Curiosity Can Kill

Posted December 31, 2018 in Training Method

Owners are usually shocked. As our snake avoidance training begins 99% of dogs go straight up to the first snake (non venomous) it comes across. YES really, and imagine if that was a dugite or tiger snake rather than our friendly python. It makes you realize just how vulnerable dogs are to snakes – their curiosity can literally kill them.

Big or small, young and old we meet them all. From the tiny Chihuahua to massive Mastiff’s as well as young puppies (4 months+) and much older dogs.

We don’t lure them to a snake or put a treat near by – we let the dog do what it wants to do – and take it from there with our snake aversion therapy.

We meet an incredible range of breeds during our training. Size doesn’t matter in terms of effectiveness but intelligence, eyesight and other factors do.

What is most interesting for us to observe as trainers and ultimately most important for the dog is its drive level. Some dogs just must find, chase, hassle, catch or kill. Others are just curious and curiosity can kill if your pet is over keen on checking out a snake. So we concentrate on our naturalistic method allowing any given dog the opportunity to approach a snake early on if it wants to. We then try over a couple of walks, to correct this dangerous and unwanted behaviour. That in a nutshell is snake avoidance. For most dogs it works very well indeed. Soon (hopefully) our exhaustive study of the practice will be published.