Ever Have The Hair Stand Up On The Back Of Your Neck?

Yeah, that’s called a behaviour. It’s not a conscious choice you’re making to raise the hair on the back of your neck because you get scared or nervous. It’s your brain and body that’s causing it. Your mind has nothing to do with it. That’s the animal that we are – that we deny – that we no longer understand.

Dogs read us in real time and you can’t hide anything from them. How fast can dogs read that behaviour? Let me tell you a story about a dog I worked with – Bear, Pitbull cross. She made me question my own sanity. She was a basket case of mental energy – the dangerous dog. What is a dangerous dog? Or dangerous animal for that matter? Cortisol is raging, blood pressure is up – eyes are bloodshot. The animals mind is gone – out the window. What I’m seeing is primal, the base operant conditioning.

Bear needed to blow out the lines mentally – so I became her bitching post. I’m not going to take it personal, get rid of the beast and then we shall meet – bark it out on me. Bear would be classed PTSD after a bad episode at a boarding kennel – she got attacked by a dog then went missing for 2 days bleeding, no food, no water. Not a good thing for an already reactive dog. She didn’t recognize her owners when they found her. I knew she was going to work me hard and might even draw blood.

So what about that hair on the back of the neck? I don’t have any real fear of dogs – it doesn’t mean they can’t make me nervous or scared in the moment. And Bear managed to break through that fear 3 times – and each of those times followed by a nip.

She bluffed charged me closer and closer and she wasn’t pissing around. She’s trying to figure out what it’s going to take for her to scare me and make me run. She wants to get rid of the Negative Reinforcement that I am. Something you cannot do in that moment. I need to become a positive consequence, and to do that – I’m going to take alot of flak.

That’s positive reinforcement – turning negatives into positives. It’s not good to leave things on a negative note.

When she bluff charged me to within inches – the hair stood on the back of my neck and that’s an Oh Shit moment – I knew she was coming for me. She followed through and came for me the instant that the hair stood on the back of my neck. That fast, she read that moment of fear and tried to capitalize on it.

That’s how fast a dog can read your body language. And they do it in real time.

She found a way to punish me in that moment – in that moment – she became the Negative Reinforcement to me. That shaped my own behaviour – to fight or flight.