Ad hoc counterconditioning sounds dead easy. Every time your dog’s trigger happens in the environment, give them a fabulous treat or play with them with a favorite toy. If the trigger lasts a few seconds, feed them or play with them for at least that duration.
This kind of counterconditioning is different from the combination of desensitization and counterconditioning (DS/CC) most of us are more familiar with. With ad hoc counterconditioning, the desensitization part is missing. There are no carefully planned, graduated exposures starting with a low-level stimulus.
What it has in common with DS/CC is that the dog is not required to perform a behavior. It’s a stimulus-stimulus pairing. First stimulus is the noise they hear, second stimulus is the food we give them. That’s it.
It may sound easy. But like many things in training, there are details that can greatly influence how effective ad hoc counterconditioning is.
When and Why Do We Use Ad Hoc Counterconditioning?
We use ad hoc counterconditioning when we can’t control the environment enough to set up a series of graduated exposures. Sometimes it’s because we can’t recreate the stimulus with high enough fidelity. Sometimes we can’t come up with a non-scary version that we can start with. And sometimes it’s because the stimulus happens on its own too often and we can’t prevent the dog from perceiving it.
Although ad hoc counterconditioning can apply to many kinds of stimuli, it’s commonly used with sounds. Environmental sounds are unpredictable and they are often difficult or impossible to block. So for the rest of this piece, I’ll refer to sounds as the triggers.
Recent evidence supports the use of ad hoc counterconditioning for sound. Dr. Stephanie Riemer, whose research centers around dogs with fears of fireworks, found in a review paper that the most effective interventions for fireworks phobias were ad hoc counterconditioning, anxiolytics (medication), and relaxation training (Riemer, 2020). Ad hoc counterconditioning was said to help by 71% of Dr. Riemer’s survey respondents. Dr. Zazie Todd of Companion Animal Psychology has some great articles describing Dr. Riemer’s studies. I’ve linked them in the References and Resources section below. Many of us have found success with ad hoc counterconditioning. I didn’t know its name then, but I did it with my dog Summer, who was sound reactive to thunderstorms. It helped.
Use the Best Food
As with all counterconditioning, we want to use the highest value food possible. This is because the conditioned emotional response to the trigger can only get as strong as the reaction to the food. But how to be ready with good food all the time? Many sounds can come without warning. Most of us don’t have a way to keep broiled salmon or Gorgonzola cheese on our person all day every day. We are limited to less perishable, less messy foods we can carry in our pockets or cache around the house. For many dogs, this excludes their favorite ultra-high-value foods.
Some options of foods dogs enjoy that can usually remain at room temperature for a few days are:
- Dehydrated lamb or beef lung
- Freeze-dried raw foods (these will eventually mold if kept at room temperature)
- Some oven-baked dry dog foods
- Commercial baked treats
- Some home-baked treats without meat
If the sound is infrequent and you have a large dog, you’ll get their attention with one of those single-portion cat food containers you can rip the foil off of. But this is not practical for most situations.
Ideally, you always use the special food, although it’s easy to get caught up short at some point. I’ve been doing this on and off for years, and there are still times when one of my dog’s trigger sounds happens and I don’t have the special food. So I give him whatever I have.
Create Caches
OK, you’ve decided on your “noise treat” food. To be ready for those unexpected sounds, it’s best to have caches of the food available all over your house. Use containers that are unbreakable, have a snug lid, but are easy to open. Put them out of your dogs’ reach. Be sure you have them everywhere your dog might hear the sound, including, if possible, the back yard if you have one.
Even with something that seems this easy, it’s great to practice your mechanics. With your dogs out of the room, practice walking to the container, opening it, and giving a treat to an invisible dog. Do this a few times in each of your setups. You want to make sure the placement of the container is OK, you can open it smoothly, and you can get there from different parts of the room.
Practice this way because you aren’t going to practice with your dog. The whole point is that this food appears for them only when there is a scary sound!
Also, place the containers around your house during a period when the sound is unlikely to happen. Because when you first put them out, your dog/s will smell the treats and get excited. But we want the odor of the food in the containers to become background noise. Putting it out some time before the sound is likely to occur will allow that to happen. “What a drag, I smell that dehydrated beef heart, but I never get any!” Until, surprise! The sound happens and the beef heart follows!
Make yourself a schedule to replenish and freshen your treat caches. Be especially careful with freeze-dried raw foods and home baked treats that you replace them often enough.
Predictable Noise Events
For predictable noise events like fireworks displays and thunderstorms, you don’t have to use your caches. But you still have to be careful about timing. Prepare, a day or two ahead of time, a lot of high-value food. I often use roasted chicken breast because it is low calorie but high value for my dogs. Just remember the order of operations; do not bring out a bowl of it at 8:59 if the fireworks display starts at 9:00. Instead, go to the fridge to get it immediately after the first boom. Or you can do extinction trials beforehand: set out a bowl of chicken a few times over a few days and don’t give any to your dogs. That prevents the food from becoming a predictor of the event. If you do this preparation, you can bring the food out earlier on the day of the event, but still don’t do it right before the noises start.
Challenges
You’ll need to get the order of events right: always let the sound happen first, then give the wonderful food to your dog. If you get this one right, your conditioning has a better chance of standing up when life intervenes and messes other things up.
Refill your treat caches when you are not expecting a big sound event. That’s hard to remember, because we usually think to do it when a sound event is coming up. But if you go around and replenish them then, you might get the terrible opposite of what you want: the appearance of the food predicts the noise. We don’t want that! So set yourself a schedule.
Stay consistent and don’t give your dog this special food at any other time. Be careful about carrying it on your person. If you are accustomed to carrying treats in your pocket, a moment is going to come when you really want to give your dog a treat for something else. It’s very hard to resist that nice special food in your pocket. Ask me how I know.
Some trainers extend the duration of the feeding to make each food event after the trigger into a happy little party. This can be a good practice; it’s one way to make the positive part of the pairing more intense. But you have to balance that with how frequently the sound happens. Where I live, thunderstorms can last for hours, with the thunder approaching and receding, but never quite leaving. Even receiving one treat per boom, my dogs will often get satiated. And stopping can weaken the pairing. Luckily, ad hoc counterconditioning is a robust procedure. The countless other pairings you have done will not disappear. But we always strive for each sound to predict something the dog loves.
Remember not to ask your dog for a behavior. Don’t ask them to sit, down, or even look at you. Just offer them the food when the sound happens.
Your dog may sometimes be too scared to eat. If this happens and doesn’t improve, seek out a qualified positive reinforcement-based trainer who specializes in fear-related behaviors.
A Word about Medications
Ad hoc counterconditioning is one intervention among several possibilities, and it shouldn’t be the only one. The first intervention for any sound reactive or sound phobic dog is veterinary help. Not only for the fear (remember Dr. Riemer’s study), but because a very high percentage of dogs with sound phobia are in pain.
Spur of the Moment?
Ad hoc means “for this” in Latin. It refers to an act, entity, or procedure with a single purpose, and in our application means a “spur of the moment” action. This is how we want it to appear to our dogs. After a sound happens, we want great food to appear out of nowhere.
But we’ll do a better job if we don’t act on the spur of the moment. Preparation pays off! Ad hoc counterconditioning may not be as controlled and planned as combined desensitization and counterconditioning, but our readiness to perform it takes planning and thought.
Copyright 2026 Eileen Anderson
Many thanks to Malena DeMartini, who helped me with this post. All errors are my own, of course!
References and Resources
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