One of the essential skills we teach in our teenage and rescue training classes is to walk past other dogs calmly. Either in a coffee shop or on the footpath.
When I took the dogs for a walk this morning we met three other dogs: One was barking, one was lunging and barking and one was ‘just’ straining on the leash to get to mine.
I do not recommend on leash greetings and I ask my dogs to come into a heel position and walk past or when the other dog really goes off, we move further away, they look at me and wait. I obviously reward them for being calm.
The interesting part for me was the lunging and barking dog. Zorbas just ignored him completely but Shellbe was going close to threshold.
This shows I have not trained her enough so she is completely confident in these situations and can ignore it. On the other hand it shows that years of training and counter conditioning with Zorbas are paying off big time.
There were two other situations recently when we were walking and off leash dogs ran up to us. He either greeted them appropriately or when he got stressed look at me for instructions.
