16/07/2026
Something I see advertised almost daily.. 🙃
THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS NEUTRALITY WHEN IT COMES TO MEMBERS OF OUR OWN SPECIES
The same is true for dogs too.
One of the most frustrating activities I see for reactive dogs is the so-called Neutrality Walk.
These promise that your reactive dog will be walking nicely with and past other dogs within a 30-minute session. They're sold on the idea that your frustrated or anxious dog will suddenly behave 'neutrally' (whatever that means) towards other dogs.
Other dogs will become a 'neutral' or meaningless stimulus.
If you ask me, I'd call them 'ignorance walks'.
That's the promise. That your dog will ignore other dogs in the neighbourhood.
That's the promise, no matter if those dogs are behind a fence running along 100m of property line defending their turf, no matter if those dogs bark at your dog, even if they're off lead and run up to your dog.
Whatever the dog, your dog will ignore whatever it's doing.
I'd call them 'ignorance walks' not only because they're promising that your dog will ignore other dogs (which is very different than feeling neutral about them) but also because the people selling them are about as science-illiterate as it's possible to be.
Unfamiliar dogs are NOT neutral to your dog.
They're NEVER neutral.
Sure, your dog may be very habituated to other dogs so that a lot of the time, other dogs are not particularly salient or relevant to your dog.
That usually happens as a result of excellent breeding for sociability plus a robust temperament plus perfect exposure plus being an adult dog.
Being habituated to other dogs to the extent that you just don't notice a lot of what they do is not the same as being neutral, however. It's also a lot of hard work. Ask all the people who purpose-breed assistance dogs where at the end of an intensive 18-month training period, half the dogs don't pass because they're not habituated enough to other dogs.
Sometimes, your dog might be more interested in you or in the environment or what they're doing. Again, not the same as neutrality. Again, ask people with assistance dogs where the dogs are required to do task-related behaviour in public around other dogs. Lots and lots of those dogs don't pass the test because the lure of social interaction from other dogs or from people is too strong compared to the lure of the task.
Being so trained that you can perform a duration heelwalk around distracting dogs is also NOT neutrality. It simply means your dog is doing a job and ignoring distractions in the environment. Just FYI... even in dog sports that require loose-lead or off-lead heelwork around other dogs like French ring sports, that requirement is usually a short distance and duration, not a daily trip around your neighbourhood. And those guys put in the work. It takes a long time to drill that kind of focused frogmarching.
So, you might say, neutrality is just the wrong word.
Maybe they should call them duration obedience heelwalks around distractions?
Or attempts at habituation walks?
Or ignorance walks?
Yet the whole premise is set up on a misguided house of cards that tumbles down the moment you poke it.
Social others are NOT neutral to a dog. They're not neutral to humans. Moving stimuli are immediately noticeable and have meaning. Moving social others could afford good stuff or threat. Novel stimuli are also immediately noticeable and we orient automatically towards it.
Pretending otherwise, that other dogs can ever be meaningless or irrelevant to our dogs, well that's just setting our dogs up to fail.
People promising us that our dog who barks and lunges at other dogs might ever be neutral about them - well, that's just fraud, plain and simple.
Fanselow, M. S. (2026). Redefining Pavlovian conditioning. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 108168.
Domjan, M. (2026). The essential elements of an ecological approach to Pavlovian conditioning. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 108164.
