u/Helpful_Sun2872

I booked a rover sitter to board my dog in her home for 1 week. She’s been on rover for 10 yrs, has all 5-star reviews (84 total), 26 repeat clients, 3 dogs of her own, and a fenced yard so she doesn’t walk client dogs (my dog is leash-reactive so I really wanted a setup like this, and it was hard to find). I did some social media “stalking” and found she is pretty involved in the local dog community and it looks like she’s fostered dogs in the past, and she just overall seems like a huge dog lover and a “normal person” lol.

This is my first time booking with Rover. She accepted the booking after asking just a couple questions (I also had filled out my dog’s profile with a good amt of detail). It’s a full week of holiday rate (Labor day) so I figure that’s probably why she wanted to book it fast.

I didn’t even really know M&Gs were a thing until after I booked and started reading this sub. Is it a red flag that she didn’t want to do one before booking?

How do you all feel about using +P to directly suppress reactivity? Does it damage relationship?

I’ve been watching a lot of Miles Hamilton YouTube videos and he uses +P (prong pops or e collar stim) to directly suppress reactivity. Some examples he shows look very harsh, with repeated prong pops and yelling at the dog. He says the dog should look shut down after, so that you effectively suppress the reactive behavior in the future. It’s hard to believe this wouldn’t damage relationship, but he claims it does not, if performed correctly.

I also listen to tons of Michael Ellis and he advises against using +P to directly suppress reactivity. He recommends using +P in behavior mod only to correct the dog for not performing a known obedience behavior.

So I’ve been working hard on emergency u turns with my reactive dog, with a “let’s go” command. I’ve been training it with a combo of leash pressure (verbal command the leash pressure) and treats. We do lots of practice with zero distractions around. He’s great at it with low level distractions, eg if a trigger is far away, but if he actually gets fixated on something, the leash pressure just ramps him up more.

Conversely, I’ve found it’s amazingly effective to just turn into his body while holding a treat up to his nose, basically gently physically pushing his head away from whatever he’s staring at. So I’ve kind of come to hate the emergency u turn for situations where he’s actually near his threshold. Anyone find the same thing with their dog? Is this common? Am I using it wrong, or just trying to use it in situations where my dog isn’t ready yet? Should I just stick to what works for now?

How common/how bad is it for you Rover sitters to deal with a leash-reactive dog?

I’m looking to get a sitter for my dog, likely for him to stay in their home. My dog is pretty perfect except for his leash reactivity. He’s not dangerous/a bite risk, he just gets a little overwhelmed outdoors and will bark at dogs/people/scooters etc. He generally has pretty good leash manners otherwise.

He is friendly and warms up to people quickly once he meets them. He’s also quite calm, crate trained, and has no separation anxiety or resource guarding issues. He’s pretty much happy to sleep in his crate for 8+ hrs a day if he needs to.

I kind of feel bad that a sitter would have to deal with his barking on leash, so I guess I’m just wondering how common it is, and how annoying it is as a sitter to deal with.

Has anyone used Carolina Ranch for dog boarding? I’m going to be out of town for 1 week in September and have my dog booked at Carolina Ranch as it came highly recommended on Reddit and has good reviews.

It’ll be my first time leaving since adopting him and I’m soooo sad and anxious thinking about it. I’ve read all the reviews but was hoping to find others who have experience with Carolina Ranch and can maybe quell some of my anxieties.

I have a 62 lb dog and drive a Honda Civic so I can’t put a crate in it.

I’ve been using the Ruffwear car harness that you loop the seatbelt through, but he moves around too much and easily gets himself tangled up in the seatbelt. I just went to take him out of the car and the seatbelt had gotten stuck on his leg and he was basically pinned down to the seat.

The best thing would be a short bungee leash so that I can attach that to the seatbelt and then to his harness, but all the ones I can find are not actually crashed tested, even though they’re advertised for car restraint.

I’ve been watching and following dog trainers for years and I’m not sure how I’m just now getting into Michael Ellis. I’ve never been this obsessed with any other trainer. Basically every sentence he says blows my mind lol. I got his $70/mo membership and I’m learning so much.

Does anyone else relate, and also has anyone found any other trainers that even come close? I’ve watched so many YouTube dog trainers and find that they usually just say a lot of nothing, or don’t bother explaining the theory behind their techniques.

I adopted a dog almost 3 weeks ago who is leash reactive to dogs and people. Thankfully I have experience with reactive dogs so we’ve been working hard on staying under threshold, general leash manners and engagement, engage-disengage etc. We live in the city so I drive him to a quiet nearby park for all our walks. He can be reactive in the car as well, but I can usually avoid a reaction if I toss a treat into the back when we see a trigger.

We just had a great walk, very chill, saw 3 groups of people walking, 1 with a dog. He stayed in a blue/yellow zone and we got in some great counter conditioning and engage-disengage work. Also had lots of chill sniffy time with no triggers in sight. Felt like one of our better walks.

On the car ride home, he started just randomly barking at nothing, which he’s never done before. He wasn’t super agitated/aroused, but was sort of just randomly barking in one offs, as if he saw a trigger but I was 100% sure there was nothing there. Towards the end of the ride he started barking in a way that more closely resembles his barks during a full blown reaction (basically the barks started coming in quicker succession - more of a “back off right now” bark than an alert bark). Still no triggers in sight.

Usually he is less reactive on the car ride home vs the ride there, since he’s able to expend some mental energy on the walk itself. My theory as to why this happened was maybe he was just overtired? We did some training indoors before the walk as well so he was using his brain for quite a while.

Just wanted to know if anyone has experienced anything like this. It definitely caught me off guard and made me worried that I pushed him too far, even though the walk we had was so great!

I’ve heard a lot of people say that one of the keys with leash/fear-reactive dogs is that they need to trust that you will handle situations and that they don’t need to take on that role themselves. I see people say that working on that with their dog helped reduce their reactivity. I never have any clue what people actually mean by that. How do you get your dog to trust you in that way? What does that actually look like?

I adopted a dog about 2 weeks ago and he can be pretty reactive outside to both people and dogs (joggers are the worst). After seeing the way he reacted to people outside on leash, I was sooo anxious to bring him in for his first vet visit… but he was completely 100% fine. No reactions and warmed up quickly to the 3 vet staff he met.

Yesterday we went to our first nosework class and we were the first ones inside, and I was really anxious that he’d react when more people walked in, but again, he was completely fine. Zero reaction. He didn’t even notice when the other dog walked in bc he was licking his peanut butter lick mat. When he finally noticed the other dog, he fixated for a couple seconds before I was able to easily disengage him by pulling his lick mat back out. He was on leash both at the vet and at the nosework class so it’s not a leash-specific thing. Anyone have a dog with similar behavior? I can’t really figure it out.

Bc same ☺️🙃