Hello everybody, my name's Claire Wilson. I'm a veterinary behaviourist and I'm delighted to welcome you to this speedy whistle stop tour of canine behaviour first aid advice. Just as a a bit of a preamble before I start, there are a lot of topics within this talk, which could be like an entire talk of their own or even an entire day's seminar, so.
It's, there are some bits where I will probably say to you, please do go away and look for more information about this. The idea of this is just to give you a general theme to help you feel better armed at coping when a client comes in and says that they've got a behaviour problem. A lot of people feel a bit overwhelmed and don't really know.
To begin, so I'm hoping that this talk will point you in the right direction, but it's certainly not an all-encompassing everything you need to know talk because I've only got 50 to 60 minutes, so I will cover as much as I can and where necessary, I will suggest that you look at other sources of information for things. So first of all, we'll have a quick look at why we want to be thinking about giving first aid advice, what we're aiming to achieve in that advice. We're going to talk about ruling out medical influences, which is a really important thing.
So many of my referral case load I actually end up sending back to referring vets saying actually I think something medical is going on. So it's really important to understand what sort of red flags to look out for and also to understand why a behaviourist may send a case back to you. We'll have a quick look at how animals learn because that's really important in terms of giving our clients and management strategies to cope whilst they're waiting for a referral or possibly even to solve a problem if it's something more minor.
We'll talk about the importance of identifying triggers. We're also going to talk about punishment and the effects of punishment on behaviour. We'll have a speedy look at canine communication.
This is one of the things where actually I could talk for a whole day and show you hundreds of videos and still not have told you everything that there is to know. So, that's a, a, a major part where I would definitely recommend you looking at other sources. We're going to look at how to respond when dogs become aggressive.
We'll talk about appropriate referral because that is a bit of a minefield, how to cope with difficult patients, and we'll also hopefully have a quick look at the prognosis for dog bite cases, which is going to be another scenario you may come across in general practise where a very traumatised and upset owner comes requesting euthanasia and you don't know whether that's a justifiable answer or not. In terms of of a bite incident, so we'll have a look at that too to help you come to those decisions and support our clients appropriately. So why are we looking to give first aid advice?
One of the biggest issues I think is that often owners have been struggling for quite a long time before they ask for help. Sometimes it's because they're a bit embarrassed about the fact that they've got a problem, but a lot of the time things are just gradually getting worse without them necessarily noticing, because it's not just some sudden one-off thing. They might think that their dog's going to grow out of it or it was just a one-off incident, and it's not until things have been going on for quite a while and potentially escalating that they start to think, oh, actually I have got a problem here, where can I look for help?
They might have already looked for help in lots of other unhelpful places. They might already be quite exhausted and feeling a bit hopeless, and sadly, often they may already be at a point of a point of wanting to relinquish or euthanize that animal because they're just really struggling. So if we can give them some really simple basic advice just to help them cope and feel better and feel able to go ahead with a referral and support them and their animal during that process, then that would be awesome.
For those of you who are already referring to clinical animal behaviourists, you will be aware that we are all extremely busy and we generally have quite long waiting lists, . A lot of my clients end up having to wait several weeks to see me, and so actually you providing them with some essential advice to keep them going until then can really make a big difference to the successful outcome of that case. Why are we looking at the veterinary practise as a source for this?
Well, as we all know, emotional health is just as much our responsibility as physical health is, and we need to be taking a really proactive part in in helping with that. And we may also have a very early opportunity to prevent something becoming a really significant problem. So particularly with puppies, if we're seeing puppies who are mouthing excessively and owners are struggling or they might have just started resource guarding, they might be scared at the vets, there are lots of situations where actually us intervening early may nip something in the bud and resolve it.
And also we can take responsibility for directing owners to appropriate sources of help because there are a lot of inappropriate sources of help and if owners are just left to their own devices searching the internet, they are likely to come across some really inappropriate sources of help. So we can be responsible to help steer them in the right direction, which is a really important role for us to play. And what are the aims of the first aid advice that we're giving?
So I've already said about keeping clients going until the referral consultation, if, if that context is, is relevant. One of the key aspects is to try and limit further undesirable learning. So every time an animal is showing an undesirable behaviour, so for example, a dog who's barking at people who are walking past on the pavement.
That is accidentally being reinforced, as we will see in a moment when we go onto the learning theory stuff. So if we can help owners to avoid their animal practising those undesirable things, we're preventing those things from becoming worse and we may even be making a start to solving them. We, we can help them to identify management strategies to set their dog up or their cat up or their rabbit or whatever other animal it is to succeed with showing desirable responses.
Because the more they show desirable responses, the more that will be what their habit becomes and. It will help them in the long run to develop better general behaviour. So, we also want to educate owners about punishment, which we will discuss further in a moment, in terms of limiting undesirable learning.
We need to think about animal welfare. Behaviour problems almost always involve a negative emotional state emotional state in the animal, so they may be feeling fearful or anxious or frustrated. All of those emotions are things that are not a nice thing to be feeling, and we want our animals to feel relaxed and happy and safe.
We also need to think about the impact on other animals. So if there's other animals within the household that are being negatively impacted, or there may be other animals out in the wider world. So there may be cats in the neighbourhood who are at risk from a dog.
