What is the Play Way?
A new method for rehabilitating shy and fearful dogs based on play.About “The Play Way”
The Play Way is Amy’s method of helping shy and fearful dogs overcome these issues to live a happier, less-stressed life. Rather than focusing on food, as many do when working with these dogs, Amy has established a more nuanced rehabilitation process that revolves around personal, social play.
She believes play is a much more reliable method of judging a dog’s true behavioral thresholds, while being equally effective at changing the dog’s conditioned emotional response to particular stimuli. Play is both an indicator of stress and an intervention for stress!
While working under Amy’s guidance, I started to feel more confident about any potential triggers that we could come across. We started to enjoy our relaxed (!) walks together opposed to my dog being frantic looking for things to sniff, stare or pounce at. We learned so much in this class and will continue to practice our skills and grow confidence and appropriate behavior. Thank you, Amy!
The concepts of behavioral change just aren’t easy to grasp. We have been working for years now in our attempts to affect change in our easily aroused Aussie. I felt I was quite familiar with the concept of “threshold” as an example. In this class I feel I am finally starting to get it! Amy’s analogy of the traffic signal (green/yellow/orange/red) when talking about thresholds has been invaluable. I use it daily. Thank you, Amy, for your thoughtful input and your support throughout this class.
All the “exercises” suggested during the course are aimed at helping dogs overcome their fear and they really work. The most valuable thing, to me, was the reminder about keeping under threshold. Also extremely valuable was that I was able to arm myself with good information to be able to tell people that I knew what I was doing when I “comforted” my scared young dog instead of “making her snap out of it”.
Want to learn more?
Amy offers online classes and in-person workshops and seminars.
Throughout her work, she covers Amy offers several classes for dealing with fearful and reactive dogs all based on her innovative Play Way rehabilitation methods.