Blog — Biological Fulfillment

Big thanks to Joy Eriksen for sharing this article with me. Joy is a CSAN if you need help feeding raw!  Read the Article Here: Functional Significance and Welfare Implications of Chewing in Dogs TLDR Bullet Points: 1. Denying dogs chewing opportunities may pose welfare concerns. 2. The shearing/abrasion forces during chewing help clean teeth surfaces and may reduce periodontal disease risk. 3. Chewing on harder substrates may stimulate bone remodeling in the jaws, strengthening bony architecture. 4. Chewing helps regulate the autonomic nervous system, reduce stress, and provide an outlet for behavioral motivation. 5. Chewing is a biological need...

Many people throw this term “leash reactivity” around for the purpose of giving their dog a diagnosis, but what does it really mean? Firstly, your dog is displaying some sort of unwanted behaviors while being restrained on a leash. The “symptoms” of leash reactivity can be: barking, growling, lunging, biting, and even redirecting on the handler. Typically, this is in response to a “trigger” but it could simply be a stimulus that arouses your dog’s drive. So we have a stimulus and a response, but what is the underlying process? It’s different for different dogs, so let’s break it down....

  When I was first learning about dogs from my mentor, he taught me that a dog's temperament is based on their "prey threshold" i.e. what types of prey they are genetically programmed to hunt. So bird dogs have a certain temperament because they are tuned to birds (soft mouth). And you can imagine a bulldog, grabbing and holding onto the bull (hard mouth) and what kind of temperament and drive is required of that particular dog. And so on and so forth, in this way we account for all the different types of hunting dogs and their different types...

  Facts are facts: Loose-lead walking requires a dog to suppress natural behaviors. We don't usually like to use straight-up suppression to get "compliance," which is why I teach ways to help the dog channel their natural drives into alternative behaviors. This is by far the best way to help intensely driven dogs become manageable on walks. Here are some foundational concepts to consider… Firstly, have we fulfilled the dogs need for exercise and breed-specific enrichment? Secondly, have you provided proper motivation for the dog to adjust their natural speed and gait to match your own? Finally, we are asking...

  The polyvagal theory implies that more attention needs to be paid to the development of interventions that either promote activation of the social vagus or dampen sympathetic tone. One major implication is the need to pay closer attention the therapeutic use of play, rough and tumble behaviors that serve as preliminary exercises to develop adaptive defensive and aggressive behaviors, as a means of shifting people [and dogs] out of fight-or-flight reactions into loving and mutually engaged mobilization. --Bessel A. van der Kolk, in the foreword to: The Polyvagal Theory by Dr. Stephen W. Porges   Mirroring your dog during play...