save the pit bull, save the world.

I actually finished this book, fully titled Scaredy Dog! Understanding and Rehabilitating Your Reactive Dog, by Ali Brown a little while ago, but I’ve been lazy about writing up a review. I am attracted by all books relating to reactive and aggressive dogs because I’ve done so much work and felt so much aggravation, frustration, embarrassment, and eventually satisfaction and even pride dealing with these things in my own dogs. While I’m pretty confident and comfortable in dealing with these behaviors now, I’m always looking for more options, more variations on the same themes, more ideas that might help me in the future, or might help other people.

Ali Brown has provided a very nice, straight-forward guide to both living with and working with a reactive dog. Like me, she learned all of this first hand, through the experiences she had learning how to work with her Belgian Tervuren Acacia. One thing I really appreciated through the whole book is the feeling that she “gets” it. She understands the frustration and the embarrassment and all the other bad emotions that go along with owning a reactive dog. In her book, she offers a multitude of different approaches that all work together, from decreasing the dog’s overall stress levels to learning to read the very subtle signs that your dog is getting distressed, to management through crates, fences, tie-outs, and even cars.

All of this neatly dovetails with her easy-to-follow instructions on how to go about addressing the behavior itself through counter-conditioning and desensitization. It’s all the same stuff as I’ve done- working on attention and calm behavior at a distance from the trigger where the dog still is under threshold and slowly, calmly decreasing the distance. She makes a lot of use of the car as mobile crate, which I think is a wonderful and useful idea. She also addresses how to deal with bad situations and owners who have “Don’t worry, he’s friendly” dogs.

She also deals with dogs who are reactive to humans, which is not something I’ve personally had to deal with, but uses the same principles.

Good stuff, all the way around, and all of it very positive and in keeping with what I believe are appropriate training techniques for dealing especially with a fearful dog. There is a lot of discussion about reading your dog and respecting what your dog is feeling, and that is oh so important in this age of Cesar Milan. It wasn’t much help to me as I’ve done all this before, but I think this book is an excellent guide to somebody who is just learning the ropes of reactive dogs.