There may be other dogs who do not want to be barked at and growled at because that scares them. So we need to think about the wider implications as well. It has an enormous effect on human welfare.
Any of you who have interacted with clients who are experiencing behaviour problems with their animals will know how exhausting it is for them emotionally and physically. And also we need to think about physical safety. In terms of aggression cases, we want to be avoiding human injury and injury to other animals and injury to the animal itself as well.
So for example, in separation cases, if a client is repeatedly putting their dog in a crate and it's not coping, it is at a risk of self injury. It also can be really helpful to gain client compliance if we can give them some tiny bits of advice and they start to see light at the end of the tunnel that can just help to turn around those those thoughts in the back of their mind that maybe they're going to have to give up their animal. Again, as I mentioned earlier, we'll talk about prognosis for dog bite cases because that's an essential thing as part of our first aid advice trying to work out actually is this a case that's safe to continue with.
Potentially giving them legal advice if that's also relevant in terms of fight incidents or or other aggressive behaviours. And, and we also need to take responsibility referring appropriately. So as a first port of call, we always need to be considering is there a medical involvement in a behavioural presentation because so many medical conditions have behavioural effects.
This table is from a paper by Gary Landsberg and colleagues back from 2011, and it's Really thorough, table of, of all the possible things that might be causing a behavioural presentation which are actually medical. I've put a red ring around pain because that is the most significant thing that I see in my referral caseload, . In the description there in terms of potential behavioural signs, he's talking about altered responses to stimuli, decreased activity, restless and unsettled, vocalisation, house soiling, aggression and irritability, self trauma, waking at night.
It's basically every potential behaviour problem that you might be thinking about referring could be caused by some underlying pain or being aggravated by underlying pain. So we really need to be thoroughly thinking about whether any of these things may be a factor. We also need to take seriously if a behaviourist gets back to us and says actually this doesn't feel quite right.
I think there might be something medical going on. They're not qualified obviously to be able to say what the medical thing might be, but they, they are very well qualified to recognise whether it is just a. Just purely behaviour components and that and that it's explained by experience and learning and so on or whether actually the pattern doesn't fit and the animal's perhaps not responding as it should be or whatever.
So do take that seriously if a behaviourist comes back to you with concerns and and make sure you work really well together with them to to to support that client and that animal. So what sorts of things are we looking for when we're worrying about whether medical involvement may be a factor? So this is constantly in my mind as I'm doing like my home visits are 2 hours generally with a client and you generally will only have about 10 to 20 minutes with your clients.
So it is much more challenging for you to be able to identify these sorts of patterns in behaviour because you just simply don't have the amount of time to spend investigating it. But there are some red flags which may become apparent in a shorter consultation, . So one thing is whether the behaviour change is sudden or gradual, and this is not a be all and end all.
We may well see a behavioural change that's sudden because of some learning. So there may be a specific trigger associated with a sudden change in behaviour. So, you know, a dog may suddenly become worried about being in the car because actually they became really carsick or they were in a car accident or something, and there's an explanation for why that happened.
But if a dog, I, I quite often will get dogs referred saying that, a dog is suddenly being aggressive and never was before, or suddenly not coping, being left alone, or suddenly worried about loud bangs when they didn't care for the last 5 years. Any sudden change such as that, I would definitely say is an alarm bell. But we might also see more gradual changes, so we might see, for example, if a dog is getting reluctant to walk, again, another common thing that I see and and often misdiagnosed as sound sensitivity because people think that the dog doesn't want to go out walking because it had some fireworks or a thunderstorm or something, and it can be quite a gradual onset if there's some arthritic pain associated, for example.
So that might just be coming on at a, at a slower rate and not be quite so obvious. Obviously, in terms of medical things we would be looking for associated loss of condition, but this is not always that obvious. So there may be just something subtle like some minor muscle wastage, and actually looking for symmetry is really important because if there's an asymmet.
With muscles, you know, you might see that one thigh is just very slightly thinner than the other thigh because it's not been fully weight bearing for a period of time. We might see a poor coat condition. That's particularly common with cats who are experiencing pain because they don't groom themselves as well.
Which leads us on to lack of normal maintenance behaviour. So if, you know, if the appetite is affected, they're not looking after themselves, they've got an odd toileting pattern. All of these sorts of things are obvious medical markers that we would we would spot, but we might not necessarily link them to the behaviour change.
So this next one I think is the most important is, is it out of the normal range of expected behaviour for that individual animal? And I think that's the absolute key. So when I'm talking to owners, I'm finding out what did their animal used to be like and who are they now and.
If we're seeing a behaviour that just doesn't really fit with their normal personality or their normal responses, I would be thinking, well, why, why has this changed? Is there something underlying that that that explains that change in personality or different temperament from what we would normally expect. We want to be looking for triggers that that tell us what the what is causing the behaviour, so there may be really obvious triggers, you know, that the dog might be barking at people and every time it sees a person on a walk, it's barking, getting upset, or specific types of people, you know, they might be more worried by children who are running around erratically than they are by adults.
But there may be a challenge in identifying triggers, so there may be a dog who is just randomly barking at home and you can't identify why. Sometimes it's barking because it's heard a firework, but then other times it's barking and you're not aware of having heard a sound. Also lack of predictability, this is another really key thing.
