Teaching the Reactive Dog Class: Leading the Journey from Reactivity to Reliability

by Emma Parsons

Typically, people with dogs that bark and lunge at strangers or other dogs live in a bubble of fear, hopelessness, and frustration. After years of experience working with countless clients and their reactive dogs, and with Ben, her own aggressive dog, award-winning author Emma Parsons (Click to Calm) has found a better way to help even more owners and their by carefully orchestrating controlled exposures to triggers in a class setting.A whole class full of reactive dogs sounds like a recipe for disaster, but it is precisely the formula of bringing these frazzled owners together with their dogs in one room that makes the class work so well. Emma, her assistants, and her students form a supportive community dedicated to helping each other and keeping everyone safe. Enveloped in empathy, students learn to train their dogs to tolerate progressively greater exposures to their classmates.Teaching a reactive dog class is not for the inexperienced or the faint of heart; the challenges are many, but the rewards are great. In Teaching the Reactive Dog Class, Emma presents an entire six-week curriculum you can adjust to your needs. This blueprint for instructors and staff and for go-it-alone owners of reactive dogs a week-by-week guide to class goals, key concepts, and crucial exercises practical advice about what to do when things go wrong a set of accompanying weekly student handouts of exercises (also available as downloadable PDFs) background and principles every instructor should know guidelines for recruiting, training, and using class assistants special requirements for students detailed recommendations for continuing training once students have completed the class "Emma was our biggest cheerleader. Without her classes and help I don't know where we would be. Once a skeptic, I am now a believer. I only wish I had discovered Emma and clicker training sooner!" —Jen Lihzis, student"Emma helped me learn about thresholds, gave me tools to help heal my dog, encouraged me through the downs, and gave great exercises to have fun with your dog while building your skills to help cope with life." —Tish Webb, student

Genres: Dogs

227 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 21, 2014

Reviews

[Sanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written and pretty detailed. Has some good tips and other things are a bit longwinded, but good to read through regardless to get some ideas.

[Rochelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

The only reason that I didn't give this 5 stars was because the author said there were worksheets for student homework available and they were not at the website she listed or in the book itself. Overall a good resource for those of us teaching reactive dog classes.

[zointhedeadzonereads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great resource for trainers who need help structuring their reactivity classes!

[Aggis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great Read - even better resource.

[Pr Latta · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is probably the single biggest help to turning my hypervigilent rescue dog into a fine family dog. I am not a dog trainer, but an older owner who had to deal with a dog who was definitely not a good match energy-wise. Parsons gave me *concrete techniques* to use as we increased the dog's ability to tolerate stimuli (she was not dog/dog or dog/human aggressive, just responded HUGELY to almost all stimuli) and sought assistance from dog behaviorists.

I believe this was also the book that convinced me (remember, I'm old and was old school) on the benefits of positive training.

While there is a lot of information on setting up and managing classes (this is, after all, directed toward teachers) I was thrilled to find that I could use the techniques by myself, with the caveat that I was not able to predictably present stimuli and had to, rather, "take things as they came."