Boosting a Dog’s Confidence with a Petting Tip to Help Stop His Dog Aggression

By: David Codr

Published Date: July 14, 2019

uncan - Boosting a Dog's Confidence with a Petting Tip to Help Stop His Dog Aggression

For this Culver City dog training session, we share tips to help boost the confidence of Duncan, an insecure Yorkie mix who dips his head and cowers when people try to pet him.

Shortly after the session started, I noticed Duncan would duck his head, cower or flip onto his back whenever I tried to pet him. These are all pretty classic signs of insecurity in dogs so I made sure to let him guardian know that petting him when he was doing these things could actually amplify the insecurity.

I handed her my phone so we could do a video on how to pet a dog in a way that stops it from acting scared or fearful.

Duncan’s guardian originally called for help with his aggressive behavior when around some other dogs following an unfortunate incident. But many dogs who act out that way do so in part due to insecurity. Boosting a dog’s confidence will go a long ways towards stopping his aggressive dog behavior.

Confident dogs are far less likely to be aggressive or reactive, so I suggested the guardian go to youtube and look for videos of tricks and commands to teach him. The more skills he has, the more options she has to redirect him and the confidence he gains will help with many of his dog behavior problems.

You can boost a dog’s confidence in many ways; stopping petting them when insecure, teaching them new tricks and commands, rewarding desired behaviors when offered voluntarily and learning how to read dog body language so you can get the dog away form things it doesn’t like before it feels the need to on its own. And anyone can do this, you don’t have to be a professional Yorkie dog trainer to do these things.

One of the things we went over is a great way to get a dog to focus on you on command. The way that I teach this exercise has an added bonus of stopping the addition of cortisol, the stress hormone, into the dog’s blood. So this exercise stops insecurity in dogs while also making them feel good, a double helping of goodness.

We also covered walking tips, feeding suggestions and a number of other dog behavior secrets in this in home Culver City dog training session. To help the guardian remember them all, we recorded a roadmap to success video.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Categorized in:

This post was written by: David Codr