So I would say to an owner, if you put your animal in that very same context again. Would you expect them to always behave in the same way? So if your dog is reactive to other dogs, if the same black Labrador came around the corner at the same distance on the same in the same location, would your dog reliably react to that dog, or is it unpredictable and you don't ever really know what to expect your dog to do?
Because if there is a lack of predictability, I would definitely be saying that that is not just a straightforward learned behaviour. We need to be careful of confounding factors in this because there is, it is difficult to ever recreate that exact same context in terms of, you know, has the dog had the same amount of sleep and the same amount of exercise? Are they hungry?
Is it the same time of day? Has anything stressful happened at home before they've gone for a walk or whatever? There are a lot of potentially confounding behavioural factors in terms of determining this predictability.
But if an owner says to me, that, you know, well, some days they have a really lovely walk and other days it's really awful, I'm thinking, well, what is it that's making some days worse than others? Is it because he's got a sore back or something else? So, that's another big red flag.
And also another one is a poor response to an appropriately designed behaviour modification programme. So if, you're, you've referred a a a dog to a certificated clinical animal behaviourist, you trust their behaviour. Assessment and their behaviour programme.
The owner has implemented it really well and been super compliant, but the animal is just not responding as expected, then I would again be thinking, oh, is there something medical going on that's interfering with the ability of this programme to work for this animal. And obviously we also then need to be thinking, is it medical and behavioural, which it almost certainly will be if there is a medical cause, there will also be learned components. So there may be pain associations, there may be cognitive impairment, where we need to consider.
Stress in the environment or social stress, physical stress. We also need to think about potential medical origins and actually there is a very good question and answer session on the fellowship of Animal behaviour consultants, oh, clinicians, sorry, I said that wrong. I always call it Faby.
They have really excellent veterinary resources, and there's a really good, discussion about how loads of different drugs can affect behaviour, not just steroid related, on their website, which I would definitely recommend looking at. And this paper that I've listed here was, a free access paper and hopefully it still is, so I would definitely have a look at that too. And more recently actually, Daniel Mills and colleagues have published one.
Specifically about pain and behaviour as well, which is really worth looking for. So all of this interplay between medical and behavioural factors makes it really important to have a good working relationship with your behaviourist. This isn't the sort of situation where you would just refer on and forget about it and think, all right, I've sent that to the behaviourists, that's ticked off my list, we've sorted that one now.
You you really need to be working in conjunction with them and ensuring, everything is covered from both sides. So let's talk a little bit about how animals learn, because this really matters for their experiences in the surgery, but also in terms of first aid advice that we're gonna give to owners who, who appear to us with a, a problem. So why does it matter so much?
Learning is constantly happening all the time. In every interaction and every bit of life, we are constantly learning. It's not just in a training class or just in a training session.
Every experience in the veterinary surgery and out in the world matters for future behaviour. So we need to think all the time about what is this animal learning from this experience and how can we alter that to help change their behaviour to something more desirable. So there are 4 basic processes that we need to think about habituation, sensitization, classical conditioning, and operant conditioning.
So habituation and sensitization are the most simple forms of learning, and these don't, these don't require any kind of conscious thought. They're just happening automatically. So habituation is the process that results in a decreased response to a specific repeated stimuli that have no consequences.
And so the point of this is to avoid overwhelming the sensory systems and allow you to focus on the relevant stimuli. So for example, you, you might learn to ignore, I don't know, say the hum. I can hear the hum of my computer now that I'm deliberately listening out for it, but actually most of the time I'm not noticing that because I don't want my brain to be busy thinking about the hum of the computer when actually I need to be concentrating on what I'm saying and what the slides are in front of me.
So it's about the brain dismissing all the stuff that doesn't matter and focusing on what does matter, and that's one of the key things that we're aiming to achieve with puppies during their socialisation and habituation period, to make them realise that actually most of the stuff in the world is not a distraction. They don't need to think about it. They just need to walk past it and ignore it.
Sensitization is the opposite of this. It's where you become more sensitive to a repeated stimulus over time, and this is a problem. This can lead to fearful and phobic responses.
So we might see sound phobias such as firework phobia, fear of traffic, fear of unfamiliar people, and so on if they are overwhelmed by their experience. So classical conditioning, you've probably all heard of Pavlov and his bell, which actually in the real experiment was a metronome, not a bell. This is, again, no thinking involved, this is just an instinctive and automatic response, where two stimuli that occur close together in time become paired together in some way.
So, for example, Wilma is looking very unexcited about her lead because I've deliberately posed this photo, but normally if I get her lead out, this would predict to her that she's gonna have a really exciting walk and she would be running around getting all excited thinking, hooray, it's time for a walk. And that is classical conditioning. The lead has predicted something fun to her, and this can happen in the other way as well.
So it can predict aversive things as well. So for example, dogs who are worried about coming to the vets, they may have made an association with being on the consulting room table as predicting something potentially aversive, so they may be worried about going onto the table. So we need to really make sure we're, we're creating positive associations like this situation with Wilma and her lead rather than accidentally making aversive associations, and that's especially important with puppies and kittens who are coming for their first appointments at the surgery because the first learning that they have is going to be the most important one for setting them up for the future.
