Your Reactive Dog Isn't Antisocial. They're Stuck at Neutral.

Most people think the goal with a reactive dog is to get them to neutral, just calm enough to walk past another dog without kicking off. And look, that's fine as a starting point, but if neutral is the ceiling you're aiming for, you're one bad walk away from being back at square one. Because neutral is bang in the middle of the scale, and the middle of the scale has no buffer. What I want to show you today is what actually happens when you start pushing beyond neutral into genuine socialization, not just tolerance Not just ignoring, actually learning to be a dog again.

Now this is a deep dive.

It's a full session I ran with a group of owners and their dogs, and it's unedited. So you are gonna hear me talking about things like the yo-yo effect, why calling your dog away from every interaction might actually be making things worse. You're gonna hear something about genetic ceilings because some dogs have them and nobody talks about that honestly. You can hear about why, where you socialize matters just as much as how you actually do it. If you're a dog owner watching this because your dog is reactive, there's a link in the description for our free Behavior Bible. It covers the foundation Relationships start here. Right, let's get into it.

Back when our old site, when we first started the business, we were always aiming for neutral. We thought neutrality was the goal and the key and the best thing to have. The problem with neutrality is if we've got like a spectrum of how social our dogs are, or even how social we are, if neutrality is bang in the middle, the trouble with aiming for that is that if our dogs have any kind of negative experience, we're really close to going this way, right? But if we're somewhere around here probably not there because that caused frustration-based problems, but if we're somewhere around there, we've got a buffer. So my dog Bumble is quite social. He doesn't always look it, but he's a fairly social dog. He's a very confident dog. When I first got my blue staffie, the blue staffie bit him twice and pretty bad, like shook him and everything, all the full mashings. But because Bumble was here, or maybe even here at that point, he's fine. He hasn't become more reactive. A lot of people, um, think that a one-off event will make your dog reactive. You can get single event learning. That is a thing. Obviously, the rationale behind that would be if, if the event is traumatic enough and the dog didn't learn from it, they'd put themselves in that situation again. So then they might, I don't know, cause harm or get killed or whatever next time, if that makes sense. So that's common in nature. It has to be traumatic though. So like, if a dog runs over and barks at your dog, that's not going to do it. If your dog's not very resilient in the first place, they're more prone to a lesser event being the straw that broke the camel's back. But it's probably not the event itself, it's probably what's gone on previously that's affected that. So essentially what we're after is, okay, boot camp, TWI, we've probably been that way, or maybe extreme end of that way. So we've got frustration-based reactivity, we've brought them back to the middle. The goal of this, and or at least teaching the skills of how to do it, is to create that where we've got a little buffer where our dogs can be acceptable being sniffed or sniffing, and maybe even an off lead dog runs over, but it's not, it's not going to send them that way or hugely that way. So where you should be now is at the neutral point, right? Maybe some slightly more than others, but you should be near enough neutral. And what went into that a lot of the time was a really good yes and a no. At some point we're going to spin that on its head. When you're going through a resocialisation process, we don't use our terminal marker much at all. The reason being is because it can overshadow what we're trying to achieve, which is dogs interacting with the environment and probably dogs. So as an example, Chloe had a puppy called Dolly and she created a really good clicker response. And Dolly would run over to someone, she'd click, dog came back, got paid. Run over, click, dog came back, got paid. What do you think happened as a result of that? She created a literal yo-yo effect. So she was never interacting with the person. She was just running over and then flying back and going, "Eh? Paid?" The problem with that is she never interacts with the thing, never actually learns to be a dog. We're almost capping where she can be as a dog because we're clicking away from too much stuff in the environment. So as much as we hammer home how important your terminal marker is at one point, I'm now going to almost do a 180 and say we're probably going to be using it less and less and less. Less. It's just in the back pocket in case the other things that we use don't work. You know, is your bad. You know, is your punishment. We would only be using that if the dog does something that is genuinely a crime. So if our dog moves over to interact with the dog, even if they're pulling on the lead, ideally we're not going to say, bad, don't do that again, because that literally means don't ever do that again. So in theory, we've said you can never interact with the dog. That's not what we're after, right? So we're going to try and stay away from our terminal marker as much as possible and also away from the bad. Obviously, if the dog you're working with takes umbrage to another dog, hoofs off, yeah, okay, that's, that's not great, that's bad, that's— don't do that thing again. And that's why we use a marker so we can pinpoint that perfectly. Okay, so your new refereeing toolkit. So this part, I wouldn't even call this dog training, I'd call it like facilitating or refereeing. Whose dog, if anyone's, has been in the presence of another dog for a number of seconds and then something's happened. It happens a lot, right? And it happens with dogs that are maybe even unsure of people. We let the dog sniff someone. I'm going to bend down. This is me and I'm the dog. I'm sniffing and then I kind of like go, ooh, shit, now I feel pressured. And then the dog reacts. So essentially what worked for me is the way I term it is like Chinese water torture, like an elongation of steady pressure. Nothing's changed, but the dog's just felt pressure for long enough and they've hit the threshold of like Oh, I can't cope with that anymore. So it might be that you've got to get your dog away from the dog. You could use your terminal marker, but then we might teach that yo-yo effect. So what we want is probably more like a leave it, or you could use your enough, like your end of play cue, like, okay, we're not doing that thing right now, but slightly different. Owen's got a right big rotty thought. My little blue staffie, Little John, he's the typical Chinese water torture dog. He's walking along, a dog will sniff him, he goes stiff. There's preemptive signs of it. If we let that ride out, Little John goes— the unfortunate part of him is he doesn't do any vocalizing, no growling, no barking, no nothing. He just goes straight to walloping. Owen has got a good leave it, Thor sniffed Little John, we let it go for a few seconds, leave it, get him away, Chinese water torture. And then what essentially you're doing is building Little John's tolerance of that. Oh, nothing happened that time. Let it happen again. Nothing happened that time. And by the time we got about a km into the walk, they'd sniffed each other a number of times and you could just see Little John's body language. Oh, okay. He's not coming at me because it purely comes from a spot of unsurity, right? He's not like he's never had any trauma. He's just not very sure about dogs. He wasn't very well socialised. But essentially we need a cue or a way of getting our dog away from that whether it be Little John or whether it be Thor, we've got to separate them out so we don't hit that threshold point where something happens, right? Because who wants to split up a fight between a Staffie and a Rottie?

