Thanks, Marhcarter. I appreciate the kind words.
They are tried and true techniques and have worked with my dogs over the past. And the reason you don't look at them when they are around the scary object or start to approach it is that they are looking to you to "read" your level of anxiety or interest as they get close to the scary thing and look to you as a kind of co-dependent. If you act "tuned out", your dog will soon learn that he/she needs to deal with his/her fear and desire for highly-scented, juicy chicken bits - risk v. regard - on his/her own and learn how to develop ways to process fear without panic reaction and still get the chicken. At the first, the dog may be too scared to even to even try to go in for the chicken but in time, its presence and scent and the primal need to eat any chance given wears them down and they just have to overcome the risk for the reward. In the future, your dog can draw on that learned behavior of how he or she dealt with fear and push past it to help him/her get over other scary things.