So operant conditioning is a step on from the classical conditioning in that we're involving some thinking now and it's related to the consequences of behaviour rather than just two things simply being paired together in time. So behaviour will increase if there is a positive consequence, and the behaviour will decrease if there is a negative or a neutral consequence. So it allows the animal to operate on its environment.
This is why it's called operant conditioning because it it gives the animal a degree of control. So examples of, what might happen in terms of increasing behaviour. A dog who barks at people because they're worried about people and wanting them to stay away.
If those people then stay away, the dog is successful, and he will learn that he can keep himself safe by barking at those people. If a dog is jumping up and gains some interaction from visitors, even if that visitor is actually pushing them away and saying, oh no, don't jump up at me, actually that dog is going to think, Hooray, I was successful. I got some interaction from that visitor, and that will make them more likely to jump up again in the future.
And in terms of what will likely decrease the behaviour if that visitor instead turns away from the jumping dog or looks away from him and doesn't give any interaction at all when he jumps up, waits for him to put all 4 ft back on the ground again, and then interacts, we will see a decrease in jumping and we will see an increase in 4 ft on the floor. In terms of the dog who's barking at people who keep away from him, if we can set him up at a distance where he doesn't feel the need to bark and people are just walking past and he can see them walking past without him needing to bark, then being quiet will be increased and barking will be decreased. But that is essential in that situation to be setting it up appropriately for that to actually work.
Oops. So, as I said, learning processes are occurring during every single interaction and experience. Remember that that that is a constant process.
It is not just in a training class. So there's Billy demonstrating that if he's successful about leaping onto the sofa onto that person, that he will do that more and more because he, he's getting reinforced for it and it is being successful. If, however, he's reinforced for lying on his bed, then that will be a more successful behaviour for him, and he will choose to lie on his bed more often rather than to leap over people on the sofa.
Not that there's anything wrong with having a dog on the sofa, but actually my dogs get really muddy and so I don't really want them all over my sofa. So, in terms of management to reduce this practising. When you've presented with a behavioural problem, what we want to be looking at is the individual situation using these general underlying principles, and we want to help the owner to avoid that behaviour from being manifested, so we can have a chat with them about what the triggers are, what the contexts are, and so on, and explain to them why it's so important to avoid the problem behaviour being shown.
And we also need to make sure that the response to any undesirable behaviour is effective in reducing its success, so we want to be careful to make sure that owners aren't accidentally reinforcing undesirable behaviours, for example, with the jumping up and accidentally interacting. So identifying triggers, it can be tricky sometimes and if, if it's a struggle, I would then, as I said before, go back to, gosh, is there something medical going on? Is this actually, if it's that hard to identify what caused that dog to react in that way, then maybe there's something internal causing a problem.
And as I said, it is tricky in a short consultation, but even really small changes can make a difference. So for example, it may be something as simple as if the dog is reacting really badly to people passing the front of the house, actually we just don't let them into a room where they have access for that or we keep the curtains shut or something like that. It could be something very simple that will make a big difference to that dog practising that behaviour.
Trigger stacking you've probably come across before. It's the idea of the last straw breaking the camel's back. So these are just some diagrams that demonstrate this in two different emotional states.
So we've got a frustration one and a fear one because it's really important to think about the arousal level of the dog. More than about the actual emotion when we're thinking of trigger stacking, because anything that's going to cause a dog to become aroused is at risk of escalating and adding up in a cumulative effect. So what happens is this dog here has been upset because these two people have had a row and he's got a bit scared by it all, .
That in itself he might manage to cope with, he might just go and hide in his bed under the stairs or something and and keep out the way until the things have calmed down. However, if he then goes out for a walk and he gets scared because a stranger comes too close to him and he's barking at the stranger, and then in the evening some fireworks go off, he's had all these three things happen in quite a short space of time, and they will all add together and tip him over this red line, which is his, his ability to cope, and that may cause him to become aggressive. It may cause him to run away and hide, whatever his strategy happens to be.
And, and the same down below, this is frustration, so this dog is really wanting to play cause it can see these other two dogs over here having a good game, but he's on his lead, so he's getting really aroused and annoyed that he's trapped on his lead and can't go and join in. Then after they leave the park, he sees a cat sat on a on a fence post, which he really would like to chase, but he can't because he's on his lead, so he's getting even more wound up, and then he barks at the postman through the window and he's really frustrated about that too because he wants to chase the postman down the street or he wants to get out there and greet the postman. But he can't because of that barrier, and again all of those things will add up and tip him over the edge, and that could then result if he did happen to get out the front door, he might run down the road and bite the postman, whereas actually if the postman had been the only thing in isolation, he might have managed to cope with that a lot better.
So we need to be very careful to explain this to our clients so that they understand how important it is to manage what their dog is being exposed to, to try and keep his arousal level low or her arousal level low, such that he's less likely to react to things. We also need to be really careful not to inadvertently increase stress when we discuss these management strategies. So for example, some dogs may actually really benefit from not going out for walks if they're struggling so much, but then what we don't want to do is inadvertently cause stress to them by them being understimulated and so on.
