‘threshold’, the distance at which she starts to react, is.
– When you know what her threshold is, you’re equipped to work with her under it. Eventually that threshold will decrease, and decrease, and decrease. If you have friends with calm dogs they will come in very handy 🙂 google ‘look at that’ game, also check out the kikopup channel on youtube.

Hope this was helpful. x