Emma Parsons aggression seminar

Was fabulous. She exceeded my expectations. First of all I was absolutely horrified when she described Ben, her Golden who had serious dog-dog aggression to the point of getting so over the top he aggresses complete with spit and vomit at the sound of tags jingling or a car door opening.

His story is an interesting one and certainly shows the unwanted effects that can occuer using corrections/fear/pain to try to extinguish aggression. She tried the old correction method including correcting him harshly with a prong collar when he aggressed at another dog because really that's all that was available to her back then and it made his problems exponentially worse.
In the beginning his problem wasn't actually all that bad but after two sussions , one using hard prong corrections that had him urinate and defecate and one using an alpha roll he became really bad- poor guy.

If I had had a dog like him I would have had him PTS without a doubt so it's amazing to see in his video clips how far he's come and that he can interact calmly with other dogs and compete in OB so successfully. There were some people in the audience with reactive dogs who had tears in their eyes when she talked about how frustrating and isolating it is to own an aggressive dog.

Interestingly, Emma didn't choose or want to work with aggressive dogs, she didn't even want to after rehabilitating Ben. She just wanted to go back to her competitive OB world but she had beome very well known because of how well she had done with Ben and people kept sending her clients. I thought that was kind of funny.

The thing that was new and interesting to me that she did was basically teaching the dogs through clicker training to be able to look at the stimulus and be calm. I had always seen people with reactive dogs just training their dogs to focus 100% on them and remain in work mode. That works to a dgree but then the dog never really learns to be OK with the stimulus - just to be forced to ignore it. These dogs in a short time were able to look at the stimulus be it a human or another dog, whatever they aggressed at, and then look back at their handler. So instead of just having to sort of pretend the stimulus wasn't there, they really became ok with it and were able to look at it calmly without aggressing for longer and longer periods and look back at their handler-- very cool. You could see the tension melting out of the dogs. It was a beautiful thing to behold.

Rosie and Sammy did well as "calm dog" demos- they never really react to anything when they are in work or frisbee mode but they've also never really been in that type of situation so I was nervous. They thought it was great when we worked alongside dogs that needed us to be more wild and rambunctious. I tugged with Rosie so long and hard I was embarassingly out of breath and just hoping it would be time to put that dog away.

A couple of funny moments - there was a dog who was supposed to be reactive who didn't really react to Rosie at all but seemed pretty comfortable. In an effort to up the ante for this dog I was to play tug and frisbee with Rosie, get her growling etc and accidentally threw the frisbee right onto the table with all of Emma's things and knocked over a cup sending stuff flying onto her laptop with her power point presentation. WHOOPS. If that had been coffee instead of a cup of treats it could have been a very short presentation. LOL. The other funny was when I accidentally threw the frisbee right to Colleen's feet. Rosie pounced on her frisbee and then looked up and saw Colleen and handed her the frisbee- this after I had assured Emma that Rosie always brings it right back to me. Heh heh oops.

Sammy also had a funny moment when he was doing parallell heeling on the other side of a barrier from a very aggressive dog. The dog was doing REEALLY well and we were able to successfully raise criteria with that dog quite a few times. So Emma asked us both to stop at a place where there was a break in the barrier so the dogs would see each other. Well Sammy (bless him) was in perfect heel position so my big theigh was blocking them from seeing each other. I took a step back wards so his head would be ahead of my leg and he hopped straight backwards in his sit. I laughed - thought it was a fluke and took another step backwards and he did it again Too cute. I guess he's got his backwards heeling down for our rally trial next weekend.

I got to chat with Colleen (Dr2) at some of our breaks, not as much as I'd have liked since my whiny dogs weren't amused with spending two days in crates and I had to take them out. Colleen is great and so TINY I could have packed her up in my training bag and taken her home I think I will have to convince her to start trialing in rally -perhaps with her cute little Brussels griffon? hint hint

Anyhoo this post wasn't supposed to be this long-sorry. Bottom line- Emma Parsons is fantastic. I highly recommend anyone seeing her wether they have an aggressive dog or not. She is a regular presenter at clicker expo. She also has a yahoo group called 'click to calm' (the name of her book as well) which sounds like a really great resource and support for people with or working with reactive or aggressive dogs. I give Emma Parsons 4 paws up out of 4 :hail:

She sounds excellent! I'd love to be able to meet her or at least go to a seminar with her presenting sometime. I too always seem to get the "bad" dogs to handle and I'd love to learn even better ways of doing that.