So if we are going to make advice like that, we then need to balance that out with giving them loads of activity feeders and enrichment within the home environment or in the garden and so on. We don't want to advise to confine a cat if actually that's gonna cause them more stress. We want to make sure that coping strategies are available to these animals and that our management strategies allow them to still use their coping strategies.
And we need to make sure that we're addressing their mental and physical stimulation, needs and, and that our advice isn't accidentally interfering with them not getting enough stimulation. So what about punishment? Punishment, I just want to make it really clear that punishment is not just about saying no.
All dogs ought to understand that you can say no to them and that, that they, you know, can't always have what they want. And there's been some misunderstanding, I think, in, in some, . Websites and so on, thinking that reward-based trainers never say no and and don't stop animals from doing things.
But what we're talking about here is positive punishment. We're talking about creating a deliberately aversive experience for an animal, and we don't want to be doing that for several reasons, but I think in terms of learning theory, the most important one is what I've put in in red at the top here, that, When we're trying to change problem behaviours, what we want to be doing is identifying the motivation behind that behaviour. Why is that dog barking at people that are walking past him?
Is he frustrated? Is he fearful? What is it he's trying to achieve?
Is he trying to make the person go away? Is he trying to make the person come towards him because he wants to interact? We need to be thinking about the reasons behind the behaviour.
And then we're in a really good position to change those behaviours because we understand why it's happening, we can then do something to change how that animal is feeling and thinking about the situation. In cases of punishment, actually all you do is inhibit that behavioural expression, and you don't do anything to address the perception of the trigger. And in fact, you could even make the perception of the trigger worse.
So for example, if a dog is fearful of unfamiliar people walking past and every time he barks at an unfamiliar person coming past, he gets his lead yanked or he gets jabbed in the ribs or some other horrible thing. He's gonna get even more scared about unfamiliar people appearing, because he will create that associative learning that when a person is present, something bad happens to him. So he's gonna be even more desperate to get rid of them.
We might also see some significant damage to the owner pet relationship, and you know one of the key things for solving behaviour problems is ensuring that a dog has a really good relationship with their handler. They need to totally trust each other, and that's got to be mutual, and the animal must feel safe with their owner. So anything that disrupts that relationship is a really bad idea.
So another thing is that, dogs are very much, social creatures in terms of their, responses to situations, and they will notice what the owner is doing and potentially join in with what the owner is doing, or think the owner is joining in with them. So for example, A dog's barking at the window at people passing by. If the owner then starts shouting at the dog, the dog may well misinterpret that and think the owner is also trying to scare that person away, and that will accidentally reinforce it rather than interrupt the, the behaviour, which is, you know, the owner thought they were interrupting the dog, but the dog might have thought, aha, let's all shout together at that person until they've gone.
It's also extremely dangerous to confront an aggressive animal with, with any kind of punishing, techniques. They may well escalate to defend themselves and become even more dangerous. So it's always really important to advise owners to not use punishing techniques.
So what about communication strategies in dogs? As I said, one of the really important aspects of solving problem behaviours is understanding how dogs are feeling and what they're thinking. So we need to be able to recognise how they're communicating to us, and we need to understand the body language of anxiety and fear of high arousal, of relaxation.
Owners need to be able to recognise these signs so that they can help their dog and set them up to succeed, and veterinary staff also need to understand all these communication signals so that they're able to handle their patients respectfully and safely. So this is a very much a whistle stop tour, because this is a a whole talk in itself, but essentially dogs are very social creatures. They have very big teeth which can cause a very significant injury if they do get into a fight.
And so they have a very strong. Instinct for solving conflict and cooperating with each other and avoiding conflict in the first place. So their communication strategies fit in with this.
They are, they're desperately wanting to avoid conflict and appease each other and not get into a row. So they use lots of different signalling structures, in terms of body language, ear position, tail position, the movement of the tail, their general body stance, tension in the face, the position of their head, the direction of their gaze, and the thing is you need to be looking at the entire dog. You can't just look at one thing.
You know, a a a a happy looking waggy tail may not in fact be that if you look at the rest of the dog. If the rest of the dog is looking quite tense and staring, then that waggy tail probably means that dog is very highly aroused and at risk of biting. So it's really important to look at the whole dog.
And just as an example of some of the signals here we've got, Ebony here has gone too close to Boris. Behind his head is his congwobbler, which is full of food, and he does not want Ebony nicking his food. So you can see he's got his head down, and he's staring towards her, saying, hey, this is.
My food, you better move away. And Ebony, desperately wanting to please him and not end up in a fight, is licking her nose. She's turning her head away and she's also lifting a pool, and all of those things indicate to Boris that she's terribly sorry and she doesn't want to have a row with him, and she's appeasing him and saying, please don't be cross with me.
And we will see a lot of these signs in the vets that Ebony is showing now. We see a lot of dogs who are avoiding eye contact with us, licking their lips, lifting their paws up. All of those things suggest they are worried in our presence and they are feeling under threat, like.
Boris is genuinely threatening Ebenee's right to feel like this. When we're at the vets, obviously we're not intending to threaten our patients, but they will very often perceive it as that and show these appeasing signals to try and avoid conflict with us and ask for space because they're worried. So we need to be looking at all of these signals and and also educating our owners about them.
