02/10/2024
The reactivity recipe:
-Start with poor relationship dynamics. You want your dog to view you as a soft, permissive doormat, that way you can truly encourage their worst behavior/personality tendencies and provide no incentive for them to offer their best. This is a foundational necessity to creating truly explosive issues on walks. If you mess this critical piece up, all the following advice might be for naught, so tread extremely carefully here.
-Ensure the rules, structure, and leadership inside the house are super loosey-goosey. You’ll struggle tremendously to get truly intense reactivity if 90% of the dog’s life is filled with healthy rules, structure and believable leadership. Be sure to let chaos reign in the home if you want the good stuff outside of it.
-Start the walk with some solid excited encouragement of “Anyone want to go for walkies?!?!”, or something similar. Although all the other predictive cues for an upcoming walk are already working their arousal-inducing magic, if you want to play in the big leagues you’ll have to go the extra mile for maximum chaos.
-Do not, I repeat, do not use any training tools which offer you any kind of control or ability to positively affect your dog’s behavior. I’d recommend a flat collar, or even better a harness, and while a 6’ leash held at the handle is a good start, the truly committed will trade up to a retractable leash and show the dilettantes what’s really possible.
-Of course anyone who knows anything knows that training your dog to walk at your side, at your pace, without zig-zagging, dragging you to trees/bushes to smell/mark, and stopping your dog from being able to constantly pull for that deliciously relaxing workout—knows this will ruin everything. Avoid this at all costs, because a polite, calm, rule-intensive, highly structured walk is almost guaranteed to ruin, or at the very least, tremendously reduce the reactivity you’ve worked so hard to cultivate.
-A few bonus tips for the true reactivity addicts out there:
*If you see another dog, ask if your dog can say hi. On leash meet and greets are a great way to foster tension, arousal, mistrust of other dogs, and if you’re really lucky, perhaps even a wee scuffle. Don’t let these opportunities slip by.
*If your dog is staring and loading on another dog or trigger, be sure to give them ample time to load up to the maximum level. Any type of correction given too early in the escalation sequence can have extremely deleterious effects on your dog’s ability to properly load and explode. You want to wait patiently and let nature take its course.
*If you DO choose to correct your dog (Yes I’m judging), be sure it ONLY occurs once your dog is fully committed to the behavioral explosion. If you’ve timed this properly, your dog should be barking/snarling/spinning/lunging and your perfectly timed correction should take what was your average, run of the mill reactivity meltdown, and transform it into something truly crowd stopping.
*An often overlooked component of the reactivity recipe success, is leveraging some hyper-emotional responses. Be sure to add an edge (or more!) of panic, fear, and anxiety into any verbal exchanges you share with your dog. Don’t underestimate the transformative value of a hysterical human feeding an already amped up/stressed out/aroused dog the extra emotional inputs needed to achieve full lift off.
*I know we all know this one, but can it ever be said enough? Please, in the name of all things holy, keep your arm iron-stif and in some unnatural position, and keep that solid, frustration-inducing tension on the leash at all times. This is an easy one for most, but I’d be remiss to overlook it.
*Lastly, remember this is your dog’s walk. This isn’t about you, or your comfort or safety. If you truly care about your dog being fulfilled and happy, I would hope you’d be willing to make the appropriate sacrifices to both body and mind. And what’s best is that you know that by doing so you’re also gifting your dog with the same psycho-physiological benefits you’re enjoying. We call that a win-win.
Of course there’s more—there’s always more—but this should be a solid start for those looking to make their walks an extraordinary, nail-biting adventure which you can later regale friends, family, and even future generations with, and which sadly most owners will never know the pleasure of.
Go get ‘em! ❤️
