The lunging, barking, growling and pulling at the leash of a reactive dog can be very embarrassing for the owner and scary for the onlooker.
What most people don’t know is that training a reactive dog should NOT look like you are training a reactive dog at all.
The idea that many people have about working with a reactive dog is that the dog needs to be exposed to its trigger to elicit a reactive response in order to work with the behavior.
This is incorrect and here is why:
Reactive behavior can be caused by a buildup of many different emotions, such as:
Fear
Excitement
Frustration
Motion sensitivity
Being startled
Wanting to play
Overarousal
Sound sensitivity
Being protective
And more
The reactive dog is usually already experiencing one or more of these emotions before showing any signs of reactivity. As the dog gets closer to its trigger, these emotions increase. When these emotions exceed the threshold at which the dog can cope, it leads to lunging, barking, growling and pulling at the leash and any training opportunity is lost.
The more the dog goes beyond this threshold, the more ingrained and worse the reactivity will get.
This is why it is so important to only expose your dog to a trigger in a LOW ENOUGH INTENSITY that s/he does not go over that threshold (the point at which the dog goes into a full blown stress response). Your dog should be AWARE of the trigger, but far enough away from it that s/he does not feel threatened or over stimulated by it.
Behavior (wanted or unwanted) that is rehearsed or repeated is going to be ingrained. You want to ensure low trigger intensities in your training sessions so that your dog can rehearse remaining calm in the presence of his/her triggers. The more your dog can rehearse calm feelings around the triggers, the more the calm behavior will be ingrained.
NOT being reactive can become ingrained instead.
Therefore, training a reactive dog should NOT look like you are training a reactive dog at all, and makes it possible to train a reactive dog in public without feeling embarrassed or intimidating onlookers.
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