In this video, you can see Luna is nicely tolerating the other dog. I know this doesn’t seem that impressive, but this is huge for Luna. She is still in rehab for serious on-leash dog aggression and high prey-drive towards all animals. Just 3 months ago, she would have been snarling, barking, and lunging at the end of the leash but she is making huge improvements as you can see.
In her case the dog aggression stemmed from fear and anxiety and those are notoriously difficult to rehab. In addition, her breed (German Shepherd and Malinois) has a very strong energy which steepened the ‘up-hill battle’.
In this video, I only had to use eCollar correction once with a couple of verbal corrections which is great. She is starting to self-correct a lot of the time which means the counter condition is starting to work and her ‘default’ reaction to other dogs is starting to be re-wired. Instead of her conditioned reaction to be aggressive (fight response), it is avoidance which is a great trade-off.
While this is mostly achieved with conditioning, a large part of our success is a solid heel which helps keep her focused on me (the handler) and if she is engaged with me then it is harder for her to fixate on environmental distractions; the more she engages with me, the better for the dog aggression training.