Blog · A leash-reactive dog
When your dog lunges and barks
There is a mindfulness skill called urge surfing: you feel the urge rise, notice it, and let it crest and fall without acting on it. It is almost exactly what I ask owners of reactive dogs to do. Except I ask two of you to do it at once.
There is a mindfulness skill called urge surfing. You feel an urge rise, you notice it, and you let it crest and fall without giving in. The urge passes on its own if you do not feed it. You do not have to fight it and you do not have to obey it. You just have to outlast it.
It is almost exactly what I ask owners of reactive dogs to do. Except I ask two of you to do it at once. The dog, and you.
The dog's wave
When a reactive dog lunges and barks at the end of the lead, the dog is in the grip of an urge. Something crossed its threshold, the arousal spiked, and the body did what an aroused body does. We tend to treat that moment as an emergency that has to be solved right now. We talk to the dog, we tug, we reach for a treat, we lock eyes and try to call it back.
Here is the problem. To the dog, eye contact, talking, touching and treats are all inputs. They tell the dog that the moment it is having is a real and important one, worth staying in. We think we are calming the dog. We are confirming the dog. So the first thing I ask is that you stop adding inputs. Let the dog have the wave. Let it lunge, let it bark, and let it find out that the wave crests and falls on its own. This is the same thing the waterline describes: the reaction is the water cresting the rim, and it drops again if nothing keeps topping it up. This is also the heart of the three Ts.
Your wave
The harder part is that you are having an urge too. When your dog reacts in public you feel something. Frustration, because you have worked on this. Embarrassment, because people are looking. Fatigue, because you are sick of bracing every time you leave the house. Those feelings are urges of their own, and they push you to do something, anything, to make the moment stop.
That push is the thing to surf. The instinct to fix it right now is the same instinct that feeds the dog. You are not failing your dog by staying quiet and still. You are doing the harder and more useful thing.
Put your foot on the lead
Here is what to do with your hands while you do nothing with your mouth. Put your foot on the lead. Short enough that the dog is safe and cannot launch, loose enough that you are not holding it inside the reaction. Now you have a job, and the job is to watch.
Track three things: the body language overall, ear set, weight, the hard stare and when it breaks; which part of the dog is actually moving, the front end, the tail, the head; and how long it takes the dog to recover once nothing is added. You will be surprised how often the recovery is shorter than the story in your head. Ten seconds, thirty, a minute.
That information is the whole point. A dog you have observed is a dog you understand, and a dog you understand is one you can do something real about later, when you are calm and not in the middle of it. Reactivity does not get solved at the end of the lead in the heat of the moment. It gets solved in the patterns you start to see once you stop reacting to the reaction.
Common questions
What should I do when my dog lunges and barks on the lead?
Give nothing: no eye contact, no talking, no touch, no treats. Put your foot on the lead so the dog is safe, stay quiet and still, and watch the reaction crest and fall. Adding inputs tells an over-aroused dog the moment is real and worth staying in.
Does comforting my dog during a reaction help?
No. Talking, patting and treating mid-reaction are inputs that feed the arousal you are trying to bring down. The reaction passes faster if you add nothing and let it run its course, the same way an urge passes in a person who does not act on it.