I Feel Like I’m Failing My Dog!

I‘ve handled thousands of dogs over the years. I even worked for a professional dog trainer long before founding this sanctuary for unadoptable pets, most of whom are reactive. Based on this experience, I wanted to provide some insight you might find helpful. 

When I read posts from the owners of reactive dogs, one common thread that most share is the owners are emotional. If you ever use or even watch a knowledgeable professional trainer or pet owner, you won’t see them react emotionally. They’re not projecting their feelings on to the dogs. They are calm and aware of their surroundings at all times. They are anticipating the dog’s actions and in the process of counteracting before the situation can escalate. Even when a situation like a fight occurs, they still remain calm and regain control as quickly as possible. 

Here are a couple of examples the trainer I used to work for shared with all his clients. 

The first has to do with situational awareness. The trainer was at a demonstration with his police dogs. They were on a basketball court. They started the demo and these highly trained dogs weren’t responding to him. They were basically making him look like a fool, so he stopped the demo and thought about why they weren’t following his commands. Then it hit him. They had never been on highly waxed wooden floors before. To redeem himself, he asked for a short break before continuing. Then he took the dogs off to a separate area of the court and worked with them. Once they got used to the slippery floor and reflections, he took them back out and finished the demo without a hitch.

He shared this example, so his clients would realize you have to train your dog for the situations they’ll encounter. If you have a reactive dog, it’s much more important to prepare them for the situation. If your dog is dog reactive, you start to prepare them by exposing them to one well behaved off leash dog and gradually add others in an environment you can control. You don’t take them to the dog park and hope for the best. Even for a non-reactive dog, they can be dangerous due to personality clashes, irresponsible owners, and communicable diseases like parvo. 

The other example he shared without fail was not to try to train a dog when either one of you is having a bad day. If you’ve already started a training session and find it’s not going well, give your dog one command that your dog does really well and reward him/her for it and stop for the day. That way the training sessions end on a high note. 

A lot of you are working so hard to train your dogs to interact in a ”normal” world. Yet, you’re setting yourself up for failure by getting emotional when things don’t go as planned. That’s a lot of negative energy that your dogs are internalizing. It’s also one of the reasons why an impartial trainer succeeds where an owner doesn’t. Let yourself and your dog make mistakes. Things happen, but you can’t let your emotions show in front of your dog. If you need to cry or scream from frustration, go somewhere else where your dog won’t hear you. Get it out of your system and then come back, and keep moving forward. You can do this!