I have been thinking a lot about how much Ida enjoys obedience/rally work, how much it makes me feel like we're really a team, and what that means for her car issues. I don't really know how to proceed going forward. All of the options I cam come up with have questionable chances of success and the potential for real negative consequences.drawbacks.
I could try giving her xanax for every training session that involves the car moving, and try DS/CC that way, while she is medicated to prevent her from being re-traumatized every time. But that seems like over kill and since the Xanax should be on board for about an hour beforehand, means we likely won’t have many opportunities for training and/or if I do make the effort to work it every day, run the risk of creating a physical benzo dependency.
After our last experiment with the Xanax and the drive just around the cul de sac being a pretty okay success, I now question whether she might have some car sickness. Which means trying gravol and/or ginger…. But because she already has a CER- just to getting in the car, even if an anti-emetic fixes her car sickness (which I have no evidence that she has, other than she stops eating and shakes when the car moves for more than a few seconds), I still need to be able to create a CER+ to riding in the car, which means riding in the car and something amazing happening, over and over again, to break down that old CER- and build up a new CER+. Part of me wants to put her in Rally classes in the next session at the facility 10 minutes away (and no highway driving!), just to see what would happen – that 10 minutes of driving to go to something that will be awesome and fun (there is inherently potential for a much higher ROR in Rally training than in agility) might start to counteract her previous CER- to the car.
I could try a Control Unleashed approach utilizing a mat as a “safe space”. I do not know how Ida will respond when her “safe space” (the mat) becomes also the scary moving thing. Or maybe I just need to condition her to moving on the mat = okay?
I could also try crating in the car. But Ida does not like being confined when she is left alone (i.e., in isolation - she is fine confined to a bedroom with our other dog). She will escape if she is confined by herself while we are gone for more than a few minutes. She won’t truly be alone while crated in the car, but I have put quite a bit of work into making crates a safe space so that she can chill in crates for if we ever trial, and using a crate in the car may wreck that. Or it may not, since she’s not always great at generalizing, and maybe the close quarters will be comforting to her, since as a puppy, small spaces (like under our bed) were where she sought comfort/safety.
I am just…. stuck. Choice paralysis is a real thing, and in this case, the consequences for fall out for all of the choices are pretty serious to me. What do you do when every option before you has a real possibility of ending in punishment?
