Most people find us after the walks have already changed.

They’re going out at six in the morning, or half nine at night. They’ve got a route that avoids the park, the bit by the shops, and the road where the collie lives. They cross over when they see another dog coming. Somewhere along the line the dog stopped being a pleasure to take out and started being a job.

All of it to avoid what happens when they don’t get out of the way in time. The barking, the lunging, the spinning on the end of the lead, and the whole street turning round to look.

That’s reactivity, and it’s the thing we get asked about more than anything else.

Is my dog reactive or aggressive?

Worth sorting out early, because the answer changes what we’d do.

A reactive dog is over-reacting to something it finds difficult. Usually another dog, sometimes a bike or a jogger. Give it enough space and the same dog is generally fine. What you’re seeing is panic, or frustration at not being able to get to something, and the barking and lunging is how it displays.

An aggressive dog wants to close the distance. That’s a different challenge and a different treatment plan.

They’re not sealed off from each other. Reactivity that goes on long enough can turn into something worse, and plenty of dogs sit somewhere in between. But many of the dogs described as aggressive on the phone turn out to be reactive, and that’s usually better news than the owner is expecting. If yours has already bitten another dog or a person, have a look at how we deal with aggression instead.

Why it doesn’t go away by itself

Every time your dog kicks off and the other dog eventually goes away, in his mind, the behaviour worked.

It doesn’t matter that the other dog was leaving anyway. Your dog barked, the problem left, and the lesson lands. Do that twice a day for a year and you’ve got a dog with a very well practised routine.

This is why “he’ll grow out of it” so rarely happens, and why the same problem is a much bigger job at three than it was at eight months.

The advice that makes it worse

The one we hear most is that the dog needs more socialising. Take him where the dogs are, let him get used to it.

Walking a reactive dog round a busy park isn’t socialising him. He’s often overwhelmed the whole time, he can’t take anything in, and all he’s practising is the thing you’re trying to stop. We see dogs that have been “socialised” like this for months and they’re worse than when they started.

Group classes have the same problem. You’ve got a dog that can’t cope with other dogs near him, and the plan is to put him in a room with six of them for an hour. It won’t work. We’ve said the same about aggression cases and it’s the same reasoning.

Food gets misused in the same way. Food has a place in this work, but not as a distraction, and timing is everything. Get it wrong and you build a chain instead of breaking one. He goes out, he spots a dog, he barks at it, he looks round at mum and she hands him chicken. From where he’s standing that’s two good things at once, a hit of adrenaline and something nice to eat. Do that often enough and you haven’t distracted him from the behaviour, you’ve paid him for it.

Then there’s correcting the reaction. Punish the lunge often enough and you might stop the lunge. You haven’t touched what caused it, and now you’ve got a dog that’s learned there’s no point warning anyone. Dogs that go quiet are harder to read and easier to get wrong.

What we actually do

First job is teaching the dog how to learn.

Once that’s in place we start putting the difficulty up, bit by bit, to find out where he can still hold himself together and still process a command he already knows. Every reactive dog has a point where it can see another dog and still hear you. Might be forty metres, might be a hundred and forty. Inside that line nothing goes in. People read it as the dog being stubborn or dominant and it isn’t, it’s a dog that isn’t available for training at that moment.

Then it’s about changing how the dog feels, not just what it does. A dog that’s holding itself together and a dog that genuinely doesn’t care look fairly similar for a fortnight. A year later they look nothing alike, and only one of them has stayed fixed.

That distance closes as the dog gets better, but it has to be closed by someone reading the dog properly. Push it too fast and you’re back where you started. Sit at the same distance for six weeks and nothing shifts.

We do most of it in the places dogs actually go. A dog that’s steady in a training facility and falls apart in the park isn’t ready. That’s not much use to you.

And a fair bit of what we teach in a reactivity case goes to the owner rather than the dog. It’s why every client works through our online programme Love Is Not Enough while their dog is in residential training with us.

As a handler, your timing, what you’re doing with the lead and whether you can spot the half second before it happens all matter. The two hour one to one lesson at the end of the programme, along with the ongoing support and top up lessons afterwards, is what keeps everything on track.

How long does it take?

Depends how long it’s been going on, what’s driving it, and what you can keep up afterwards.

Lead reactivity in a young dog that’s only been at it a few months can move quickly. A five-year-old that’s been doing it since he was one is a longer job and we’d say so.

After forty years there aren’t many varieties of this we haven’t seen. We can usually get a good sense of a case from a phone call and the right questions, and we’ll tell you straight what we think is achievable. We’d rather do that than sell you something that won’t work.

Where to start

Most reactive dogs come to us either through one-to-one sessions, where you learn to handle it yourself, or residential training, where the dog stays with us and works every day. Residential tends to be the quicker route when it’s been going on for years or it’s got bad enough that walks have stopped.

If you want to understand what’s behind it first, there’s more on why dogs growl at other dogs.

Worried about your own dog? Reactivity rarely improves on its own and it gets harder to shift the longer it goes on. Tell us about your dog and we’ll get back to you for a chat about it.

Related: Dog Aggression Training  |  Book a Consultation