Helping a Dog Get Over a Fear of the Collar

By: David Codr

Published Date: January 7, 2020

Kenji - Helping a Dog Get Over a Fear of the Collar

For this Omaha dog training session we work with a super friendly 1 year-old Shiba Inu named Kenji; helping the dog get over a fear of the collar.

Before I shared the secret to stopping a dog from fearing the collar, we talked at length about establishing a healthy leader follower dynamic, shared tips on exercise and how to add a little structure to help the dog feel more confident in his human.

Towards the end of the session, I showed the guardian how to use a Conditioned Emotional Response or CER to help a dog get over a fear of its collar.

In retrospect, I wish we would have filmed the video on how to stop a dog from being scared of a collar earlier in the session. A few of the exercises we went over before (establishing an invisible boundary) had a lingering effect. Combined with how intense Kenji’s fear of the dog collar was turned out to be a bad combination. Kenji practiced avoidance or moved away which are two things that make it hard to help a dog get over a fear of something using a CER.

Helping a dog get over a fear using a CER is one of the dog behavior techniques I really enjoy as its usually a much quicker progression as shown in this video from another session.

If the guardian uses this tip to stop a dog from fearing the dog collar at times when Kenji is nice and relaxed, and he uses the collar I gave him instead of the one that produced such a strong response, he should be able to help his dog get over being scared of the collar. The great thing about this way of helping a dog with a fear of the collar is you don’t have to be a professional Shiba Inu dog trainer to do it.

Because he lives so close, I asked him to call or text me if he is having issues with the technique. If so, I may drop by to do a quick tutorial apart from the things that triggered the fear response in Kenji in this in home Omaha dog training session.

To help Kenji’s human remember all the things we covered, I filmed a roadmap to success video summarizing the session.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Categorized in:

This post was written by: David Codr