How it starts

Many puppies and some older dogs find the vacuum cleaner or lawnmower triggering and they may bark, chase, lunge and try to bite. It’s always better to avoid putting your dog in this situation but it can be very limiting. The problem is that they only time they see the vacuum is that it is moving, banging in to skirting boards and door frames with a loud motor running usually in close proximity to the dog.

What you can do

The good news is that there is lots you can do because you can reasonably easily control how much access your dog has to your vacuum. This is really different to reactivity to other dogs or fear of fireworks which we can’t easily control. Reactivity to vacuum cleaners responds well to desensitisation training, provided you can prevent your dog from being triggered during the period that you are working on the desensitisation which will often take a series of sessions.

Case Study

With Islay the juvenile female collie x featured in this video, I literally couldn’t vacuum anywhere in the house or mow the lawn even if she was in her crate, where she is very happy.

This desensitisation session shows the steps I went through with Islay who is both sound reactive, fearful of novelty and has a huge and often frustrated urge to chase and nip at moving objects especially if noisy. This is the third session with Islay as it took me a while to feel my way into her different triggers. All dogs are different and we can’t apply the exact same protocols to different dogs. For Islay the investigation of the different parts separately seemed to help with her frustration and fear of novelty. Quite separately from these sessions Islay has a strong relationship with her mat and understands the intention that this is her ‘station’ during an exercise.

What next?

The reality is that even after this session where we end on a real high, we will need several further sessions starting at each session at the level at which she is truly comfortable. The trick is to work at a level that your dog is entirely comfortable without any triggering. I have left in the video intentionally parts where I have pushed her too far as in reality this happens as you start to unpick the different aspects of a trigger which might include the location, whether you are standing or sitting and the type of surface you are vacuuming. Note how I don’t use treats until the very end.

Any questions or comments lmk 🙂

#dogdesensitisation #desensitisation #dogreactivity