Not me.

So you might already have a leave it. We're going to polish that hopefully in the first session of the day. On the flip side of it, Bumble and Rex, Owen's dog that he's just adopted, maybe about a K in, showed signs of play. So they kind of go all the, you know, you know, the Frenchies, when you, um, they find they're dancing around, the playbells, all that kind of stuff. We don't want to stop that, but the first interaction, it probably needs a ceiling of how far you let it go because Rex is a big, um, I actually know what he is. Has anyone seen Lenny on our Instagram? He's basically a copy of Lenny, slightly smaller, so he's like probably like a Mali Herder something or other. Bumble is 15kg Frenchie who holds his own, but in the first interaction, if Rex was too boisterous, knocks him over, we've not figured out that we're okay with those rules yet. Until they've got an understanding, you probably want to put a little ceiling on it. That's when your end of play comes in. It's like, alright, that's enough. Like, you can instigate play, you can run around for a bit, but you're 10 times bigger than him and something could easily happen that we wouldn't want. So we really— the two things that we're probably going to use is leave it, and we maybe we have to back out with some pressure at some point, and yep, enough. There may be a ceiling, both genetic and environmental, that your dog can get to socialization-wise, right? So I've got 6 dogs. Blue, Flea, to an extent Bumble, Rita can be introduced to pretty much any dog at any point. Cora, embarrassingly the only dog I've had from a puppy, can be a bit funny with dogs. That comes from me wrapping her in cotton wool because the puppy I had before that died. So that's on me. Fucked it. And then Little John, I can introduce to most dogs, but it has to be a very, very, very, very, very specific way, and I have to completely implicitly trust the other person with their dog. It's like Owen and Thor, fine, I know he's got good verbal control of him. We could make sure— and I did muzzle Little John initially anyway so that he couldn't just attach himself to for. There may be a genetic cap on it, right? I'm currently helping a lady in a charity. When she brought that dog into the, the center, as soon as she smelt dogs, you could just see— there's no noise, there's nothing like— and those are the ones that you got to worry about, right? There's no barking, growling, please give me distance. There's just like, brilliant, I was born for this. And that's why we're so big on fulfillment, like One of the problems that they've got is that dog doesn't currently play. So there is no fight outlet for that dog yet. Once we've got that, yeah, maybe we can start saying, okay, well, here's some rules around dogs and see how far we can push it. I love bull breeds, but they do have that in them where— Brilliant. Not scared of anything. Give me a scrap. And you can liken that to people as well, right? So there might be a genetic limit. There might be a history limit. So let's say, for example, you genuinely get one of those dogs that's had severely bad experiences with other dogs. It might be that that dog can have a limit on how far they can go, right? So sometimes you've got to be sensible of what dogs you combine in the process. Like, not all dogs can be friends with all dogs. Like, same with people, right? I don't like all people. It's weird, isn't it? So there might be ceilings that you hit. Those ceilings might be breakable. It might be that seems like a ceiling, but we can break through it with this process. It might be that, okay, well, that, that is the ceiling. It just depends. Quick one before we carry on.

If you're watching this and you're sick of walking your dog at 5 or 6 in the morning or 10 at night just to avoid everyone else, if you've started crossing the road, turning around, cutting walks short, if your dog's frustrated and you are exhausted and you just want your life back with them, that is exactly who our 5-day boot camp is for. You come with your dog, we don't take them away and hand back. You're there every single day. We coach you, your dog learns with you, and by the end of the week you've got a dog that actually can be out in the real world.

