Only by understanding the fundamentals and necessary distinctions does compensatory education come into focus. The questions then arise: is compensatory education even possible, and if so, how?
While it is known that individual dog fears can be eliminated through behavioral training (guided habituation), this does not apply to profound disorders that have arisen from problems at the first stage of sociogenesis .
These include, among other things, no or poor experiences in dealing with people and the world, a lack of opportunity to orientate yourself to people and thus to habituate yourself to various environmental stimuli…
The complexity of the dog’s problems often only becomes apparent after the dog has been trained to walk on a leash.
If a dog constantly pulls on an un-safety harness and long line , it is not possible to detect any differences in the dog’s behavior. At first, it seemed as if Bobby “only” had aggression in all its forms (status aggression, resource aggression…) and reacted accordingly by snapping . Only after he had established leash training did it become clear that he was a fearful dog who was afraid of everything and everyone. (Which is no surprise, since he was locked up alone for most of the first two years.) If the “danger” could be located, he would attack pedestrians, cyclists, etc. If, on the other hand, the trigger of the anxiety could not be located, such as gunshots, thunderstorms, etc., then Bobby would go into flight mode and was almost impossible to control. In addition, it was very difficult for Bobby to orient himself to people at the beginning, especially in critical situations. He immediately became a solitary dog again with a pronounced fight-or-flight response . The compensatory education required around 1,000 hours (around 3 hours every day for a year) of acting together in the world , wrestling with his anxieties together , and constantly demanding that he orient himself to you in order to make it easier for him to get used to many new stimuli through orientation . To do this, you first had to achieve the status of an ” important other ” with Bobby, which was not easy with an intelligent, dominant male like him. A previous castration as a supposed solution to the problems had no effect. Bobby repeatedly reverted to his old behavior, especially when one was not with him , not in the here and now, but distracted, in his own thoughts .
