Living with a reactive dog or any whose behaviour you find difficult can be really hard.
If we didn’t find the behaviour difficult to live with, we probably wouldn’t be calling it a problem in the first place.
Our dogs are individuals, with their own genetics, learning histories, bodies, preferences, fears and experiences that have shaped who they are. We know this. We love them for who they are.
And, at the same time, it can be bloody hard when the dog you have doesn’t quite, or perhaps doesn’t remotely, fit the life you thought you were going to have together.
You Are Allowed to Have Feelings About It
When we bring a dog into our lives, most of us have some kind of picture in our heads.
Maybe you’ll go for long walks together. Sit outside the pub on a Sunday. Have friends over. Take holidays together. Do agility. Wander through town. Visit family.
Whatever your imagined version was, you probably didn’t picture avoiding other dogs, carefully managing visitors, driving somewhere quiet for every walk, planning your day around triggers or wondering whether your dog will cope with something everyone else seems to take for granted.
And it is OK to have feelings about that. You can love your dog enormously and still feel frustrated by them sometimes.
You can feel embarrassed.
Angry.
Sad.
Envious of the person whose dog seems able to wander happily through life without any of this careful planning.
You might get through a difficult situation and then spend the next three days replaying it in your head, wondering what you should have done differently. I’m particularly talented at that one.
I’ve spent plenty of time ruminating over something one of my dogs has done, moving swiftly from “I could have handled that differently” to “my dogs would probably be better off living with somebody else” and finally arriving at the particularly delightful “how can I possibly help other people with their dogs when my own do XYZ?”
The first question can be useful. The rest is mostly my inner dickhead getting involved.
These days I’m much better at letting the feelings exist without automatically treating them as facts.
Something went wrong. I’m disappointed. I wish I’d handled it differently. That doesn’t mean I’m a terrible guardian, and it doesn’t mean everything we’ve worked on has failed. I did the best I could with the information and capacity I had at the time.
And chances are, you are too.
You Can Love Your Dog and Grieve the Life You Expected
Honouring the dog you have doesn’t mean pretending you never wanted something different. Sometimes there is a genuine loss in recognising that the life you imagined might not happen in quite the way you hoped.
Perhaps your dog will never enjoy busy cafés.
Maybe family gatherings will always require management.
Perhaps the sport you dreamed of doing together is not remotely their thing.
Maybe spontaneous walks from the front door just aren’t possible right now.
You are allowed to be sad about that. Acceptance isn’t the absence of disappointment.
You can hold two things at once:
I wish this were easier.
And:
I love this dog, and I want to build a good life with the dog in front of me.
You don’t have to decide which one is the “right” feeling. Both can be true.
Your Dog Has Feelings About This Too
Of course, there’s another individual involved in all this.
Your dog.
We can’t climb inside our dog’s head and know exactly what they’re experiencing. We can observe their behaviour, look at the context it happens in, consider what we know about them, and make our best interpretation.
And the behaviours humans find most difficult are often happening in situations that are difficult for the dog too. Fear, frustration, excitement, conflict, pain and discomfort can all play a part.
Your dog isn’t generally standing there plotting how best to ruin Sunday lunch. They’re responding to what is happening around them with the skills and coping strategies available to them at that moment.
We can’t reach into their brain and simply change how they feel. What we can do is change the conditions around them.
We can change:
- The distance.
- The environment.
- The predictability.
- The choices available to them.
- What happens next.
- What they have an opportunity to learn.
And, over time, different experiences can change what those situations mean to them.
This is why I give clients permission — repeatedly, because apparently people don’t believe me the first time — not to put their dog into situations they already know are going to be too difficult.
And if you accidentally end up in one?
Get out.
Create distance.
Go home.
Throw food on the floor and leave.
You aren’t cheating.
Stop Trying to Squish Your Dog Into the Wrong Box
I expect there was a subject at school that you liked considerably less than the others.
For me, that was drama. I hated it.
I was no good at it and, looking back, I think a huge part of the problem was the expectation that I should access emotions, perform and be vulnerable in front of other people.
There was absolutely no way Teenage Kelly was volunteering for any of that nonsense.
If you’d sent me to drama school and told me that I simply needed more practice until I learned to enjoy it, I suspect I would mostly have become stressed and miserable.
The conditions wouldn’t have suited me.
Dogs aren’t so different.
You might desperately want your dog to come to the pub for Sunday lunch. But if they spend the entire time scanning the room, barking whenever somebody moves, lunging as dogs walk past and struggling to settle, nobody is having a lovely Sunday afternoon.
Your dog isn’t.
You aren’t.
And probably neither is the table next door.
