Revised August 2025.
I collaborate with a vet who claims that many of the dogs that visit her facility are so eager to get inside the door that they pull their owners by the leash all the way from the parking lot.
Her secret?
*drumroll*
Coun-ter-con-di-tio-ning.
Six syllables. I know, most people tune out beyond four. But I still think you should learn this particular term. Why?
Because it’s one of the most important techniques in animal training (arguably top five).
(originally written in 2015, revised May 2026)
Is your dog or cat offered treats during the visit to the veterinarian?
I think they should be – but I can also think of two reasons why this might not happen.
For decades, I’ve been teaching about fear, anxiety and stress (FAS) in pets during veterinary visits. Among several topics, I’ve spoken about why treat feeding is such a powerful technique to reduce and eliminate – and prevent – fear and fear learning. This is called counterconditioning.
But in the various groups of veterinarians and vet technicians I’ve lectured to over the years, I kept hearing the same objections over and over again:
“That sounds great”, the vets would say. “But if we need to sedate them, we can’t feed them immediately before we put them under”.
They were referring to the unfortunate risk of a sedated animal getting Gastro-Esophageal Reflux (GER; stomach content getting back up in the food pipe), resulting in Aspiration Pneumonia (AP; that same stomach content ending up in the lungs and causing chemically induced pneumonia), which might be lethal for dogs (but incidentally, not a big problem with cats, apparently).
The vets I spoke to looked at counterconditioning as a treatment with potentially serious side effects, and they chose not to use it.
And my issue with that choice is that not feeding treats is also a treatment, and it also has potentially serious side effects.
But it always seemed to me that the vets I spoke to would only acknowledge the first treatment, not the second.
As if “not giving treats” was doing nothing.
Full disclosure: I’m not a veterinarian myself – my background is in ethology. And, in my mind, “not giving treats in the veterinary clinic” will potentially stress animals out – which can have devastating effects, both with regards to health, not to mention behaviour.
This looks like a classic Catch-22 type of situation, doesn’t it, with only bad options:
Those vets’ unwillingness to try counterconditioning got me curious, and I started asking questions:
As a scientist, my knee-jerk reaction was to look for the article that addressed those questions.
I didn’t find one. There wasn’t any. Nobody had looked at that!
So I did. And in my quest for the Truth, I came to realize that the apparent choice was a false dichotomy.