Ty The Dog Guy On The Daily

Flooding. No, I’m not speaking about what’s been happening in Louisiana and Texas lately—I’m talking about a psychological term for something that happens when you deal with a lot of stress. If you read my previous blog post about counter-conditioning, I mentioned that it can only get you so far when dealing with a dog’s fear. Maybe the threshold is too big, maybe the dog’s fear is too big, maybe the dog doesn’t have a large enough motivator. It’s not feasible or realistic to use counter-conditioning through the entire process in those cases. However, flooding is often useful where counter-conditioning leaves off. Flooding is a tool that we use to help dogs, sometimes properly and sometimes improperly. It’s essentially saying to the dog: “Here’s something you’re afraid of and you can’t run away from it. What are you going to do?” It’s been called “immersion therapy” as well, and has also been performed with many human subjects over the years. When the mind is confronted with something that’s terrifying o