Sometimes we get so attached to what dogs are supposed to enjoy that we forget to ask whether our particular dog actually does.
I got Flint intending to do agility with him, just as I had with Fraggle.
He’d take a jump. I’m sure if I’d pursued it he could probably have learned to run a course and might even have had a perfectly pleasant time doing it. But it became obvious fairly quickly that agility didn’t light a fire in his soul.
Tracking did.
Tracking made sense to him in a way agility never did. So we did more tracking and less agility.
Trying to squish our dogs into a box that doesn’t fit rarely works well in the long term. They may be able to squeeze into it for a while. They might even learn to tolerate it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best box for them.
And there are some boxes Flint simply couldn’t fit into, however much I might have liked him to. Greeting unfamiliar entire male dogs nicely while on lead was one of them. So I stopped repeatedly asking him to.
That Doesn’t Mean Giving Up on Change
There is an obvious objection here.
Sometimes the box really does matter.
You might not care whether your dog enjoys a pub lunch, but you do need to be able to get them out of the house. You might be perfectly happy avoiding strange dogs, but you need to be able to get through the veterinary waiting room. You may be willing to manage visitors, but you also want everyone in your household to feel safe.
Honouring your dog doesn’t mean deciding nothing can ever change.
It means starting with what your dog can manage now, rather than repeatedly asking them to cope with the finished version of the goal.
If the current situation is too difficult, we make it easier.
- We change the environment.
- We create distance.
- We build skills.
- We give your dog experiences they can actually cope with and learn from.
Then, where it’s useful and appropriate, we gradually make things more challenging.
You may reach the goal you originally had in mind.
You may reach a modified version of it.
Or you may discover along the way that the original goal isn’t actually necessary anymore.
All three outcomes are allowed.
Explore Your Dog’s World
One of the nicest things about letting go of what a dog ought to enjoy is discovering what they actually do.
The only reason I discovered Flint loved tracking was because I paid attention to the dog in front of me and tried things.
Flint sniffed. A lot. So we did scentwork, which he enjoyed.
That made me curious about other ways he could use his nose, so we tried tracking.
And suddenly I got to see a completely different side of him.
I wouldn’t have found that version of Flint if I’d spent all my energy trying to turn him into the agility dog I’d originally imagined.
Fraggle was different again.
With her, change initially came because of her physical health. Arthritis in her stifle meant agility was no longer working for her.
I tried scentwork. Wrong box.
She could do it perfectly well, but it didn’t fulfil her and it certainly couldn’t be the main event in her life. Fraggle loved running. I didn’t want her jumping.
Eventually we landed on hoopers.
Much better box.
And you don’t need to be doing dog sports at all.
Your dog’s thing might be snuffling through hedgerows.
Digging.
Running.
Searching for food.
Destroying cardboard boxes.
Exploring somewhere quiet on a long line.
Pottering around the garden with you.
Lying together watching the world go by.
There are hundreds of ways to have a rich, meaningful life with a dog.
Some of them just don’t look like the version you had in your head before you met this particular dog.
Management Is Not Cheating
Clients often ask me whether avoiding difficult situations means they’re cheating.
No.
Sometimes management is the intervention.
Every time your dog ends up in the same impossible situation, they have another opportunity to practise the behaviour you’re trying to change.
Creating space from those situations gives everyone room to breathe. It gives you the opportunity to change the conditions and teach new skills without constantly throwing your dog back into the hardest version.
Perhaps, with time and carefully planned work, that situation becomes easier.
Brilliant.
Perhaps you eventually decide there is absolutely no reason your dog needs to do that thing in the first place.
Also brilliant.
If your dog hates busy pubs, the answer may eventually be that they can cope with a quiet corner of one.
Or it may be that Sunday lunch happens without them while they snooze happily at home.
Neither option is morally superior.
Good management can be permanent.
You can avoid something forever if that gives your dog a happier life and it works for your household.
You are not obliged to rehabilitate your dog into somebody else’s definition of normal.
Make the Life You Have Together a Good One
There may always be things you wish were different. Things you keep working towards. Things you decide aren’t worth working towards at all.
There may be days when you feel sad about what you thought your life together would look like.
That doesn’t mean you’ve failed at acceptance.
Grieve the things you hoped for when you need to. And then keep getting curious about the dog you actually have.
Notice what makes them feel safe.
Notice what brings them joy.
Notice the odd little things they love that you would never have thought to choose for them.
Build more of those things into their life.
Because you don’t have to wait until every behaviour problem is solved before you and your dog are allowed to have a good life together.
Honour the dog you have.
And make something beautiful with them from there.
If life with your dog looks very different from the one you expected, I can help you work out what needs to change, what might be possible, and how to make life easier for both of you in the meantime.