"He'll Just Get Used To It"

Well, chances are that he won't! Flooding: don't do it without serious consideration!

#training

Flooding is a behaviour modification method that can work relatively quickly if it’s handled well, the dog has a firm genetic temperament and the stimulus, or fear, anger or anxiety trigger is relatively mild to the dog. It works in the realm of classical conditioning.

But it can also have a lot of fall out if these conditions are not met. By fall out I mean that it could create more problems than it solves.

WARNING: DISTURBING CONTENT - Take a look here for an example. Some dogs in this video may have been desensitised to fireworks, for others the outcome was the exact opposite and they have been sensitised!

Remembering that dogs are basically hedonists – very in the moment and pleasure seeking and pain avoiding – then flooding can have the total opposite effect of the training goals that we’re aiming for.

The idea behind flooding is that the dog is left exposed to the triggering stimulus until ‘he just gets used to it’. That means that the dog may need to be left exposed for hours and be in a very stressed state while he is. The fact is, that on the surface of things he may look as though he got used to it, but there’s equal probability that he just emotionally shut down – you can tell when a dog has done this by a ‘far away’ look in his eyes, coupling behaviours where he either toilets or sniffs the ground, and where any interaction with him seems that you’ve interrupted him from a day dream kind of state.

One of the things that is important to the training relationship is that a bond of trust is protected between you and your dog which means that your dog looks to you as leader to deal with any stressful circumstances. If this bond of trust is broken, or the dog develops any suspicion about you – then his compliance to your commands can suffer because he no longer perceives you as the leader. In fact, poorly handled flooding can actually undo all previously trained positive classical conditioning!

So, exposing your dog to flooding can be harmful to your training relationship.

Since the dog actually only remembers the last moments of his last exposure to the trigger then if that experience was a bad one, then that is what the dog remembers and reacts to at the next instance of exposure – in short, the dog ends up sensitised to the trigger rather than desensitised! He will also look for more stimuli in the environment that he believes will reliably predict that his prime trigger is about to be presented and start reacting to those too!

In other words, his pattern recognition system goes into overdrive.

One of the key qualifiers as to whether flooding is actually going to deliver positive results is whether the dog can start to relax inside 10 – 15 minutes of exposure. If it can’t, then choosing another method of desensitisation is more likely to deliver positive results even though it may take longer.

Dogs, like us, have sweet spots where their ability to learn is optimal. Often dogs can be so stressed when being flooded that not only is their ability to learn compromised, but previous learning can be undone.

In up coming posts I'll cover some subjects that will help to make this one clearer including:

- How to gauge the basic genetic temperament of your dog.

- How teaching a dog focus can be of valuable use in training and desensitisation exercises.