I think she was the APDT conference here in Sept, but I wasn't able to make that.

sounds awesome! i'd love to see her speak.

I'm so glad you posted this. There has been talk of her coming to our area early next year, and I'm hoping to attend. Really interesting comments regarding teaching the dog to calm to the stimulus - I do a ton of attention training with Meg for when we meet dogs on leash, but you are right that it's just "ignore that", not "be okay with that".

What was the set-up for the seminar? I've never been to anything like that. You mentioned your dogs were there; do they just invite certain dogs as demos, or do all the dogs come to be worked? Is it mostly lecture or a lot of demos?

I did get her book recently, but haven't had time to do more than skim it. I love the idea of teaching the dog that a tight leash (since we all tend to tighten up when we get nervous) means to relax. Time to really sit down and read, I guess!

Thanks again for the information.

It was held at a training facility/ grooming place/dog daycare in Calgary.The aggressive dogs were in crates inside kennels in a back room, separated by partitions so they couldn't see each other. My dogs were in their crates in the main area. It was a pretty simple set up. She worked with one dog at a time and set the situation up according to what the triggers were for each dog. She had cards with the details about each dog and also had discussions with the owners about what situations they should work on.

I hadn't intended to bring my dogs but there weren't many volonteers for calm dogs. I knew Emma would keep my dogs safe and they travel well so I didn't mind bringing them. I'm sure some people didn't want to bring demo dogs because when you have to pay attention to your own dog, it's difficult to see what's happening with the aggressive dog. They also wanted a variety of dogs since some dogs have problems only with certain situations or certain types of dogs. There was an old sweet little sheltie that was used for some dogs. Sammy was used for dogs who disliked big black hairy dogs and Rosie was the dog they used when they needed a dog to exude lots of hyper excited energy.

There was lots of lecture (thank goodness we were given a set of notes for her power point) and also quite a few demos scattered in between. There were about 8 or maybe 10 aggressive dogs used in the seminar and 3 calm dogs. Emma selected them based on a written application people had filled out. I think she chose for a variety of breeds and levels and types of aggression. She told us quite a bit about Ben and also some case studies of some clients she has worked with including a very volatile, human aggressive tibetan mastiff :yikes: . She also showed lots of clips of training sessions as well as her reactive dog class.

That's a really good point about desensitizing the dogs to our stress signals. That was very cool. She also showed us desesitizing human aggressive dogs to people bending over them, reaching out to them etc, teaching them that when someone bends over them that it's a cue for them to back up and lie down- what a great safety precaution. She also taught some of the dogs to go stand behind the owner on cue (taught this with hand targeting) which comes in handy when you encounter a moron who insists on having their dog greet yours "but he's friendly!" and ignores your explanations that your dog doesn't want to meet their dog. Good stuff for real life situations.

Another really neat thing was to see how well the method worked inspite of some of the handlers being fairly inept, completely nervous, new to clicker training and having horrible timing- it took longer for their dogs to progress but they did pretty quickly. I was surprised.

She had some very cool strategies I hadn't heard of for resource guarding too.

I hope you do get a chance to see her. You could also check out her yahoo group. It sounds like they have great discussions about their training, exchange ideas and it sounds very useful. She also encourages anyone who attends one of her seminars to e-mail her if we had issues or questions.

Oh wow! It sounds absolutely fabulous. I want to go sometime. I'm so glad you guys had such a great experience. I need to buy that book at least. Lyric is dog reactive when on a leash and I've always worked (when I can...not too many dogs around here) on having him "watch me," however, he also would be allowed to glance back and forth at the oncoming dog. I wanted him to see the dog, but have his attention dispursed a little bit and as long as remained calm, I'd reinforce that. But I would love to see exactly how she does it. Lyric has always been perfectly fine in a class situation where he's in working mode. Unfortunately, I only get to practice him in earnest a few times a year when I go to Seattle. There are just no dogs around here on leash walks. So that seminar is one I could really use. I'd love to hear what her ideas are on resource guarding. I have my ideas but I'd love to hear of more....or variations or whatever she has.

I'm so happy that you had such a good time and your dogs were wonderful and also seemed to enjoy themselves. What great dogs!