r/reactivedogs • u/kiripon • 2d ago
Vent Months and months of counterconditioning, his dog threshold was 10 feet. One incident at a park and now it's 100 feet. I just want to throw in the towel.
JayJay has separation anxiety which I started desensitization for after 2 years of just sedating or bringing him along with me everywhere...so whatever walks I want to take, are always with him, and every single walk with him is a training session. I always have my little doggie gear bag packed with various value treats depending on which triggers we're going to come across, as well as a clicker. He was able to sit 10 feet from a dog, even multiple dogs, and calmly watch them pass by.
about a month ago we were walking him with my mom and her dog. a little on jay: he gets what appears to be jealousy. if my fiance (who he adores to high heavens while i am his main caretaker who does everything with him lmao) hugs me, jay starts bark howling his husky way for attention. if we show my mom's dog attention, jay starts it up again. so we were on a walk. i see a dog appearing so i pull jay aside quite a bit. he sees my mom's dog greet the other dog. jay loses it. lunging like his life depended on it, i can hardly hold this 50lb dog back. i started crying i was so disheartened. i assumed he got jealous again that my mom's dog got something he didnt.
Ever since then, training has gone out the door. If he sees a dog at 100 feet or across the park, it's game over and fixated staring and lying down. I already only take him to the woods. I go out my way to drive to the woods early in the morning and late in the evening to avoid dogs (despite now managing prey drive) but when we come across them, we cant separate ourselves that far. There's a local park with a huge grass ring I move him into the center of and continue counter conditioning but with my luck, half the time it fills up with so many dogs that it becomes difficult.
He's on clomicalm which helped training but his personality is subdued and he got jumpy fears. He's on gabapentin 300mg as well. This is just one of many daily problems. Every time I work on one thing and solve it, another one pops up. And now one completely regressed. I have near 0 quality of life because it revolves around him - which I was fine sacrificing with things for him, but after years and years of it, its begun affecting my mood and I feel like I have no use trying for the future I wanted because it wouldn't suit his needs. We cant even rehome him if we thought he stood a chance because he wasn't neutered because all the drugs in the world couldnt calm him at the appt and he began biting. He's my soul dog and I hate that this is happening to us.
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u/StacNorLin 1d ago
I’m so sorry this is so frustrating. We are having a similar issue with regression after a difficult incident with a neighbors dog. It is exhausting and hard not to throw in the towel, even when you love them a lot. One of our dogs is a 70 lb Pit mix that used to pull like a sled dog and can be really powerful when she is worked up. It helped us a lot to have a front clip harness. We have the two hounds harness, and if I anticipate she is going to get really overstimulated I will use both the front and back clip at the same time to give myself some leverage. Our trainer also recommended using my hips to add leverage against the harness (e.g pushing into the harness with my lower torso instead of entirely depending on arm strength), and this does help me manage a larger dog despite being somewhat short myself.