Reactive dogs: what's actually going on
A reactive dog is one who barks, lunges or panics at specific things — other dogs, bikes, loud noises — at a level that looks out of proportion to what happened. Reactivity is not aggression and it is not disobedience; it is a stress response, and stress from separate events accumulates across days rather than resetting between them. That accumulation is the single most common reason a walk goes wrong for no visible reason. CalmDogs is an iPhone app that logs what a dog met on each walk — the trigger, the distance, the reaction, the recovery time — so the accumulation is visible before the next walk rather than after it.
Most of what makes a reactive dog's week hard is invisible from inside a single walk. These pages explain the parts that are hard to see: what reactivity is, what a threshold is and why it moves, how stress stacks across days, and how long recovery actually takes.
Start here
- What is a reactive dog? soon
- Why does my dog bark at other dogs on walks? soon
- Your dog was fine yesterday and terrible today soon
The mechanics
- Trigger stacking in dogs soon
- Thresholds, and why they move soon
- How long does it take a dog to calm down? soon
Keeping a record
- What to write down after a reactive dog's walk soon
- Apps for reactive dogs soon
- Dog behaviour tracking apps soon
- What a reactive dog trainer costs soon
Every page here is written by the person who built CalmDogs, an iPhone app that keeps this kind of record for you. There is no free tier, and the pages are free to read either way.
Questions
Is a reactive dog an aggressive dog?
No, though they can look alike from across a street. Reactivity describes an outsized response to a specific trigger. Aggression describes intent to do harm. Most reactive dogs are frightened rather than dangerous — but if your dog has bitten someone, that is a situation for a qualified professional, not an app.
Can reactivity be trained away completely?
That is a question for a qualified behaviourist who has met your dog, and the honest answer is that it varies enormously. What is true for every dog is that you cannot judge whether anything is working without a record of what you have actually been doing.
Why does my dog react to some dogs and not others?
Distance, angle, the other dog's behaviour, what happened earlier that day, and how much sleep your dog got can all move the outcome. It is rarely one variable, which is exactly why single walks are misleading and several weeks of them are not.