So, this is the ladder of aggression which I've just, this is a verbal version of it and we've got a diagram on the next page, so I'll, I'll talk through that NMO. Dogs who are feeling under threat will escalate their level of signalling. So these, these.
Things at the at the lower end of the ladder are what they will show when they're feeling slightly worried. So what Ebony was doing in that previous picture. As the threat increases, they will escalate up to the the final option of biting and biting itself, making contact is then a whole range of different strengths and intensities, so that is not one thing on its own.
And it's really important to remember that. We will talk a bit more about that when we look at bite prognosis. So the what the animal will use in terms of these signals will depend on the perceived level of threat, and note I say perceived level of threat, it's how that dog is feeling at that moment in time.
It's not what we think we are doing to that dog, it's how they are feeling. Their prior experience will be very significant, their individual temperament will make a huge difference. The other individual factors, perhaps their sex and their neuter status may also play a role.
And we really need to recognise the earlier signals here and respond to those appropriately because then animals dogs have no need to feel the need to escalate up this ladder. If we recognise these ones and think, oh gosh, that poor dog's feeling a bit worried, should we give him a bit of space or handle him in a slightly different way, they have no reason to then escalate up this ladder. So this is just a pictorial version of it, which was done by Kendall and her illustrator Maggie, and this is in several of the BSAVA manuals as well as all over the place in other places.
So, I actually really like using this version with the images because it's much easier for owners to interpret and you can show them things like a polift. Your dog is worried. When your dog rolls over, they aren't wanting a tummy rub necessarily.
They might actually be really worried and asking you to give them some space. So this is a very, very useful resource for giving to clients and maybe even having a poster up on the wall in the surgery for people to see and for the staff to refer to as well just as a reminder to them. So what do we want to do if a dog does show aggressive behaviour?
One of the really key things is keeping the arousal level low. As I said before in that example of a dog shouting out the window at a postman, if, if the owner joins in and becomes highly aroused and shouting as well, actually that can really exacerbate the situation because the dog's arousal level will match the person's arousal level around. Certainly my three dogs, if one dog barks, the others will join in, even though they have no idea what they're barking at.
They will just rush to join in with the, with the arousal, without even bothering to, to think what it is they're reacting to. So we need to keep ourselves in a relaxed and low arousal state in order to help the dog to, to feel calmer as well. And we need to use our knowledge of canine body language.
So remembering that first image with Boris and Ebony, he was staring at her, and that is a really confrontational thing to do to a dog. So we want to avoid eye contact. We don't want our dogs to feel like Ebony did.
We want to look away. We want to turn our head away so that they're not feeling under threat. If that helps to relax the dog, if looking away and avoiding eye contact helps him to feel a bit safer, then you can move away and give the dog the space that they've asked for, .
If that dog is then willing to approach you now that you're further away and you're not staring at them and not trying to impose in their space, they may well be willing to approach you, and you can then think, what can we do to make this a positive situation for that individual dog? Would a game with a toy work? Do they want some food?
Do they want a fuss? Or actually, do they just need to keep having some space and, and will, will not go, go there again? In the longer term, we need to think what was it that triggered that aggressive incident.
Go back to management plans, think what slipped up in management to cause that issue to arise, and we also may well want to think about muzzle training depending on how, how much the dog is escalating up to to biting level rather than just the lower level signalling. What about appropriate referral? So first question is, do we need a trainer or do we need a behaviourist, because these are very different skill sets, and.
So we need to think about what these different roles are. So a trainer is somebody who is taught to like this lady here is training new behaviours to dogs that don't have any problems. So they are learning, for example, to sit or walk on their lead or .
You know, be polite at gateways, go and settle in their bed while you're having your dinner. They're learning, they're basically learning new behaviours. A behaviourist is qualified to amend problem behaviours, so it is, they're changing behaviours, it's not about teaching new behaviour, it's altering behaviour that is a problem.
So there's also then within that whether you need a behaviourist or a veterinary behaviourist and we'll we'll talk about that in a moment as well. In terms of referral, it's really important to work within the RCVS code of conduct because the behaviour profession is currently unregulated and we need to be very cautious where we are sending our patients to. You need to ensure that you are identifying appropriate qualifications.
Check that the behaviourist has been assessed independently from the membership organisation, because there are several organisations where actually they just train up their own people and suddenly you're a behaviourist. There's one particular franchise in the UK where I think you do with something like a six week course and suddenly you're a behaviourist. That that is not an appropriate level of training for, for this profession.
So we need to be checking that, people have been educated appropriately and also that they've been independently assessed. We also want to make sure that the referral process is as it would be for any other referral situations. So for example, if you were referring for cruciate surgery to an orthopaedic surgeon, you would find a specific referral centre and you would send the medical history and you would refer that patient proactively to that centre and communicate with.
The surgeon who was going to do the surgery, and we need to be doing exactly the same with behaviour. So unfortunately, a lot of practises seem to just hand out a list of behaviourists or tell an owner to to find their own behaviourist and and let them know and then they'll refer them. And actually we need to be making that judgement for them.
Owners are not knowledgeable enough about what qualifications to look for, to for us to put that into their hands. We need to be to to proactively choosing somebody appropriate and ensuring that we actively refer refer those clients. There's this really nice .
