Pick Your Battles

Pick Your Battles

Herding and chasing are a common behavior issue in today’s dogs, largely because early peoples did their best to select for these behaviors during the domestication process. At one time, dogs were encouraged to pursue game and wear it down or drive it toward an armed human. Today, in this country, the vast majority of dogs are kept as pets, and this valued skill is thought of as a serious faux pas. Pursuit behaviors are often directed at children because youngsters are smaller in stature, similar to the size of prey animals. They tend to move more quickly and erratically than your average lumbering adult, and that helps to trip a primitive hunting circuit that remains in many pet dogs’ brains.

Three problems with that—children are more easily injured, more easily frightened, and usually don’t have the presence of mind to stop moving when trouble strikes. What might have begun as a game has the potential to get out of hand. Dogs that chase will often lose their heads and begin to get grabby. Furthermore, chase behavior reinforces itself very rapidly, because—in fleeing—the human virtually always delivers exactly what the dog was seeking. For these reasons, it’s one of the most tenacious behaviors (as well as one of the most despised) in an adult dog.

Now, if you are really up for a challenge, you can try to retrain him. The first step to stifling this instinct is to completely eradicate flight behavior from all of the humans in his life. If he begins to chase and snap, they’ll need to stop in their tracks and freeze—regardless of their maturity level. Scolding and punishing are out: the dog is already at a heightened arousal level, and any additional conflict will make him more labile instead of more docile. You’d start off instead with a bucketful of treats and begin the process of desensitization. You’d expose the dog to his triggers at a distance, and then diminish that distance very slowly. Because it’s such a deeply-rooted behavior, you’d have to move forward at a snail’s pace.

A snail’s pace, I tell you. Desensitization may work on a puppy, but in a grown dog, chasing and nipping is a really hard habit to break. Consider this: instead of trying to take the chase out of the dog, it might be better to just take the dog out of the chase. That means you don’t try to change him. He just can’t participate in games like tag or tackle football because it brings out his bad side. He can’t be outdoors at certain times of the day, and he can’t accompany you to certain venues because they present too much temptation. Insulating your dog from temptation by simply removing him from trigger situations comes highly recommended by behavior experts and is not considered a failure of training. We’ve offered lots of tips for training your pet on our blog, but—for certain stubborn behaviors—it might be better to cut your losses and just retrain yourself.

Dr. M. S. Regan