Hi, I'm Amy Jensen. This is the puppy training podcast episode number four, reactivity.

This podcast is for people looking to train their own dog, either as a companion, therapy, or service dog.

This is the puppy training podcast, and I'm your host, Amy Jensen.

Hi, today we are talking about reactivity.

And there's a couple different ways that your dog could be reactive, but today we're going to focus specifically on the leash reactive dog.

So this would be a dog who barks or lunges at other dogs or other triggers

while on leash. So barking and lunging are the most common behaviors dogs who are reactive

exhibit, but there could also be others such as whining, growling, salivating, biting. Sometimes your

puppy might spin or turn around or hide between your legs,

something like that. So sometimes to me, this is a very embarrassing thing. If I'm out walking a

dog and it's pulling me down the street where it's lunging or it's barking at either a,

you know, my neighbor walking by or another dog walking by,

you know, it could be a really embarrassing thing. So I really like to get reactivity under

control as soon as possible. And I know that there's a lot of people out there just because

I, as I drive through town in my car, I see this a lot with other dogs, you know, and they see another dog, and they get

overly excited, or they might be fearful, and maybe they're too close to an animal that they're

not comfortable around, and so the lunging and the barking behaviors come out, and then you can

see that the person is really trying to do their best to control their dog, but maybe they just

haven't been taught what to do. So I know this is an issue

for a lot of people, and so I thought I would do a little podcast on it today. Okay, so why are dogs

reactive? What causes this? There's a number of issues that, you know, or reasons why your dog might do this.

The first one would be the fight or flight instinct.

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