Dealing with another dog pleasantly is one of the single most natural skills a dog is born with. So… one of the CGC tests – Test 8: Reaction to another dog – assesses the dog’s ability to be pleasant when another dog’s around.
Too often, due to living in “our world” with a limited social life, some dogs behave unpleasantly when they see another dog. There are a variety of stories, chains of events, that lead up to this unpleasant behavior. Each story probably traces back to a dog showing raw excitement at the sight of another dog. It is only to be expected that a dog would be wild with excitement if she never sees a dog, and then sees a dog. What a thrill! However, “raw excitement” is not polite, can get a bad (often subtle) reaction from the other dog (or from her person), and so it begins.
The simple solution is to socialize, socialize, socialize. If your dog spends a lot of time around other dogs, and has a long history of pleasant experiences, what’s one more? Answer: no problem! But if your dog doesn’t spend a lot of time around other dogs…
Those dang leashes are a pain too. By restraining them, we inhibit our dogs’ abilities to meet each other naturally.
So, here’s what we worked on in class:
- Being around each other: I cannot say enough how helpful class is, because we’re all in a room together. Right off the bat, the dogs get great practice.
- Working near each other: Our instructor set up hula hoops for us to work in (sit, down, stay, spin, etc.) The benefit of these hoops was twofold – one, they challenged us to communicate with precision, keeping each pup in his/her hoop; and two, the instructor could easily move the hoops closer together based on how well we were doing.
- Walking in an orderly manner: we walked a line of cones (two-way traffic, a few of us walking on each side). We stopped at each cone, and cued our dogs to sit. The result was something along the lines of these photos, each person and dog facing forward, facing each other.
- Observing which dogs are most comfortable with each other: in our class, we have one young male who is very jolly, without a mean bone in his body. But this dog definitely pushes a couple of the other dogs’ buttons. He is a good boy, and listens to his mom. But… he breathes fast, whines and barks, wags his tail incessantly, wiggles his butt even while he’s sitting, and he looks right at the other dogs, hoping for a new friend. This is just plain annoying to a couple of the other dogs – perhaps all of them – and the two eldest clearly have the least tolerance. It is important for you to know what behavior (if any) will push your dog’s “buttons”. When you’re working around a dog like that, at the slightest sign of agitation, stop, go away and reset. At some point your dog will refocus on you again – at this point, reward, circle back and try again, keeping the connection. Repeat as many times as it takes. Your dog must learn that you will not proceed closer to another dog if your dog is agitated.
To play out this point even further, our instructor ended class with an off-lead session. It was fascinating to see the behavior of the dogs… and the people! The dogs did “work it out” – they sorted themselves out, the players together and the calm ones at a distance from the players. One dog remained on leash because the aforementioned young boisterous male was just too much for him to handle.
The most remarkable thing about the people was the universal fear that their dog would do something that would offend the other people. We dog people really need to cut each other some slack 🙂
