The next is to discipline your dog. Often it’s here that we fail our dog and we can loose our temper or apply poor discipline technique. Disciplining your dog cannot be abusive, violent or stressful – these will lead to punishing your dog and ineffective training and possibly lead to behaviour issues.
Good discipline is:
- Consistent
- non-emotive
- non-violent
- Giving the dog rules / boundaries / limitations

Lastly, give your dog affection. You should only give your dog affection when it is in a calm state and only after you have used the first two steps to get it there. Often we are guilty of skipping the first two steps and jumping straight to affection, rewarding our dog when it’s not in a calm state. This leads to behavioural issues.

This can help to improve your dog’s state of mind and fix a lot of the behaviour issues we commonly see in dogs. Often these issues are a direct result of how we relate to our dog. So start implementing exercise, discipline and affection in your behaviour training now.

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The usual background to a scared / nervous dog is a series of events which put it into this state. For instance a common incident would be taking your dog for a walk and it sees another dog and either barks at it or stops and turns into a lead weight which you can’t move, often curling into a ball with its tail between its legs.

Common signs of a scared / nervous dog is barking, erratic behaviour, extreme wagging of the tail while moving around another dog, tail between the legs, growling, turning into a lead weight and not moving. Extreme cases your dog may even turn into a catatonic state, where its muscles get so ridged that it is virtually impossible to move it.