Is Your Reactive Dog Missing Playtime?

Playtime is just as important!

With reactive dogs, playtime can naturally be amissed. The walks are stressful, you just want to leave and go back to the safety of your home. By doing so, you'll all het up, frustrated and overwhelmed, but in the same hand, your dog will often missing the goodness of playtime (with yourself or with dog pals). Playtime is a fantastic reward but also a way for your dog to let off some all important steam. By factoring in playtime, this can be help balance your reactive dog by dispensing all the energy and keeping their engagement higher (particularly when training) but please note, it's important to notice and lean into the playtime they are requiring, don't just jump to playing fetch. How to know what type of play they are missing? Look into the behaviour you aren't enjoying, these are the ones you need to lean into as these are the innate behaviours your dog is missing. Chasing cars, bikes or squirrels? Look at investing into a dog flirt pole, getting the dog to chase you (do not chase the dog, you will regret this when training recall!), try out flyball (1 on 1 appointment) or even lean into Coursing Agility. Strong desire to run? Try out carnicross if you are fan of running or look at slowing it down to Agility courses or canine conditioning. Barking when seeing dogs? Indentify whether it's excitable or fear aggression. With fear aggression, we recommend booking an appointment with a Dog Trainer to work out why. With excitement aggression, allow your dogs to run around with their dog pals only ONCE they are at level where they calm down and look at you. This will mostly likely be work in progress over a couple of attempts, if not more. You could also reduce a lot of external factors by booking out an enclosed dog park. Again, we recommend working with a Dog Trainer to get the ball rolling to begin with. Digging or destroying things? This is a way to regulate a dog's nervous system, a bit like digging the ground to make a bed. We recommend looking at enrichment games where the dog is ALLOWED to destroy the item, for instance, placing treats in cardboard boxes and letting them shred, destroy and make a mess to dig out the goodies. Please note, this is not recommended for dogs that swallow the parts so it's advised you monitor for the first few gos. We also recommend looking at joining sniff work classes or booking out an enclosed dog park that has sandpits - or even taking them to the beach!

Not settling, "too much energy" and destructive after walks? Read our article on why it's important to cool down your dog - your dog is saying i'm over stimulated from our walk and I need help settling down as my nervous system is sky high right now. To help this, spilt the walk into: sniff session, command / training work and cool down (this looks like dropping treats sporadically behind you to just sitting on a bench to let you both watch the world go by) You will begin to notice when the innate behaviours, like chasing or playtime, shift from play to predative by the intensity; the running is quicker, your dog isn't listening and the play isn't balanced of who chases who with their dog pals. We recommend bringing them back and calming it down by getting them to cool down mentally and physcially. We also recommend remove all squeaky toys from your home as it's too close for comfort of the real thing. Lastly, we've written a article on why Fetch is bad (highly recommend) and why it's important to cool down (again, highly recommend) to keep it holistic and positive.