Hi, I have been training my dogs, dog reactivity ( he’s a mix of excitement and nerves depending on the situation) but I’m at a bit of a stand still with it and I’m unsure how to proceed. Currently if we are in a busy park, passing lots of dogs and people, he’s pretty good, will be very focused, or if he’s not he will respond fast to verbal cues or refocus words. He maintains a loose leash and walks next to me when asked. Which is all great, but we don’t go to those places very often, most busy areas are far away and not super accessible, as in i probably can’t go more than once a week, so not very helpful for our day to day life. Our walks are usually at the local park, with paths, open fields and play grounds. Unfortunately these places are not busy very often. Quite a few people will pass through during the day, but I don’t often see many dogs, and if I do they are off leash so we can’t get to close, other wise we might encourage the dog to come over, which I don’t want. He’s is way more reactive at these types of parks, since we will only pass or see a dog maybe once of twice the whole hour walk. This makes it very difficult to train him to not pull towards other dogs. I really want him to be able to disengage and walk past other dogs. But with a lack of dogs to practice with it’s getting pretty tough. The training we do at those busier parks doesn’t seam to transfuse over to the quieter parks with just a dog or two passing. Group sessions with other dogs, or having someone’s dog set up to walk past also doesn’t aid our progress. We go to weekly rally OB training nights, he’s around 10+ dogs and doesn’t react and usually doesn’t try to pull towards other dogs there. But even after half a year of that, he still can’t walk past a dog at the park. Set up dogs also don’t phase him, he might be a little pully for a minute, but settles down and does beautiful. So with that knowledge of his behavior I feel it would be very impractical to use other known dogs to help his training as I would need to get about 5 different people each walk to be set up around the park to make any real difference 😭😅
I’m genuinely lost and unsure what to do. I just want to be able to walk past another dog without him pulling like crazy to reach it. 🙁
submitted by /u/Crafty-Cranberry-454
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