09/20/2026
Leash reactivity mistake #4: the arousal blind spot.
Below is a brief excerpt from the full article. Link to the full post is in the comments.
"The problem is that arousal isn't a behavior a dog can easily connect to a consequence. It's a state. Most people struggle to notice in the moment when they're getting worked up themselves. Asking a dog to make that same connection, that a correction is happening because of how I'm feeling rather than because of something I did, is asking for a level of self-awareness that isn't reasonable to expect. However, many trainers will initially disagree with me here because they will say that they've seen these corrections work.
What actually happens after one of these corrections is usually something else entirely. The dog gets more cautious. Trainers read that caution as success: the dog seems calmer, less reactive, problem solved. But I think what's really happening is uncertainty. The dog experienced something aversive and doesn't understand why. Uncertainty produces caution on its own, independent of whether the dog has learned anything about arousal.
And that caution doesn't hold. If the dog becomes more cautious, they trigger fewer corrections. Fewer corrections mean the uncertainty that was driving the caution starts to fade. And once it fades, you're right back where you started, a dog with the same underlying arousal problem you began with. It's a short-lived false positive, not real progress, and trainers who lean on this method often end up repeating the same correction indefinitely because it never solves the problem in a lasting way."
