He is dealing with an emotion that overwhelms him: most often fear, sometimes frustration, sometimes an excess of excitement. That is the whole difference between correcting a dog and helping him.
These situations do not look as though they belong to the same family. They are in fact its four faces: fight, flight, freeze, or appease at any cost. Four strategies for the same thing, an emotion that overwhelms the dog.
That he is dominant. That it is the breed. That it is just his character. That you need to “show him who is in charge”. These sentences cost dogs dearly, because they describe a symptom and close the file.
Reactivity is a dog responding out of all proportion to a trigger: another dog, a stranger, a car. He barks, he pulls, he freezes, he lunges. From the outside it looks like aggression. From the inside it is almost always fear spilling over.
A dog who no longer dares to look at his fear has not overcome it. He is holding it in.
He no longer lunges, he looks at you, but his body is stiff, his mouth tight, his breathing short. That is not calm. That is contained fear.
After a difficult walk: he digs, he paces, he chews, he eats without being hungry, he cannot settle. The emotion has not gone away, it is leaving by another door.
The trigger looks trivial to you. For him the threshold had been crossed long before: he was already under tension well before you noticed anything at all.
You work at it, you reward, and the episodes are just as frequent, or more intense. Usually a sign that a symptom is being treated rather than a cause.
A settled dog comes down after a stressful event. Yours stays switched on for hours, startles, never quite rests. His capacity to settle himself is overwhelmed.
Rewarding a dog for looking away can teach him to ignore his fear without ever working on it. And on the day the reward is slow to come, the emotion spills over.
Silencing the barking, the pulling or the growling without understanding the emotion underneath only moves the problem. Another symptom turns up sooner or later, often less visible and harder to work with.
“Getting him used to it” by putting him in front of what frightens him again and again, with no way out, usually reinforces the fear instead of reducing it. It produces a resigned dog, not a settled one.
The protocols are not set out here, and that is not an oversight: applied to the wrong dog, an exercise taken out of its context can make a case worse.
German shepherd · malinois cross. Several professionals had been in before me, all competent, all well meaning. All of them had done counter-conditioning with food. On the surface, it was working.
In reality: he had never stopped being afraid. Today, no trouble at all around people.
Staffordshire cross, attacked several times by other dogs. A vet had concluded it was predation, on the basis of one observed posture.
In reality: a posture learned to make others back off. Defence. Today, he meets other dogs again.
One-year-old Pyrenean sheepdog, aggressive towards people. Born in a mountain sheepfold, he had seen nothing but sheep, shepherds and mountains.
In reality: a dog raised in sensory deprivation. Today, he lives on a university campus without difficulty.
In the large majority of cases, yes. A bite is not a verdict on the dog: it is information about what he has been through and about the options he believed he had. A dog who bites is almost always a dog who, in his own mind, had nothing else left.
What I will not do is promise you a result before I have seen anything. Some cases call for lifelong management alongside the work, and that is said plainly too.
Sometimes, but never as a reflex. Food is a complicated reward: for an anxious dog it touches on survival, and chewing releases something that can wind a dog up rather than calm him down.
On emotional cases I work a great deal with the voice, with non-verbal signals, with scent and with settling. For a dog who has moved away rather than attacked, the best reward is usually to be accompanied in that choice and to have it acknowledged.
Sometimes, and it is neither a punishment nor an admission of failure. It is what lets a dog have a social life again, safely, while the work is going on, instead of staying shut in.
When one is needed, it is chosen and fitted to the shape of the dog’s head; a badly fitted muzzle is one more problem.
That is exactly Hauru’s story, and it happens more often than people think. Most of the time the professionals before me were neither incompetent nor careless: they treated the symptom because that is what the training teaches.
The difference lies in how the cause is read. Get the cause wrong and no technique makes up for it, however well it is carried out.
You will not find exercises on this site, and that is deliberate: a generic protocol applied to the wrong dog can make a case worse. That is precisely what happened to Hauru.
What you can do straight away, with no risk: avoid the situations where your dog goes over threshold, rather than pushing him to face them. A dog who goes over threshold every day never gets the chance to come down.
The full assessment separates the symptom from the cause. Ninety minutes online, with a written plan at the end.