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Temperament problems arise when your dog feels anxious, scared, overstimulated or overwhelmed. These feelings can be triggered by a wide variety of different stimuli, including people, especially strangers, men and children, as well as being handled and guarding valued objects. Other common triggers include other dogs, other animals, specific places, objects, sounds, smells, or anything really. 

It's important to realize that the effects from different triggers can add up, so your dog will be more anxious if they are exposed to multiple anxiety-provoking stimuli at the same time. If for example, when an unfamiliar child grabs the dog's collar as it is eating from a bowl. This would be four triggers at once: a stranger, a child the dog's collar and a valued object.

If a dog is beginning to become shy, fearful, scared or upset they will display a series of avoidant, asocial, antisocial or aggressive behaviors such as hiding, retreating, approaching slowly, barking, growling, lunging and snapping. If your dog is extremely fearful or scared, they may even bite.

We can usually resolve these problems with a technique called classical conditioning. Simply expose your dog to the upsetting stimulus in a controlled situation that is tolerable to the dog and well under their reactivity threshold while praising and offering a bunch of food treats, and/or playing a game your dog enjoys like fetch or tug.

After you've done this for a while, the positive feelings your dog has for the pleasant stimuli, the praise, food and games, will transfer to the unpleasant stimulus until your dog no longer thinks it's unpleasant at all. Keep it up and you can even teach your dog to actually enjoy a stimulus they initially found to be scary or unpleasant.

Resolving temperament problems with classical conditioning can be quick, easy and effective, or it can be time-consuming, difficult and even dangerous.

It all depends on whether your dog has learned reliable bite inhibition. If your dog understands that they must always be gentle with their teeth and jaws when it comes to people and other animals, then your dog is not dangerous. This means you can get on with classical conditioning exercises right away, and progress is probably going to be quick.

But if your dog has already bitten another person or dog and that bite was powerful enough to tear or puncture the victim's skin, then you know that your dog's bite inhibition is NOT reliable. Your dog IS dangerous. You should look for help from a good professional dog trainer immediately. Use the Trainer Search at APDT.com to locate a good one near you.

Before you try any of the rehabilitation exercises in this course, you should objectively assess just how dangerous your dog is, and you should determine how to manage your dog safely, to ensure they do not have a chance to hurt anyone else. If your dog is very dangerous, you should not attempt any of the rehabilitation exercises in this course unless under the guidance of a professional dog trainer.

Fortunately, most dogs are NOT dangerous because they DID learn reliable bite inhibition when they were a puppy and have never inflicted a serious bite injury.

Unfortunately, many dog owners ignore or fail to notice the subtle signs that their dog is stressed until the problem gets worse and the dog starts acting aggressively.

A dog's reactivity often makes that dog's owners feel anxious themselves. Owners become embarrassed that their dog is misbehaving and worry that their dog will hurt someone or get hurt themselves. The dogs can sense their owner's stress which only validates and amplifies their initial anxiety. 

So now the dog has two reasons to be scared. There's the initial scary stimulus, and there's the fact that their owner is also stressed. As a result, the dog reacts more aggressively or more fearfully, which makes the owners even more anxious. You end up with a terrible self-reinforcing cycle that gets worse and worse.

At this point, many owners try to prevent the problem by avoiding the triggering stimulus. This may reduce the frequency of outbursts but it does nothing to resolve the problem. To the contrary, it makes the problem worse. Without exposure to the triggering stimulus, the dog will only become more afraid the next time they are confronted with it. Dogs do not grow out of their fears, they only get worse. If you want to resolve stress, anxiety and reactivity, you must address and desensitize the triggering stimuli.

And it is important that you address these problems right away. These problems can easily escalate to where they DO become dangerous. Also, if your dog is acting antisocially, it is a sign that they are not happy or comfortable. Chronic anxiety is a terrible thing to live with and it can dramatically reduce your dog's quality of life, as well as yours.

If you notice any signs that your dog is anxious or fearful in certain situations, now is the time to deal with it, when it's easy to fix, and before it escalates.