What Does Success Look Like With a Reactive Dog?

Any of us who have found ourselves sharing our homes and lives with a ‘reactive’ dog, one of the sensitive souls who needs empathy, understanding, and (most of all) space in which to feel safe, knows that it can feel very tough at times. This is especially true in the early stages of finding out what is going on with our dogs and what we need to think about to help them. It can feel like an impossible task, to get to a point where we can enjoy walks.

A few years ago, I was in that position. Despite many years of living with and training Border Collies, including working sheep with them (both small and large flocks) I discovered that the latest dog to join our family was unlike any I had ever encountered before.

My handsome, happy boy

Those who have read this blog in the past will know I’m talking about Finn, my comedy collie as he is lovingly known. It is his 6th birthday in a few days, and I’m torn between not knowing how the time has gone so quick and feeling sure that he can only be 2, 3 at most! Finn has had issues with many triggers in his life, the main ones being dogs, people he doesn’t know, and children. I can remember all too well that awful feeling of seeing my much loved dog lunging and barking at dogs and people and not knowing how to help him. But I set out to learn.

Because of Finn, I know more than I could ever have imagined, and know that there is so much left for me to learn – I will never stop learning.

One thing I have had to learn is to view success in a different way, and find all the positives. The truth is that Finn will never be a ‘normal’ dog, one we can take anywhere at a moment’s notice. We will always need to find places where we have a bit of room to make space. We will always have to be aware of what is around us and how to get to where we want to go as comfortably as possible for all.

I would love to be able to say that Finn doesn’t react any longer. It does happen (much less often than before) after a lot of work with counter conditioning and desensitisation, building up his confidence and resilience and letting him have the choice of how close he feels comfortable getting to the triggers. Letting him know that if he needs to move away and create more space, that we will help him to do that. 

When the reactions do happen, his recovery time – how long it takes him to be able to shake it off, relax, and to go back to sniffing and exploring his surroundings – is a fraction of what it used to be. Seeing a trigger at an early point of a walk would mean the whole rest of that walk would be spent in a state of hyper-vigilance and looking for trouble. Now he shakes it off and continues as if it’s of little concern. It would take a lot more encounters to cause a reaction now, which makes a big difference to how much we can enjoy our walks.

Our second success with Finn is that he needs much less space than before. One of the best things I have bought for him is his Yellow Dog UK ‘I Need Space’ coat. We will often see people change course slightly to give us more room. The great thing is that this is helping his confidence to grow even further as his triggers don’t come so close.

Relaxed dog in his favourite place

Another form of success we see is in how he behaves when a trigger comes into sight moving towards us. Before, he would freeze and become entirely focused on the thing that was bothering him, often started to growl as a precursor to lunging and barking. We learned the particular sound he’d make before the growl started, a kind of huffing noise and would use that as our trigger to move away. That progressed to recognising the moment before he would freeze and moving him to get more space. Now, after consistent work, he doesn’t freeze as a default any longer. Instead he now concentrates on getting past the thing that’s bothering him as fast as possible. This does mean that he tends to pull on the long line a bit, but we view that as a minor inconvenience compared to lunging and barking.

All of these may seem like minor points to some, but they make a huge difference to how easy it is to go for a walk. It now needs a bit of thinking about, to ensure that we can find room if we need to, but it doesn’t take the major planning or incredibly early starts that it used to. We can enjoy our time out in our favourite place much more now, and that adds a huge bonus to our lives together.

You can find out more about what I've learned from living with my sensitive and complex boy in the recording of a webinar I ran a while back, which is available via my Good Guardianship website program page, along with other workshops and courses. You can also find there details of my training and behaviour services, and reactive behaviour support services now on offer.