Every time I go somewhere with my dogs or a dog I'm training someone wants to pet them or say "Hi" or if we go to a store the workers want to give them a treat and I say no. 99.99 % of the time I say "No, we're in training."
Sometimes they don't even ask or acknowledge I exist, they go right to groping the dog- sticking their hands or FACE in the dog's face, not knowing if it could bite, maybe they have reactivity issues we're working on, maybe, just MAYBE, you don't know how to approach and appropriately pet them.
Everyone wants a social dog. I feel I beat this point senseless but social DOES NOT MEAN MEETING AND MAKING FRIENDS WITH EVERY PERSON AND DOG AND LETTING THEM PET, GIVE TREATS OR PLAY!!!
So I'm going to explain why I don't, why you shouldn't, if you are going to, how you should instruct people on how to and dealing with someone who just decides your dog is their teddy bear.
In my opinion and experience, there are some foundational components to dogs and our relationship with them. They are:
Fear
Curiosity
Trust
Respect
Understanding
Value
Pressure (spatial and physical)
Distance
It isn't the whole picture but for the purpose of this, it's all we need.
Here is our demo dog's baseline for these components- let's say it's a 8 week old lab.
That fear is pretty normal, as curious and adventurous as puppies are, they are also cautious as fear is important for self preservation. Since they're 8 weeks old, they have basically zero understanding of pretty much everything. You're trust and respect are decent because they're so young and all you've done is pet them, play with them and feed them. That also means they find most of their value in you with some of it being away from you.
Now let's look at our 8 week old lab puppy when a stranger approaches:
The fear starts to go up but they are still curious. As does the pressure they feel at the same time the distance goes down. As their attention shifts, our trust, respect and value has gone down. Now the person is closer and talking in a baby voice because that's how people act around puppies.
The fear has gone down but so has the value the dog find in you as the person gets closer and talks to the puppy. And this strangers value is WAY higher than yours.
Now the person is here and they get on the ground and start playing with your puppy.
The fear is gone and there's no sort of pressure. Their understanding and trust has gone way up. However, it's understanding that this person is more fun and interesting and there's only trust because it's a novel relationship for the dog. And your respect and value is at an all time low while value the dog finds away is at an all time high.
So with the goal being to have a super social dog, we continue over the next several months letting people come up, give treats, play, give affection and pet. Which leads to this.
All the value is AWAY from you. The understanding and trust are at 100 but not for the right reasons. Now lets see what happens as we continue this pattern and as our dog matures, they don't want to meet and play with everyone.
As someone approaches, they have a new baseline fear that comes from the nervousness of not wanting to interact and not trusting you to advocate for them.
They keep approaching and what do you think the dog is thinking and feeling?
Everything except fear, value and pressure plummet.
"But why is the value still so high for 'away' from you if they don't want to meet this person?"
Because the value isn't in you or this person who is really harmless, the value, what the dog wants is to escape which is... away from you.
And fear, value in escaping and pressure only increase as everything else is almost non existent. Finally we arrive here:
Maximum fear and zero trust, respect, understanding or value in you.
So what? What do you do to not create reactivity or have a dog so focused on being away from you because what it wants isn't you? Let's go back to graph 4.
Only we've made some slight changes.
I'm going to choreograph this interaction so maximize what I want from the dog and add a brick to our foundation. First, we'll increase the distance while the person is still on the puppy's level and trying to get them to play. Now what we do is very important.
I'm going to correct the puppy in a fair and clear way which will look something like this:
What happens is, the puppy wants to be social and is trying to find value away from me. I want to teach them that everything they could ever want comes from me and that correction is just a boundary and saying "No, you can't do that" Did my fear go up? Sure, that's okay. My trust and understanding took a hit but my respect and value are way up now and the value the dog sees in the other person has gone way down. I'm okay with the fear and lowered trust and understanding right now because this is only the learning phase. It's not permanent. As time goes on, we engineer more of these situations. Teaching a dog to think.
Teaching a dog what we want.
Giving them opportunities to make a choice and either correcting for the wrong one or rewarding for the right one.
With more and more of these interactions, by being consistent, clear and fair with my rewards, communication, boundaries and corrections, it starts to look like this:
We can bring the distraction closer since we have built up our respect and value and brought our trust and understanding back up as well. The dog still has a bit of fear. That's okay. This level of fear is what I call healthy doubt where the dog isn't sure if it should do something like run out the door or eat the garbage off the ground.
In the end, there's no reason that our graph and our relationship can't look like this:
Maximum trust, respect and understanding, finding all value in or through you with healthy doubt when it comes to dangerous behaviour with the slightest amount of pressure.
I don't let people pet my dogs or give them treats most of the time because it takes away from my value and diluted our relationship. There are times and ways to let it happen to help with socialization but I'm very particular.
You can get 100% trust, respect and understanding, you can make it so your dog finds all value in or through you without high level stims on an e-collar or having to use Wagyu beef for treats. It's was and still is a mutually beneficial relationship, it's a dance between two species before any scientific study was done or organization was founded. If you get hung up on the technicalities, you'll miss the music and lose your rhythm.
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