Not a robot, a dog with a life, one you can actually enjoy and one that can actually enjoy theirs.

The link is in the description.

Right, let's get back to it. We're not after perfect obedience when you're trying to resocialize. We're after a dog that can sniff and be sniffed, like tolerate, and hopefully just be at the point where they can go, okay, fine, it is a dog, it's not a massive problem. Just from a process point of view, if it's a dog and a dog, and you do have a leave it, you say leave it, it doesn't work, there's no real problem with you using your terminal marker if it's stronger. You just don't want to be using that every single time. When we're counter conditioning and we're trying to change feelings, it's like, okay, the presence of the thing means something good. Present's good, present's good, because we're trying to shift emotions. But when you shift to the point where you're trying to get your dog actually more interactive with the environment and dogs being part of that environment we just fall away from it a little bit. But it is in the back pocket. It would probably go in, in terms of a hierarchy of like how you try and get the dog away from the dog. So let's say, for example, when Thor went over to sniff Little John, if Owen's leave it hadn't worked, he could have used his terminal marker. If his terminal marker doesn't work, then maybe he uses some pressure to compel it. But pressure is like the last thing we want to use because obviously that Chinese water torture system. So when we go through like the on-lead process later on we'll always have the most confident dog at the front, or the most neutral dog at the front initially before we swap it. You can imagine like dogs that aren't confident with dogs being behind them, they'll just do loads of like rubbernecking, like when there's a crash on the motorway. And usually rubbernecking can cause other accidents, right? Because people are like, oh, what's happened over there? Bang, they hit the car in front. So my analogy would be the same, like once we get loads of rubbernecking, we're probably looking at more problems. So we want the most confident dog in the front until the dog at the back maybe feels a little bit more confident in that dog's presence, and then we can swap around. But we'll go through that later on. The context that you resocialize in is key. So the hardest place to do is a small indoor place for a number of reasons. One, the spatial context just immediately puts more pressure on the dogs. Two, there's just not enough stuff going on. Like, you want the least sterility you can have. Whose dog is better in a group of dogs than it is with a single dog? Yeah, so happens an awful lot because it's like, right, okay, there's absolutely nothing else doing apart from that, so now I hyperfixate on it and now I overthink on it. A lot of dogs perform better in our group social classes because it's like, oh, there's one there, and oh, but there's one over there, and oh, there's one here, and they never kind of like hyperfixate on any one thing. That's the same with the environment itself where there's more stuff going on for the dog is the best place to socialise. So the edge of the field where other dogs have peed, other animals have been, there's loads of smells because what we want is like the dog to flip between the two of like, oh, there's a dog in front of me. Oh, but that smells really good. And they're almost breaking their own fixation on the thing, if that makes sense. So where you do it is key in that sense. You also wouldn't want to do it where the dogs have got a history of scrapping. So if they've had a scrap in the living room, the worst place for you to do would be like, right, okay, let's get them both out in the living room now. Okay, we'll go somewhere else first, do it there, tick boxes and take low-hanging fruit first. But it's mostly from the point of view of you want the sniffing of the dogs to happen organically. We will do it on lead first. And a lot of people say, I'll never let dogs meet on lead. The reason, or a number of the reasons why, is if I walk over to you with my dog and you're walking towards me with your dog, They're probably pushing towards each other. The posture changes. So immediately, like, the body language looks off. They end up meeting face to face. There's nothing else going on. And even if that goes well, at some point we go, okay, let's go away now. We walk off, we add pressure, and quite often that's when it goes— So it's not that you can't meet— not the dogs can't meet on lead because obviously there's a safety element of it. You've got a mechanical thing to interrupt. It's just how they meet on lead that's important. And it never happens logistically like that, does it? You bump into someone in the park and like, oh, can my dog 'Can we say hello?' It'll sound weird, like, but ideally be like, 'Right, yeah, we can, but we need to be walking in the same direction, ideally at the edge of the field.' They'll probably then be okay instead of, 'Oh, look, there we are,' and then we walk off and we just cause problems.

So that is the reality of socialization work. It is not a switch you can flick. It's a process, and it has a ceiling that is different for every dog. The key things to take away from today: neutrality is not the goal, it's the floor. You want a buffer above it. You manage the interaction, you don't just let it run. You use your leave it, not your terminal marker, and where you do it matters more than most people think. Now, if you're watching this as someone who wants to do this professionally, this is the kind of work we go into in the depth of the YCA Dog Trainer Development Program. It's a 10-week intensive, 9 weeks online, and then a final hands-on at our facility here in Leeds, working with real dogs and real cases. Not stooge dogs, not edited reels, the actual messy, complicated, brilliant reality of behaviour mod. The next cohort's coming up soon. The link's in the description. And if you found this useful, hit subscribe. There's going to be a lot more where this came from.