How do you spot a high drive dog? And more importantly, what strategies will help them in dog training? High drive dogs bring incredible enthusiasm to training, but that energy can sometimes tip into zoomies, biting, barking, or full-on chaos. Their drive can work for you, rather than against you when you know the key signs to look for and how to set them up for success!
Transcript: Okay. How does a high drive dog express themself in training with you? How do they express that training? Now, some of them might in their invigorated state, they might run off. Now somebody might call it they're getting the zoomies, but they might run off and go and rehearse responses that previously had a history of reinforcement.
So, in agility, they might start running through tunnels or just doing obstacles. They might go off and grab a toy and run around and have a party of one with their toy. And what they're doing is they're decompressing. It's an expression of the frustration that they're feeling from the training, and they are just decompressing in the only way that they can right now.
You might see it in a Border Collie with them just starting to do an outrun like you're a sheep. You might see it in a dog by redirecting and biting either, on your sleeve, inside of your thigh is a great redirect for a high drive dog. I'm speaking from experience because I've had it. You will see that the dog's intensity, the frustration is growing because of the intensity at which they grab their food.
They might go from having a soft mouth when they're taking food from you to having a very, very hard mouth. The same with a nose touch. They might start nose touching with their teeth. They may get more vocal. Whining, barking, also more agitated movements, more staccato kind of movements, more frantic paw movement when you're trying to shape them.
So, all of this, I can just feel the frustration when you're trying to train that. It's going to be hair pulling because you don't— “How am I going to get you to go around a cone when you're like, or have your open mouth breathing, you're staring at me with the whites of your eyes seeing, and I just don't know how to deal with that.”
High drive dogs, here's a list of needs I think are really great to meet. Number one, a relaxation protocol. If you go to podcast episode number 191, I give you in great detail how to start a relaxation protocol.
Start that at home just as a way to get the dog to accept lying down on their side. And during that relaxation protocol is where we're going to build in some actual calm reinforcement that you can use in your training down the road, but we've got to build it in a calm state at home. So, it could be watching TV. It could be a purposeful time away in your bedroom or another quiet room where you just get the dog to lie on their side and you work through the relaxation protocol as defined in that episode.
These dogs are served by having ultra short training sessions. So, set a timer. Your first training session of the day should always be one minute.
And ideally, you're stopping the timer before the timer goes off because you know ‘I need to change some of the environmental stimulation for this dog to make the correct response the obvious response.’ It's really important when you're training any dog, but particularly a high drive dog that you're aware of what is the goal. Is the goal learning for the dog or is the goal evaluating for you?
So, if you're truly focused on teaching something, then you are not setting the dog up to be frustrated. This high drive dog needs clarity. Your antecedent arrangements need to be spot on. Once they've built up a reinforcement history for the right thing, that high drive dog is going to be able to repeat that for you forever.
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