BEHAVIOR ADJUSTMENT TRAINING 2.0

To summarize: use calm praise, petting, or other non-distracting bonus rewards with impunity, any time you want to. Use food, toys, scent work and other tangible bonus rewards when the distraction works in your favor.

t all moments throughout your session and in life with your dog, think, “Is there anything I can change to help my dog feel safer?”

There really is no limit to the creative ways that you can use Mark and Move and enrich the training space. Just remember this is a jump-start to be able to do BAT, not the whole technique. Don’t get stuck thinking that you’ve really tried BAT if you’ve only ever done Mark and Move, and only with treats. In my experience, the intervention of cueing, marking, feeding, etc. tends to slow down progress if you aren’t also doing proper BAT 2.0 set-ups with the dog fully in control. The goal of BAT is to empower the dog to make good choices on his own, in a natural way. Let that be your compass as you choose what to do.

should always give your dog a way to opt out of being near the trigger.

ther dogs tend to show the “Tarzan” behavior that Jean Donaldson mentions in her book Fight! (see Resources). These dogs eagerly go to greet other dogs, but lack the subtle negotiation skills dogs use to avoid conflict. They seem to want to interact, but they just aren’t good at it. For example, instead of approaching in an arc and sniffing the rear first,

any dogs with frustration act crazy from a distance but can greet just fine once they reach another dog. For dogs who can greet well, all you need to work on is a calm approach and the problem is solved. Just practice several polite approaches with different dogs and let the dogs greet whenever they are close enough to do so.

Don’t worry that you might accidentally be reinforcing staring: in a human behavior study by Smith and Churchill (2002), reinforcing precursors to aggression (i.e., behaviors that predictably came before aggression for the subjects of the study) actually reduced the frequency of aggressive behavior.

Do BAT set-ups in many different locations to help your dog generalize

. Sessions that maximize learning and minimize stress take careful planning.

Usually it’s more like 20 minutes