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Our dog is being odd to my pregnant fiance.
Death of Rats
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So me and my fiance are living with my parents. They have a 7 year old wonderfully friendly golden retriever named Cricket. Usually she is super friendly to my fiance, but the last week or so, Cricket has started acting very odd. She ignores her. She won't come up to get petted. If my fiance goes to pet her, she'll actually retract. She's acting fine to me and my parents, however. After talking with my parents about it, apparently the couple who owned her previously got her as a puppy. After they got her, they got pregnant, and the woman (who didn't want a dog to begin with), locked her in the kitchen most of the time, and didn't give her any attention. For several years.
Now, we think that's what is causing the issue, but we don't know how to fix it. Cricket is acting fine towards everyone else, but my fiance is taking this personally, and I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on how to help.
Now, we think that's what is causing the issue, but we don't know how to fix it. Cricket is acting fine towards everyone else, but my fiance is taking this personally, and I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on how to help.
No I don't.
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Wait, is your fiancee even pregnant? What's the connection then, the pregnancy or the fact that she's a woman?
It says "pregnant fiancee" in the thread title. :P
I've worked with shelter dogs and dogs with shyness issues in the past. It's unlikely to be an issue of attention-seeking/jealousy and attempting to treat it as such probably won't work very well.
Shyness/Avoidance is when the dog associates a sensory stimulus with negative reinforcement. Basically, a particular sound/image/scent has become linked to a painful memory for the dog. If it's a genuine avoidance issue, and from what you've described that's what it sounds like, the best weapon is positive reinforcement and a firm but calm and gentle hand.
Assuming this is a relatively mild response, desensitization is probably the first step. Cricket will learn to associate the image of your fiancee with the specific circumstances of her current life. Having your fiancee around, just sort of in the room, is a good start. Then you want to start training to a default behavior, assuming Cricket doesn't know one. A default behavior is a simple 'what should I be doing with this energy' for the dog - a recommended behavior is 'look at me', meaning you want to get the dog to start paying attention to you when she starts acting shy toward the fiancee. This may require some command training, depending on how you've trained her in the past.
After Cricket is generally calm when your fiancee is nearby (or, if she's already calm), you can pick out a special treat to associate with your fiancee's presence. Have your fiancee get a little closer to the dog - based on your description, within a few feet - and then spill some of the special treats on the floor. Basically the idea is to present a more powerfully positive sense memory than what Cricket already has to work with. Then, have your fiancee leave and stop feeding Cricket the treats.
After Cricket seems to start responding to your fiancee's presence by looking for the treats (how many repetitions this takes varies a lot by dog), ask your fiancee to start petting her, and reinforce similarly.
The important idea is that the dog decides what she's comfortable with. Old-school de-conditioning/behavior breaking have never worked very well for me.
Clearly I like to blindly click on threads without reading the title and give random advice
Yeah, that was a silly goose mistake
Tran's advice is sound, although my instinct here is to say that you should give it some more time.. she will quite probably get over it, and right now with your fiancee feeling like crap anyway might not be the time to start up positive reinforcement training. The dog will know. If she feels better it will do more to help the dog think that this is a good thing.
Until then, as long as she's not aggressive, unless it's making your fiancee miserable not to have the attention of the dog, I'd just keep making sure she (the dog) has lots of love and attention from everyone in the house so that when she (the fiancee) is feeling a little more herself you can start fresh with positive reinforcement training.
Tran sounds like more of an expert than I am, though, so he should possibly weigh in on the timing issue.
(Disclaimer: my expertise comes from volunteering at shelters and working to help rehab dogs for placement. I've spoken to a lot of vets/trainers but I am not a professional myself. If you're very concerned, or if the behavior gets worse, definitely consult a vet, who will probably prescribe psychopharmaceuticals of some kind.)
Should've put that disclaimer on my first post. I'll edit it in.
Anywho, I don't think it would hurt to wait. It sounds like Cricket isn't behaving aggressively and is able to operate in a relatively small space without generating an avoidance trigger. For reference, I've seen an abused boxer who couldn't deal with having women of a certain build within 20 feet or so, and would really freak out - yanking on the leash, biting flanks, cowering - until we worked out the fear. By contrast a room is fairly small. Just conditioning Cricket to the idea of the smell - and I agree that's probably what the trigger is, early on in the pregnancy - will help a lot. There may be a small relapse later on, when your fiancee begins to show, but it's possible by that point Cricket will have become used to your fiancee as a person again.