When living with and caring for animals, we may encounter challenges of fearful or aggressive behaviors. This is a difficult situation for humans and animals because there are so many different training approaches and opinions surrounding fear and aggression. However, this class will help you better understand your dog's fear and aggression and know what approach is best for you and your dog to achieve meaningful goals in the most effective and ethical way possible. 

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Class Description

In this 4-week online group class, Sean and Maasa are going to introduce a new approach to working with fearful and aggressive behaviors. Taking this approach will help ensure the reason for our animal's fear or aggression is resolved, as well as the development of more desirable behaviors. 

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When we ask our animals "why" they do aggressive and fearful behaviors toward humans, animals, or other things, we often learn that they are doing these behaviors to tell us or other things to go away and stay away. They don't like humans or other things near them. What they want is distance from us or other things. 

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The approach we take, in general, is that we want to give what the animal wants, and we want to use that to teach desirable behaviors. Rather than reducing, eliminating, or punishing these behaviors, we want to build desirable behaviors. So, when we learn that fearful and aggressive behaviors are maintained by distance from us, we want to use "the distance" to teach desirable behaviors. This training procedure is called Constructional Aggression Treatment (in a short form, CAT), developed by Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz and his ORCA students. CAT has grown over the years and has been demonstrated effective across a wide range of species to transform fearful and aggressive behavior to friendly interactions.

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In this class, you will learn how to plan, implement, and interpret assessments to understand what is maintaining the aggressive and fearful behaviors (what the animal is after) and how to apply the newest version of the CAT procedure to meet your training goals. 

You will learn the behavior analytic concepts and training procedures through our lectures and exercises and by sharing your training and discussion. At the end of each class, we will leave you with an actionable assignment. You can follow along with the weekly assignment by applying the assessment and CAT with your animal or your client's animal! You can share assessment and training videos in the group classes and Open Houses and get our advice and feedback to improve your next session! You will have a deeper understanding of how CAT works by actually doing it!