Chart on the FA clinicians website. This is the website that I mentioned before here, FA clinicians Fellowship of Animal behaviour clinicians. They've got loads of excellent resources for veterinary practises, this being one of them, which just helps you to see the difference between what an animal training instructor and an animal behaviour technique.
Which is essentially a rehab trainer. So I have a, a rehab trainer who works with me. I go in and do the the assessment and the diagnosis and come up with a treatment plan and she then will implement the things that I've suggested, but she's not qualified to actually make those the diagnosis.
A clinical animal behaviourist can do the behavioural assessment. I'm not allowed to call it a diagnosis because that's, that's a protected word by RCVS. That they will do a behavioural assessment, come up with a plan, and, and support the client and then.
The veterinary behaviourist obviously does all of that, but also has the medical side of things. So for example, if there are underlying medical issues or if we need to use psychoactive medication or address nutrition or anything else, then the veterinary behaviourist is able to do that as well. So what do we do with our aggressive patients, .
It is very challenging in the veterinary surgery if we are trying to get our job done and the poor animal we are working with is is not being compliant because they're so worried. One of the most important things is to remember that most dogs who are getting upset at the vets are fearful. They may be frustrated rather than fearful, or they may be a combination of both, but it is vital to be considering their emotional state and the motivations behind their aggressive responses.
They are trying to stop you doing what you're doing because they are worried about it or frustrated by it, and those are negative emotional animal states emotional states, and we need to respect that and help them to feel safe again. We need to think about what is that animal going to learn that will affect its future behaviour. If we think, oh, it doesn't matter, let's just shove a muzzle on it and we'll get two nurses to hold it while we shove that kennel cough vaccine up its nose.
What's that animal going to learn from that experience? That animal is going to learn that it never wants to come back to the vets again. It is going to be probably more aggressive.
The owner is gonna be traumatised and upset at having seen their dog be handled like that, which is going to put them off coming back to the surgery when their dog is poorly. It's, we, we need to think very carefully about how necessary procedures are. So if it is something like a kennel cough vaccine, or a dog's come in with a really sore ear, and we can't get an otoscope easily down the ear because it's too sore to handle, do we actually need to do that job, or can we pause and think of a different option?
So, for example, with the ear thing, I actually very rarely put an otoscope down a a a sore ear because I will send an owner home with some pain relief, or potentially steroids to, to reduce inflammation depending on, on what I think is the problem based on the history and the presentation. And I will ask them to come back in a few days when hopefully their ear is a lot less sore, and we can then have a look down down the dog's ear to see what else we need to do. For a kennel cough vaccine, you know, are they going into kennels next week, and it's essential because the owner's got a holiday booked and the dog's got to go into kennels because there's nowhere else for them to go, and the kennels insists on them having it.
Or actually, is this just a routine thing that the owner keeps up because they think they need to. Or they want to have it ready in case they need to go into kennels, and then actually we can send that dog away to do some target training with a syringe and teach them to cope with having something put on their nose and train that handling so that actually it's, it's a nice procedure for them to experience it in the end, . We also need to think about whether it's safe to continue from the point of view of the, the dog becoming more aggressive, and somebody becoming injured, as well as the, the welfare on that poor animal itself.
So. This poster is a very, very old poster that I helped design for the APBC, and this little section here just says potentially trial therapy for a likely diagnosis or suspected pain, possibly prescribe angiolytics and reschedule the appointment. Muzzle training to allow less stressful handling.
So if a dog is really worried about having a muzzle put on, that's actually going to cause more of a problem. If we can spend some time teaching them and training them to like wearing a muzzle because they anticipate food when it's, when it, the muzzle comes out. Then actually that allows us to do a much more minimal restraint handling and still be safe.
So just spending some time doing muzzle training can make a huge difference. A lot of these animals, because they're frightened, they're actually using significant restraint on them, massively. Their fear because they haven't then got the option to avoid.
So if we can teach them to wear a muzzle such that actually they don't need to really be held at all, and we can just sneak an injection in without restraining them, then actually that's gonna be really beneficial. And really importantly, training the dog to be less fearful of examination and handling. Which some clients are really brilliant at doing and really compliant at at putting the time and effort into doing that, and it can make such a huge difference.
So a quick bit about bite cases and prognosis. So this is another website that I totally recommend you going to. Sophia Yin, if you just Google Sophia Yin, you will find her website.
Very sadly, she's no longer with us, but all of her resources are still very much available and this, bite Levels one is really good, but she's also done some great ones with how to appropriately greet dogs and things like that and, body language ones and so on. So I would definitely recommend you searching for her website. This is, the, the levels of bite, which makes a, a very big difference to prognosis.
So there's a pre-byte which is basically just, . Not biting at all, as you can see, there's an air snap, there's minor puncture, much more serious puncture, multiple bites, and death, and obviously the level of bite makes an enormous difference to the prognosis, but we also need to be thinking about the context and whether that dog was potentially justified in escalating. If the owner wasn't aware of the lower level warning signs, they may have been ignored or they may have been misinterpreted, and that dog might actually have been pushed really, really hard before they felt the need to bite.
