Hi Reader,

Let me describe a scenario I hear about constantly from professionals in my community.

A dog comes in for reactive behaviour. He barks, lunges, and makes himself look very large and very loud whenever another dog approaches. The owner is distressed.

The professional assesses the situation, concludes the dog is fear-reactive, and builds a careful desensitisation plan with counter-conditioning, threshold management, the works.

Weeks go by. The plan is implemented well. And yet something keeps not quite working. The dog improves in some contexts, stays stuck in others, and nobody can work out why.

Here is the question I want to ask you: what if the dog was not afraid?

What if what looked like fear-based reactivity was actually something neurobiologically quite different, driven by a completely different emotional system, requiring a completely different approach? And what if the reason the plan was not working was not because the technique was wrong, but because the emotional driver had been misidentified from the start?

This is not a hypothetical. It happens constantly, and it is one of the most consequential gaps in how problem behaviour gets assessed in professional practice. Fear and frustration can look almost identical from the outside.

Both produce high arousal, both produce reactive or aggressive-looking behaviour, and both tend to show up most forcefully in situations where the dog has limited control over what happens next. But they come from entirely different places inside the brain, they are maintained by different processes, and they respond very differently to intervention.

The tricky part is that most assessment frameworks do not give you a reliable way to tell them apart. And if you are working from a framework that treats them as interchangeable, you will sometimes get it right by chance and sometimes build a beautifully structured plan for the wrong problem entirely.

In my live session on how emotions drive problem behaviour, this is one of the things we go into in real depth. We will look at what the appraisal process actually is, how the brain evaluates a situation before any visible behaviour happens, and what specific differences in that evaluation process separate fear from frustration. And we will work through examples where the outward behaviour is identical but the internal state is not, so you can start to see the difference in the cases you are already encountering.

What I will tell you is that once you have this framework, you genuinely cannot unsee it. It changes how you read behaviour from the first moment of an intake session. It changes what questions you ask. And it changes your confidence in the recommendations you make, because you are working from an understanding of what is actually happening, not just what it looks like.

🕛 The live session takes place online on the 26th of March at 15:00, and includes lifetime access to the replay and the Emotions in Dogs visual poster for client conversations.

If you have questions before you sign up, just reply to this email.

Dr. Else 🧠

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