Teaching an Anxious Dog to Focus to Help Reduce His Stress

For this Omaha dog training session we work with 1 year-old Bernese Mountain Dog mix Murphy (Pictured here on the right with his roomie Tof), teaching him to focus to reduce his stress and lunging behavior.

Knowing that Murphy is sometimes reactive, I used a lot of dog behaviorist tricks such as only petting him when he didn’t turn away from my reaching hand, avoiding direct prolonged eye contact and respecting his space. Many dogs act aggressively because humans are not listening or respecting the dog’s space and boundaries. When you are rehabilitating a dog with aggressive behavior, you need to make sure the dog is comfortable and confident.

One of the things we went over is how to teach a dog to focus. This is a great exercise for aggressive dogs as its an easy way to redirect the dog’s attention away from things they are uncomfortable with or reactive to. You can learn how to train a dog to focus on command by watching the free positive dog training video below.

Helping a dog stop acting aggressive takes time, patience and lots of practice. Im hoping that the other dog psychology tips I shared in this session give Murphy’s guardian the tools she needs to help stop the aggressive behavior. But if the dog is still aggressive to people in a month, we may need to set up a follow up session to build on our progress.

To help the guardian remember everything we covered in this in home dog training session, we recorded a roadmap to success video.