Pattern games help build confidence, giving the dog agency and helping them to regulate their arousal in a wide range of contexts. Using pattern games as part of counterconditioning and desensitisation really helps to boost these training techniques. These games don’t involve giving the dog any cues, so we are not forcing them to … Read more
Once management is in place (see “Collie car chasing management and setting up for success“), training can focus on changing emotional responses to traffic and helping dogs to regulate their arousal and learn to practise new behaviours around traffic. We ALWAYS, with every training technique listed here, carry out this training at a distance from … Read more
Pain can cause a wide range of problem behaviours in dogs, and anecdotally, many dogs that I have seen for traffic reactivity behaviours have eventually been diagnosed with pain or discomfort. If a dog is in pain, then it can increase their arousal and make them more susceptible to fear, anxiety, and frustration, so trying … Read more
Lunging, barking, and spinning at passing vehicles (which is what I mean by “car chasing”) is a common issue in border collies, thought to affect 25% of individual collies (Marin et. al., 2026). The behaviour is rarely due to herding tendencies in collies, and much more likely to be related to fear, frustration, anticipation, pain, … Read more
There’s a persistent myth in the dog world that collie traffic chasing is just “herding behaviour” or “controlling movement.” However, when you really look into the different experiences the collie has when meeting sheep and when they chase, nip or lunge in other contexts, we can start to see why many of the behaviours we … Read more