One of the things I spoke about in my
Calm Your Dog For Fireworks Night Challenge was about the stress continuum and working in the right zone is crucial to improve the resilience of our dogs. We need to work up the tolerable end of the stress level towards the toxic level but not spilling over because that's where we push our dogs over threshold to the point they won’t learn anything and shut down or become more reactive.
But if we always keep them at a normal stress level we will never actually make any progress and things will stay the same or even get worse as their resilience decreases. So to put this into perhaps an easier to understand context let me give you an example from today.
I went out for a cani-cross run with my 3 springers I did a little warm up run and then I decided to do some hill sprints as I want to improve my speed, I might have chosen to run for longer to improve my endurance but today I was wanting speed. In order to do this I need to push myself and so did hill sprints running at almost max with a down hill recovery phase. And so I was pushing myself to the top of the tolerable stress level for short periods of time in order to maximize the cardiovascular benefit and increase stroke volume making my heart stronger and more efficient, interval training is all about adaptation and making this changes is crucial really to improve fitness. Now if I ran my whole run in the toxic stress level I would probably have a heart attack or be very ill because I would have pushed my body more than capable but short bursts make us stronger and faster. And it's the same with using our brains and that of our dogs if we work from a toxic stress level we're just pushing them over threshold they're not going to learn anything but by working at a tolerable level of stress and pushing yourself and them up and down it you keep building on that and building new neural pathways that become the default instead of the negative behaviour or the negative association. This is how you make huge changes and help build resilience and this is one of the key features really for helping with noise desensitization.
It was really interesting when I was speaking to people about this challenge before it began with those who have tried noise desensitisation when they said that it hadn't worked and I asked how it was done none of them had really left enough time before the night in question and it hadn’t been done in small enough doses or consistently creating the benefits of the compound effect.
The vast majority of people got some sounds on say Spotify or they've got a sounds CD and then put it on a couple of weeks before fireworks night but not introduced it properly and not done it slowly enough and so it won’t work. Building resilience is crucial but it is not something that is To put this into another context when I was actually helping my blind dog in managing her anxiety with the sound of traffic it took me 8 months to do! It's important to really work at the right stress level of your dog and that you're not over stressing them but you also do need to have them at a point where you are stressing a bit in order to make those improvements that you want. How you do this will vary from dog to dog as there isn't an exact science one dog may need a minute on the lowest volume, another may only cope with 10 seconds and another may do 5 mins to start with. You then increase and maybe decrease at times to slowly build the tolerance up.
In the challenge I looked at the interplay between 5 key area timing, duration, stress level, consistency and layering with scent - more about that is the subject of another blog! But using this approach builds up resilience and ultimately builds calmness in your dog around those things that are stressing them out.
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