The Weekly High Five 🐾

Hey Reader,
​
Moose goes to daycare three days a week. Same dogs, for years. Plays fine.

Put him on a leash, walk him past a dog he's never met, and he snaps. Teeth, lunge, the real thing.

Same dog. Same species on the other end of it. One variable.

His owner came into our session shaken. Someone had walked their dog straight over to say hello and Moose went off before anybody could stop it. She'd started using a word about him she never thought she'd use.

She hadn't been sitting on her hands. Harness. Head collar. Treats in every pocket. And at least one person at the park telling her he needed to learn.

Sound familiar?

So here's what the leash is doing.

When two dogs meet without one, they have two moves. Take distance until it feels okay. Or go in, sniff, gather information, decide.

On leash your dog gets neither. He's pinned at whatever distance the sidewalk hands him, pointed straight ahead, no exit.

The snap is what's left. Essentially it's the only sentence he has.

Some of it travels down the line from you, too. You spot a dog two blocks up and your hand wraps and tightens. I do it as well. He feels that before he sees anything, and it tells him something is here and he should be worried.

Correcting him in that moment doesn't hand him a better option. It stacks one more bad thing onto the sight of another dog.

One thing to try this week.

Freeze a cheese stick, a bit bigger than the pinch you'd normally hand over. Keep most of it in the wrapper, in your fist, with a little showing.

On tomorrow's walk, before any other dog is in sight, let him nibble while you walk.

Regular cheese is gone in one gulp. Frozen, he can only work small pieces off, so his mouth stays busy and his head stays near your hand while his brain handles what's up ahead.

Some dogs stay with it a whole block. Some lose it the second a dog turns the corner. Either way, that's information you didn't have yesterday.

Moose is ten sessions into twelve. In our last one he took cheese while my training dog Graham walked parallel to him. Not reacting. Not spiraling. Thinking, which is the whole goal.

He isn't finished. He still has hard days, and the sidewalks are busy again now that school's back.

What moved first was his owner. She came in believing he was broken and left with a routine. He was never telling her he was dangerous. He was telling her he had nowhere to go.

What I can't give you in an email is distance. How far another dog needs to be before any of this works is specific to your dog, and it moves.

Same with telling a frightened dog apart from one who badly wants to reach the other dog and can't. Those look identical on a sidewalk and need opposite plans.

And if you've already had an incident, what you really want to know is whether your dog is safe. That's a conversation, not a paragraph.

That's what private training is for. We work on your street, with your dog, over enough sessions for it to hold. https://down4paws.com/private-services/

If you'd rather start smaller, book the free 15-minute call and tell me what happened. https://down4paws.com/15-minute-free-intro-call/

You're not failing at this. You're further into it than you think.

Talk soon,

Pam,
CCDT

Find me on IG: @down4paws

P.S. Not ready to book anything? Grab my free Leash Reactivity Guide instead. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Bn1c59HNdr4wN8WuWSK0OzBIcaGRSfgU/view?usp=sharing