How do you re-grow confidence after your dog has been attacked?

How do you re-grow confidence after your dog has been attacked? 

Well, you start by taking a step back. Increase your distance to things (muzzle train if necessary) and try to show your dog that the world isn't so scary. 

You can also enroll in dog spots or try some competitions online - and sometimes walking in a slightly nicer area can help you grow your confidence too. 

Luckily for us? Dogs bounce back really quick when we let them. 

Transcript

  📍 Welcome to Ask Ali with multi award-winning dog trainer, Ali Smith, answering real dog questions from real dog parents. Any recommendation? So Van Misus. Asks any recommendations for reinstating confidence in my dog meeting and interacting with other dogs? Ever since my boy was attacked a year and a half, his confidence has severely been shaken or been severely shaken, rather.

Firstly, I'm really sorry this happened to you. Unfortunately, this happens far too much at the moment and it's really sad because it's entirely unnecessary, right? So dog attacks are, Something responsible dog. Parents will as much as possible, stop happening  with their dog to another dog.

However, when it comes to your dog getting attacked, it can be a very difficult thing to Prevent., to grow confidence. Firstly, you've gotta grow your confidence. You've got to, and the way I used to do it, and the way I always recommend to people to do it, is to find a better quality dog park if you can.

And that sounds really simple. Typically, and this, I really don't want this to sound like a socioeconomic issue, but if you move to a more affluent area, typically you get more responsible dog parents. This is just an observation. This is not scientific, but typically, If you go somewhere where there is more money, the dog population tends to be better.

So if we try that, that can help you find a place that you are more confident walking and it will also help your boy to, to readjust to, to the world and to other dogs. And a se the simple way of putting it is that we want to take a step back in socialization and start. . You can also do other things like dog sports to increase confidence.

Things like parkour, agility, fly ball, all sorts of things like that can give your dog a lot of confidence in these sorts of situations. And just it's when they learn how able they are in themselves to do things, that confidence comes on. It's much like us, right? Like we can be really confident, it's sometimes in things that we are strong at, and then other times we're less confident. But if we do the easiest example is I dunno about you, but like all the sporty kids in school used to have an abundance of confidence because they knew how capable they were. They got a lot of praise for what they did or whether you were the smart kid too, actually.

So I was probably very confident in school because I got a lot of praise for being a very intelligent child. And look what happened to me.  only joking. It's not an issue, it's just a thing, making a joke. Okay. . Yeah if we can show him that he's really good at stuff and he gets a lot of praise and everything goes really well, the more confident he's going to be, , if you can hit a dog sport, if you can go to a slightly nicer area, if you can just watch at a distance and see things happen, because that, that seeing things happen can really encourage us and really encourage them that, this was just a one off, this is not a normal thing. So yeah, mitigate the risk of failure.

Find really nice places and he'll come along really quick. Okay. Dogs are really resilient. It's one of the really best things about them in the whole wide world. So if we make a change and show them that change has happened, they will just move on. They're not quite the same as us where we start like harping on about this thing that happened and it causes like this long living trauma.

So luckily, we like our dogs are much better at that than we are. So I hope that helped. If not, please ping me.