Last fall my boyfriend and I adopted a Golden Retriever mix from a rescue in Dallas. I have always loved dogs, but haven’t had one in my family since Middle School. Needless to say, I was thrilled to be getting a dog of my own. Although we adopted her, she was still pretty young, about a year and a half old. She was already house trained and is generally good at not chewing up things that aren’t hers. The one thing we noticed soon after adopting her, however, is that she is very reactive when outside towards dogs and people.
Prior to having this pup in my life I really didn’t know anything about reactivity in dogs. As it turns out, she just gets overly excited when seeing a dog or person because she wants to meet them. Rather than calming saying hello, however, she barks. This can be fairly challenging because naturally other dog owners become nervous that she is actually aggressive with other dogs rather than just excited.
To help her work on this, we recently enrolled Tonks into a training class for reactive dogs. We were pretty excited to find such a specified training program that would hopefully help her get to the point where she can meet new dogs without barking. One of the tasks we’ve been working on is to show her a stuffed dog and turn around without her reacting to it much. I was pretty surprised to see that at first she did indeed react to the stuffed dog! She ended up being able to calm down and focus, but it really showed me just how reactive she is that she will bark at a stuffed dog. The trainer told us that in weeks to come we will work on slowly introducing her to real dogs and seeing how she reacts. I’m nervous, but excited to see how she does! It’s been a lot of work for us to have adopted a dog while both in graduate school, but it’s also been very rewarding. I really can’t imagine my life without her in it anymore and am so thankful every day that I see her!
Erin