Me and Willie have been walking the same path two or three times a day for five years. I’m pretty sure he’s really comfortable and there are a lot of positive experiences on it. We’ve walked thru many rain storms, no big whoop, even in the hard rain.
He is not a fan of the thunderstorms! Inside he starts to stress out and looks anxiously between my wife and I, then usually goes and lays down in the bathroom till the thunder stops.
When this is happening we act like nothing is happening. This is what they say you’re supposed to do to ease the anxiety. I can’t say that when he was young we did this (I just don’t remember, I didn’t always know this was the protocol), I’m kind of afraid we may have tried to soothe him (which I now know this actually reinforces the behavior).
The other morning we were on a walk, we also had a pup I am board/training with us, and the biggest thunder I may have ever heard in my life kaboomed. It didn’t seem like it was way up in the sky where the rain was falling from, I swear I could’ve reached up and grabbed the source of the thunder!
Can you imagine how much this freaked Willie out?!
He tried to run as fast as he could. I had to brace myself and stand strong. I could not allow him to escape the “scary place”, reinforcing his fright, and worse, teaching a 5 mo old puppy to react this way as well! She was a little freaked out, but just scampered a little, sat down and looked to me about what to do. It’s pretty hard to not let an 80+ lb freaked out dog yank your arm out of it’s socket, let me tell you.
It was a long slow walk back as we could only take a couple steps at a time because Willie kept freaking (even though there was no more thunder the rest of the time).
That evening he wanted nothing to do with going our normal route. But we did it. The next morning, I had to again really encourage him to go our normal route. Rebuilding our positive experiences, trying to make him forget that one traumatic experience.
Our setback … that evening was 4th of July! As the sun was setting, I decided to try to get our late walk done BEFORE any fireworks might start. No luck. On the street over the people let if some Roman candles and couple other fireworks.
That day of rebuilding, thrown down the drain. As you can imagine, the next day I again had to really encourage Willie to go on our normal path which we’ve had so many positive experiences on, seemingly ruined by just two bad experiences now.
This morning, I again had to encourage him to go to this side of the street. I didn’t even go for a walk, I just let him and Mary Lou play. Be natural, no human interference (even if that human was me, his fearless leader of over 6 yrs).
Not sure how long it’s going to take us to get to where he again WANTS to walk our path, but the old man is learning some positive experiences from the puppy. We’ll go on our normal stressfree walks as in the past and it’ll go away.
Stay calm, don’t react to things your dog is stressed about. Your dog will react like Mary Lou did: she will freak for a second, see that you are calm and in control when she looks up to you, and she will learn that this experience was just that – an experience. It doesn’t have to be traumatic if we don’t let it be.
