Help for Your Reactive Dog (BAT cartoon)

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These great illustrations of how to Behavior Adjustment Training, or BAT, on a walk are by Lili Chin, http://doggiedrawings.net. Note that the body language in the picture is at the upper end of the threshold. I often work at a lower level of stress, where the dog just notices the decoy. So if you get any of the signs shown in the first picture, don’t go any closer!

Written by Grisha Stewart, Ahimsa Dog Training, Seattle Tweet This Post!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 8th, 2010 at 5:04 pm and is filed under BAT, Tips & Safety . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “Help for Your Reactive Dog (BAT cartoon)”

1. Dawn Says:
   April 8th, 2010 at 5:53 pm

   I love this! So easy to understand..
   my one question is on the hand near the dogs rear with “tap”. if a dog is highly aroused would you still recommend that? I doubt Ceasar fans would be open enough to look at this.. but if they did would they think that is one of his “pssst” hand hits?
   love this and have a dog I want to work with this on..

2. Chris Says:
   April 12th, 2010 at 8:54 am

   Would this be a good technique for dogs that become overly excited in a playful manner when approaching another dog or walking past a yard with a dog? Our newest addition becomes almost uncontrollable when we see another dog on a walk. He’s very excited and playful. However, he’s a large pit mix and I can see that his enthusiastic nature makes other owners nervous and, of course, it isn’t very pleasant to walking him when he’s jumping and twisting around and pulling (we do use a front clip harness). We adopted him only a couple weeks ago and he’s starting the Dream Dog program this week. I’m sure general manner will help a lot! But, I wonder if BAT is a good technique for this situation. I don’t want to discourage his friendliness, just calm him down. It would be nice if we could walk in areas with less stimulation at first, but there are a lot of dogs in our neighborhood and he really needs the exercise.

3. Grisha Says:
   April 12th, 2010 at 9:13 am

   Yes! I would do BAT with bonus treats with him, and use the clicker instead of yes, since you’re using treats. That will help him want to walk away with you after he’s gathered some info. You’ll learn about Leave It and “let’s go” in class, too, so that will be something that helps.

   You’d benefit the most from doing some set-ups, but you can do it on walks, too. Your class instructors can help you with this, but if it turns out that you need more help, you can set up a private session with Carly or me to go over how to work on this.

4. Andre Says:
   May 2nd, 2010 at 5:36 pm

   I remember this illustrator. I vaguely recall that she had hired a trainer that utilized leash corrections and did illustrations for it. Then later on her blog I saw she had discovered a wider variety of trainers (+R, those Natural Dog Training guys, and just a review of dominance theory trainers). I am enthused she found BAT. Time to go read her blog.

   And yes, I am finally getting to trying BAT exercises; first step is read everything here, plus the link you posted to bayingbeagle.com

5. Grisha Says:
   May 2nd, 2010 at 5:50 pm

   Great, Andre! I look forward to reading about you doing BAT on your blog.

6. Ally Says:
   May 4th, 2010 at 11:29 am

   How great! The illustration helps a ton! I have an 18 month old male (neutered) golden who this should work great with! I looked into doing classical conditioning but he’s not real food motivated and has health problems preventing us from using too high value treats with him so this sounds like it will work great! He was in training to be a service dog but is now just my pet, and he’s shown fear issues about other dogs when he’s on-leash since he arrived to my home at 9 months of age! This may just be a miracle for us I’m sharing it on my blog as I know there are others that are followers of my blog that have similar issues with their dogs (service dogs in training/career changes and others) that could really benefit from this program!

7. The “crazy old lady” session (more dog training theatrics!) « Boogie’s blog Says:
   May 8th, 2010 at 8:53 pm

   [...] me away, whenever I marked with either “Yes!” or the clicker. We went through the BAT protocol 3-4 times with each person who appeared on my street. Boogie got the drill! He knew what to [...]

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