06/03/2026
A reactive dog is not an aggressive dog.
"Reactive" is a catch-all for behavior that looks inappropriate or exaggerated but makes complete sense once you understand what's driving it. Reactivity = a big emotional response. It can look like barking, lunging, freezing, hiding, spinning, or shutting down. (Cringing in fear counts too.)
Underneath almost every reactive moment is one of three feelings: fear, frustration, or over-arousal. Not malice. Not dominance. Not "a bad dog."
Here's what often happens on leash: a dog passes another dog too closely for their comfort. They're already uneasy and physically stuck. Barking and lunging? It works. The other dog moves away. The behavior gets reinforced. Konrad Lorenz noted decades ago that aggressive behaviors increase with lack of space. It's not a character flaw. It's information.
When arousal crosses a certain threshold, neither dogs nor humans have meaningful control over their actions. You cannot learn anything new in that state ask anyone to memorize a poem while jumping out of a plane.
The practical move: stop trying to correct the reaction. Start managing the distance. Under threshold, learning begins.
That's where the real work happens, movement maneuvers, desensitization, counter-conditioning. Teaching dogs and their humans that triggers are survivable, and eventually ignorable.
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