Fear and Anxiety Ratings

This post will attempt to quantify Aggie's behavior.  Her fear of unknown people and dogs leads to anxiety of the presence (or even potential presence) of these unknown creatures.  Combine fear and anxiety with a lack of impulse control and you've got a dog that bites.  I need to lower Aggie's fear and anxiety, and increase her focus and impulse control.  How?

There are a million ways to do it.  First step: organize oneself.  If you can keep thorough records, you can oftentimes find patterns you wouldn't otherwise know existed.  I have a science oriented mind, and appreciate when things are as clear cut as possible.  Therefore, I want numbers and graphs.

I must have edited this post a hundred times trying to figure out how I was going to quantify Aggie's fear and anxiety.  I ultimately decided not to try to separate the two.  For now, any event that provokes fear, anxiety, or both, will be assigned a number from 1-5.  Here are some behaviors I expect to see in each category:

0:  No fear or anxiety, relaxed/loose body movements

1:  Eyes wide, body slightly tensed, will alert on object/noise (or scan the area looking for threats) but will let it go relatively quickly and go back to previous activity

2:  Mixed signals (tense body, wagging tail, happy ears, foot raised), Able to turn away from scary object/noise if asked but not able to relax easily, Indoors: unable to rest even if she looks tired, intermittently pacing and trying to rest (usually whining)

An example of Category 2.

She's checking in with me, but tense due to a train passing by ~1/4 mile away.

3:  Stops eating kibble but will accept higher value treats (beef jerkey, hot dog, cheese, etc),  Indoors: has trouble focusing on cognitive tasks such as scent detection but can recover if I work with her,  Destroys things, Cries in her kennel if she can't get to us but if let out will be jumpy and mouthy

4:  Will probably eat higher value treat but only if forced to turn away from object/noise (ie: gently pulled by leash)

5:  Unable to eat anything, Won't respond to me, Aggresses at scary thing, Complete shutdown*, Indoors: will bite at bars to get out of kennel (ie: when people walk in the house)

Part of what will affect her rating will be how long it takes her to recover from some of these behaviors.  I hope to start timing this and be able to have particular values shortly.

Also, I plan to start a chart to track her ratings and what the triggers were.  All with the goal of focusing my training on what she needs.  Here's to progress!  (or the hope of it...)


*for a video of what shutdown dog looks like, check out this blog:
http://eileenanddogs.com/2013/11/21/shut-down-dogs-part-2/