A Saturday morning trip to the park

Saturdays...a day that most people cannot wait for. A day that a lot of reactive dog owners dread.

It's a bit like going into the spring and summer months, the months that every reactive dog owner dreads, dog's everywhere, off lead dogs everywhere. Running up to yours, trying your best to bite your tongue when you hear those dreaded words....'THEY'RE FRIENDLLLLLLY'. Anyway, you know every Karen and their mum is going to have their dog out with them on a Saturday so your choice of environments and places to go becomes limited. However, we see it as a training opportunity. A day in the week we used to dread has now become one of the days we get Odin out and about and learning the definitions of calm, cool and collective.

We do have to be quite selective about where we go, for example, a busy town centre on a market day is NOT the best place to start. We opt for a much calmer environment at the moment, the local nature reserve. We can guarantee there will be dogs there to work with, but not so much so that Odin can't have the space he needs and places to go if he becomes over-stimulated or we put him in a position he'll fail.

This morning we set off to that nature reserve, treats and ball in hand, we'd done a bit of training at home to get him into a good mindset, and when we arrived all seemed well. Odin's body language was calm, relaxed and responsive. He didn't appear nervous at all and was happy plodding along next to us. No more than 5 mins in we encounter our first dog...the other dog barked at Odin....NO REACTION. RESULT!

Feeling pretty happy, we continued, second dog approaches, this time head on. We were lucky in our positioning as we had the ability to give the other dog a wider berth but not so much so that Odin couldn't see the dog. We approached, taking a right turn and giving them distance. Odin saw the dog and....NO REACTION. He was interested, sure. But he looked at the dog and snapped right off, back to sniffing. We were absolutely buzzing by this point.

The nature reserve is within walking distance to the small market town it is part of so we decided to take a trip down there, this was slightly more challenging for him but it town is pretty quiet and you don't encounter too many people or dogs there so we thought we'd see how he did. We saw one or two dogs and he has a few whines but nothing I would say over the top. Pretty happy with that.

Overall in town he was fab, he trotted along, happy as Larry and was quite happy giving everywhere a good sniff than being interested in anything or anyone else. We decided to head back to the reserve and do another lap of the lake and work on some 'settle training' that we've been doing lately. We choose a spot with enough space around it but enough going on and practice 'the art of doing nothing' with Odin. Quite simply, Odin just has to lay down and exist. It's one of those fundamental skills we've been doing a lot of work on and he's been getting better and better each time. He's learnt that if we sit down and chill, he has to aswell. So here we are in a spot and all is going well so far. A few people and kids walk past, Odin is more interested in me and Dan than he was them.

The walk is going so well by this point....until I see a person and their dog turn the corner to walk right behind us. We made the mistake of not moving and giving Odin the space he needed, I think he'd been doing so well we thought he'd be okay. BAM. Fireworks. Dan literally had to hold him back. Barks, lunges, the works. It's pretty embarrassing when that happens and thankfully Dan is really good at ignoring whatever people might say or do in response. Me not so much. I hate the snide comments and dirty looks we get.

At this point we decided to move along, we'd just had a big meltdown and what we didn't want to do was keep him in a position that he was clearly very heightened and over-stimulated. So we continued our walk....well, from that point on he reacted to every single dog he saw. I felt guilty. We'd set him up to fail and now he'd failed and he was all over the place. Huge mistake as reactive dog owners really. We'd had such a great start and all it took was us feeling overconfident in him.

We were heading back to the car and a small black dog approached and yes, Odin reacted. I simply smiled at the owner, who was with her friend and kid's when I heard her say 'You're gonna get eaten' to her friend. Great. It's SO hard not to bite back when you hear things like that. You know in your heart of hearts your dog is not like that, but of course all they see is the reaction.

One thing I will never, ever understand about the human race....the need to give their opinion on everything, the need to comment or say anything. Why can't we just let it be? In what world did she think that saying what she said was going to make us feel any better about what had happened? Short answer...it didn't, it made us feel defeated and even worse. But of course to them it's a joke and they're not thinking about the implications of their comments, or how they're making other people feel.

Ultimately we both came away from this mornings walk not feeling great about it. I think it was a huge error on our part and we put way too much confidence in Odin to make the right choice. Lesson learnt and we go back to the drawing board. He's the best boy and it wasn't his fault. We keep moving....

A pub trip.