The single most important thing I did to manage Padfoot’s reactivity was eliminating triggers by timing neighborhood walks and finding places to walk where we could avoid people and dogs. Wesleyan Cemetery has been a godsend since it is close by and I can see anyone coming from hundreds of yards and change directions if I need to. Dog-friendly Arlington Cemetery is also great with wide roads and high visibility. If I didn’t have them, I’d look for an area zoned for light manufacturing, like the neighborhood around CARE’s Dane facility. It’s not scenic, but the roads are wide with little traffic and no foot traffic except us dog walkers. 

The theory is to use the low-trigger environment to work on our partnership so Padfoot is focused on me instead of taking his own initiative, then slowly introducing triggers. That works, to a point. It’s not in my personality to maintain heeling for a half-mile, and Padfoot rebels during longer training sessions. He’s a decent loose-leash walker and I want him to be free to smell things and enjoy himself. I suspect I am not as strict with him as most trainers would want me to be.

We are at the point where I can tell him to sit when I see him zeroing in on something, and he will switch his focus to me and actually sit (most of the time. This strategy works best if I have him sit beside a car so it blocks sight of the dog that has his attention). We are completing neighborhood walks with him only triggering once or twice, and rarely with people, as long as they are across the street.

Last week I introduced a new strategy. One of the easiest ways to train is to tell your dog to do something immediately before he’s going to do it anyway. (In addition to teaching them to correlate the behavior with the command, it kind of bamboozles your dog into thinking you are in charge.) I decided to use this strategy to remind him that I am leading and to keep his focus on me while we have a loose-leash walk.

To do this, I call shots all during our walks, even though he knows exactly where we are going: “left turn”, “right turn”, “cross” (for cross the street), “in” (for go inside), “about” (for turn around) and “walk on” (which I tell him when he stops because he’s focused on something and I am dragging him away before he goes off. Not strictly in the same category of the other commands, but hope springs eternal that he will eventually learn this one.) 

So far this is helping. Stay tuned.