What direction should I take with training?
4.5 year old rough collie, reactive and on fluoxetine. She also has severe allergies and is on zenrelia.
Tonight I’m having a bit of a meltdown over my dog. I have a 7 month old baby and I’m just so upset about not being able to go into my yard peacefully.
Background: my dog has always had some training issues. We’ve done three different reactivity classes (she’s gotten much better on walks), scent training, and obedience. We hired a private trainer who helped us with her reactivity on walks but for some reason said collies will never stop barking in a yard.
She has near ZERO food motivation. She has food allergies so she can only eat hydrolyzed protein food and the associated treats, and she doesn’t care about either of them.
The issue: I can’t leave my home without her losing her mind. She starts anxiously barking and whining the moment I start gathering my stuff to leave. I did 10 weeks of three times a day training on this issue and made basically no progress, if anything it got worse. The training I did was to basically desensitize her from the motions so I started very small, just pretended to get ready and leave but then didn’t. I did that once a day. The other two training sessions were me touching the doorknob and then scattering her food. She had semi interest in her food at this point so it worked ok. I then moved my way up to being able to walk into the yard and back without her freaking out. The problem is that we do have to leave the house sometimes and she just continually lost her mind every single time and even our old methods to ease some of it stopped working (we used to bring her into the yard then put her back inside as we left).
The other issue is that when she’s in my yard, she does not stop barking. It’s not continuous, and sometimes she can go an hour plus without a noise, where other times she will be barking every 5 minutes. Sometimes it’s at nothing, sometimes it’s a huge meltdown over a dog barking or seeing a squirrel. She knows to run inside for a break when this happens but that method has not worked at all. She just comes right back out after and barks again. She will also sit and focus for a ball or frisbee but again this only works in the moment. She will calm down for that trigger and then immediately start barking if something else happens. For this reason she is never outside unsupervised and we can’t sit out long with her because it’s exhausting trying to manage it, and our neighbours get mad.
Tonight I was trying to sit with my son on the grass and she would not let up. I ended up putting her inside and letting her bark through the door. Even though we were out of sight I guess she could hear or smell us as she did not stop over the span of an hour. Usually if we leave fully she stops barking in under a minute.
Does anyone have ideas of what type of training I should try with her or what type of trainer?