Hi,
I'm sorry if this is long, I am not sure what context is important.
I have an 80 lb rescue bully mix. She is not a service dog nor does she have the temperament to be one, I am not looking for public access. She is reactive to other dogs which we are working on, and nervous in new environments. She's very well behaved and friendly at home.
We got her from a shelter in September of 2024 when she was about 18 months old. Two weeks after we got her, my child had his first seizure and she responded shockingly well, trying to get him to breathe by pawing at his chest and licking his face, but backing right up for me to help him. Several times she has barked and let us know that he was having a seizure. Today, I believe she alerted me BEFORE he had a seizure, but I didn't understand what she was telling me. The good news is that I thought she was barking for treats because we had just come in from outside and I had forgotten to do our coming inside treats, so she was still reinforced.
I have worked with her a lot and we use R+ training, but I have not trained any of the seizure response/detection, she has figured that out on her own, and it surprises me because she really wasn't treated the best and hadn't lived in a house before we got her.
The problem I'm having is that she's alerting me by barking and she also barks about other things. Is there a way to take the behavior she has already taught herself to do (recognize/alert to his seizures) and change the alert? I would really love a nose boop to the leg or something that she doesn't do in other contexts. I do a lot of research into training but I'm not even sure what terms I'm looking for, so I thought I would ask here. If you could point me in the right direction, I would appreciate it. I'm not even sure how I would go about training it because I don't know when he's going to have a seizure either, and he is nonspeaking so if he does know he can't communicate it at this point.
Thanks for your time.