Mistake #2: The Obedience Trap
Last post, I talked about the danger of relying only on counter-conditioning, and the importance of showing a reactive dog that they can trust you to handle the things that scare them. This post is about a mistake that often gets built on top of that gap. It’s one that I admittedly fell into early in my career, and one that I got to address head-on not long ago on a panel with a reward-based trainer.
The moderator opened the discussion with an assumption: since I am generally considered a balanced trainer, my approach to reactivity must lean first and foremost on obedience. Teach the dog to heel, sit…and enforce it. If the dog is complying, the thinking goes, it can’t also be lunging and barking at the other dog across the street.
I had to stop him right there. Not only is that not my approach, I actively coach trainers away from it.
What This Approach Misses
On its own, using obedience to suppress reactivity does nothing to address the reason the reactivity exists in the first place. It skips right past the underlying insecurity I talked about in the last post and goes straight to managing the symptom. It doesn’t build the kind of connection and trust that changes how a dog feels. It just changes what the dog is allowed to do about how it feels.
That alone should give us pause.
And to be clear, this mistake doesn’t only show up in the heavy-handed way I’m about to describe. I see a softer version of it regularly, including from trainers who are purely reward-based. Instead of enforcing a position, the strategy is distraction: get the dog locked onto a “look at me” cue, or engaged in some other game with the handler, so there’s no mental bandwidth left to fixate on the trigger and escalate.
This version is nowhere near as risky as what I describe in the coming paragraphs. But it still misses the mark. It’s a management strategy, not a rehabilitation strategy.
Not only does distraction only work when you can actually pull it off, but it’s ultimately a way of avoiding the problem rather than eliminating it. If the goal is real, lasting rehabilitation, distraction can’t be the plan. We don’t want to prevent the dog from noticing the trigger. We want the dog to notice it, and either learn to feel better about it or learn to handle the unpleasant feelings in a healthier way when they come up.
But there’s a more serious version of this same mistake, one that’s just as unlikely to create lasting change, and risks making the problem worse.
The Bomb-Proof Problem
Early in my career, I’d hear trainers talk about teaching a “bomb proof” heel or sit. The kind of position so rock solid that, in theory, a dog wouldn’t break it even if a literal bomb went off next to them.
I understand the appeal. That level of control is seductive. But the longer I’ve done this work, the more that idea unsettles me. Because if a bomb actually went off near my dog, the last thing I’d want is for them to hold position. I’d want them as far away as possible.
That reaction points to something important. Any time we’re looking at a behavior problem, one of the first questions we need to ask is what function that behavior serves for the dog. With reactivity rooted in insecurity, the function of all that barking and lunging is to create or maintain distance from whatever’s triggering it.
This is also why so many dogs who are reactive on leash are perfectly fine off leash. The leash is what’s removing their ability to do the one thing that behavior is designed to accomplish: get away. On top of that, most dogs learn through repetition that once they’re clipped to a leash, they don’t get a say in where they go. Most owners aren’t trained to notice the early, subtle signs that their dog is uncomfortable, so the dog learns that quiet communication doesn’t work. The only thing that gets a response is yelling.
That knowledge is what defines our training plan. We’re not just teaching the dog a healthier, more appropriate way to ask for space. We’re teaching the human on the other end of the leash how to notice that ask and respond to it before the dog feels like it has to escalate.
A bomb-proof heel or sit does the opposite of both. It restricts the dog’s movement and shuts down its ability to communicate at the exact moment it needs both the most. You might see what looks like early improvement, as the dog gets hesitant to break position for fear of a “correction.” But what you’re actually building is a dog caught between two pressures it can’t escape: the trigger closing in on one side, and its handler on the other. That is a ticking time bomb, to borrow the metaphor.
Obedience With Exception
Over a decade ago, when I put out my first DVD with Leerburg, I introduced a concept I called obedience with exception. If I’ve taught a dog that “place” or “down” means hold that position until released, I also build in an exception: the dog is allowed to break position if they’re moving away from a perceived threat or conflict. They can’t break position just because they feel like it, and they can’t break position to move toward the conflict. But moving away is always on the table.
Differential reinforcement isn’t my core strategy, but that doesn’t mean it’s objectively the wrong tool. However, if we are going to use incompatible behavior, the cue or command we choose matters. Whatever we are reinforcing in place of the reactive display ideally should serve the same function as that display. If the function is distance, the replacement behavior needs to get the dog distance too, not take that option away.
Seen through that lens, obedience isn’t off the table. A recall can be a great tool here, as long as you’re recalling the dog away from the trigger. You’re reinforcing a healthier version of exactly what the dog was already trying to do. Heel can work the same way, moving away from the trigger, though I’d encourage a loose, functional definition of heel rather than a rigid position glued to your left hip.
The Real Goal: Giving the Dog a Voice
Here’s what I think gets missed most often, even by trainers who are already doing some version of this well. The goal isn’t a dog that’s responsive to your cues in the presence of a trigger. That’s a stepping stone, not the destination.
The actual goal is a dog that cues you.
In the early stages, that might look like using a recall to get the dog moving away from something that’s bothering them. But as training progresses, you start to see the dog anticipate. They begin turning away on their own, before you’ve said a word, and your job shifts to encouraging them and following their lead. You’re showing the dog something they didn’t know was possible: that their handler has learned new tricks, and that in certain moments, they get a vote in where this walk goes.
That’s the piece that actually undoes the earlier learning, the lesson so many dogs picked up long before their owner called you for help: that once the leash goes on, they don’t have a say. Handing that agency back is where the real change happens. It’s how you build a dog that can make good decisions on their own, rather than one that only holds together because you’re managing every second of the walk.
That’s mistake number two. Next post, we’ll get into mistake #3.
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