Some people are afraid to ride in cars and so are some dogs. Many dogs don’t understand what the purpose of a car is other than it goes quickly and lots of things appear. This is stressful for them.
Most dogs that avoid getting in the car are doing so because the car itself causes them stress. In some cases dogs are only stressed about physically getting in the car. But most of the time dogs don’t want to get in the car because the ride itself is unpleasant or the destination is always somewhere unpleasant.
There are a couple things you can do to help your dog. If your dog is stressed because of the destination you can take more trips with awesome outcomes. (Going to the drive through for example.) This will help reduce the stress because your dog now sees that the car often predicts fun places. (Dogs are great discriminators so you may still see your dog become stressed as you’re pulling into the parking lot of the stressful place.)
If your dog is stressed about getting into the car you’ll want to break it down into small steps with high payouts. Hand targeting is a very useful tool. The goal with this plan isn’t to try to lure your dog into the car. They generally catch on to that and avoid it. But if we play a hand targeting game that involves getting treats for targeting your hand near and far from the car, no pattern will be picked up on and then we can work towards getting the hand target to happen in the car. Here is a video of this.
I’ve done this process with many dogs. Often we have to start off with the hand targeting game and once that is accomplished we can move on to having the car become a predictor of awesome destinations.
Overall this process can take days or weeks. Also, if you have any concern that your dog’s negative association is due to car sickness you’ll want to contact your vet to get help with that.
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