And I see that a lot with my clients. I will see a lot of dogs that are desperately trying to avoid biting and their owners just aren't seeing that and are imposing themselves on their dog, and their dog is then biting. And I feel so sorry for those dogs because actually they really were trying so hard not to.
We also need to think about, actually, yeah, was it reasonable? Was the dog justified in in this bite? So for example, one very sad case I saw was a German shepherd who had bitten a little girl on the forehead, a very minor bite.
It was a minor level 3 bite. In fact, it was more of a kind of scratch than a puncture. He was seized by police and put in kennels for 3 months because social services got involved because of the little girl going to hospital.
In fact, that dog was a dog with a really, really nice temperament with the family normally, and what had happened was the little girl had jumped onto his back when he was lying on the top of the stairs, and he had very severe hip dysplasia. So it was actually completely reasonable for him to say, Can you get off me? That really hurts.
And he used a very minimal level of aggression to tell her that. So we need to be looking. In detail at the context of what's happened, we need to be looking at triggers.
Was was the bite something we can predict in the future? Because if actually we can implement some management to avoid that situation arising again, then that's a dog we can work with. If, however, we can't really understand why the dog bit, it's bitten really seriously and we don't know how to avoid it in the future, or we can't reliably avoid it, then that's a much more risky situation.
We also need to think about how many bites have occurred, and this might seem like a silly question, but if a dog has done one bite, we, we actually find that harder to predict whether that will happen again, whereas if a dog is bitten multiple times in that same context over and over again and we can use some management to avoid that context, then we've got a much better chance of knowing that we can resolve that situation. So there's a lot to consider. We shouldn't just be taking clients at their word that their dog was bitten and they need to be euthanized or rehomed or whatever it is.
We need to be actually helping them to analyse the situation and look at the context, look at what their dog is normally like. What's the temperament of this dog normally like? Has he actually got a really sore knee or a sore back, or has he got a sore tooth because he needs a dental?
You know, there may actually be some reason why, why a dog has bitten when he hadn't before. So a quick summary, the most important thing we can do for our owners is supporting them emotionally. It is so challenging to live with an animal with a behaviour problem, and we want to make sure we're looking after our owners and helping to support them.
We need to consider whether there may be medical factors involved and accounting for those managing, resolving, treating, investigating. We need to do a risk assessment in our aggression cases. We need to help our owners to work out prevention strategies.
The absolute key for this first aid advice is reducing the risk of the animal practising their undesirable behaviour so that it's not being accidentally reinforced all the time. We need to educate owners about recognising fearful body language, and do use resources. There's the, the Kendall's ladder of aggression and there's also all those things on the Sophia Yin website.
There's also some great handouts on the RSPCA website about dogs interacting with children, what's appropriate and what isn't, and so on. And they also have a lovely rabbit one as well, although this talk is about dogs, but they've got a lovely rabbit body language one. We want to ensure that owners are understanding what appropriate responses are to problem behaviour, so discussing with them about punishment and discussing how to react if a dog is showing aggressive behaviour, and then very importantly, directing them to appropriate professionals if they do need further support.
So just as a little summary, I just got this new puppy on Friday, she's called Vera and she will be 7 weeks old tomorrow. And she asked if she could just show some videos to demonstrate this importance of setting dogs up to succeed with showing desirable behaviours and that we don't want to accidentally reinforce problem behaviours. So this first one is me giving her her breakfast and as you can see, she's she's gonna leap about all overexcited and silly.
I do not want to accidentally reinforce leaping behaviour because she's gonna be about 25 kg when she grows up. So I'm waiting for her to offer me a very polite sit instead. So you can see the leaping gets ignored and the food does not get placed on the food while she's leaping.
And then she puts her bum on the floor and stops leaping, and that's when she gets the food. And then, so that was yesterday and then this morning. She has progressed about managing to do some eye contact and this video, I'm using squeezy cheese, she just gets to lick the end off the cheese, so it's a very tiny reward because she's only tiny.
So to start with, I started off yesterday just teaching her to be rewarded for a sit rather than mobbing me. But she then started to give me some eye contact. So in this video, I'm waiting for her to give me some eye contact.
I'm not reinforcing that sit because she had just given me some lovely eye contact, but I made a mistake there because she didn't understand that yet. I should have reinforced that sit. So the next one, I'm reinforcing the sit.
I'm not waiting for eye contact because I need to set her up to succeed. If I never reinforce that sit, she won't bother to do it again. So I don't want to make my goals too high.
I'm now going to, now I've got her sitting again, I'm gonna wait, oh, and she looked at me, so she gets a reward. So what I've changed my criteria now, I'm rewarding her if she sits and looks at me. But if she had lost that, I would have then had to go back to just rewarding the sit to make sure that she was still being reinforced for something desirable and not being reinforced for leaping about trying to steal the cheese out of my hand.
So I hope that those little videos are useful for you to just see how important it is to be setting our dogs up to succeed with practising desirable responses and just not not inadvertently and accidentally reinforcing problem behaviours because that's really the most important message that you can give to your clients as first aid advice. And there's Wilma Whippet saying goodbye. Thank you ever so much for listening.
I really hope that's been a helpful presentation for you. And please do go off and look at further resources to help you to learn more.