Follow these steps to help your reactive dog

You are fed up with the problematic behaviour of your dog and want to fix this quickly. Training might be the first thing that comes to mind, but this is actually the final thing to do when working on your reactive dog's behaviour. Meet your dog's needs

Start by making sure you meet your dog's needs.

Get your dog fully checked at the vet, to make sure that you have a healthy dog and rule out any medical issues that might cause your dog's reactivity. Give your dog outlets to do what makes them feel comfortable and confident. This might be going for walks on a long line where they can roam around freely and follow their nose. Or you can allow your dog to hunt for rodents and allow them to dig if they love to hunt. It all depends on your dog's breed and specific needs. Giving your dog the opportunity to be the dog they are, makes them more comfortable and confident, which already can diminish problem behaviour.

Management Identify your dog's triggers. You can do this by observing your dog on walks and when you get home, write the triggers down in a journal. Dogs that are dog reactive are not necessarily reactive to all dogs. Same goes for dogs that are stranger reactive, they might not be reactive to all strangers. It’s for you to find out what your dog’s triggers are as specific as possible.

Once you are fully aware of them, you can start to help your dog by walking your dog in a trigger free environment. Or at least walk your dog somewhere that keeps the triggers at a minimum.

This means that you need to change your walks in order to prevent your dog from having succes with his reactive behaviour like barking and lunging. Every time your dog has success with his reactive behaviour he is likely to use it more often to achieve the same goal. If your dog wants more distance between him and a strange dog, barking and lunging might make the other dog walk away, which is reinforcing this behaviour.

If your dog is dog reactive, stop going to a park full of off lead dogs that keep charging at you and your dog and making your dog react and practice this behaviour.

You need to make sure your dog does not feel the need to react to every dog he sees, by creating distance between your dog and the trigger. This means that you need to put in a lot of effort in your walks and act based on the situation you are in, instead of wanting to walk a specific route. Do everything to create enough distance to keep your dog under threshold: cross the street, turn around and walk the other way, block your dog's sight by standing behind a parked car, move out of the situation.

Training

Once your dog is in a happy place, because you are able to meet al his needs, it's time to start training. Your dog needs to change the negative association into a positive one when looking at a trigger.

This can be done by using counter conditioning, a powerful tool to modify your dog's behaviour. The goal is to change your dog's emotion associated with seeing a trigger. This is a very slow process and takes a lot of time and patience to achieve. If you want to learn how to train your reactive dog and be able to go on walks again without being stressed out, make sure to check out my services.