Twice in a row now I’ve had to pull my dog in another direction due to people walking their dogs without a leash. Why tf do you feel so confident in your damn dog to not react? In fact I don’t fucking care. It’s a fucking law and it’s inconsiderate of other individuals and their pets. Seriously fuck you. Nobody cares how well trained your dog is or whatever the fuck you’re doing to stroke your damn ego.
Took my dog for a walk once to the local field and this teen with a puppy off leash just allowed her dog to come right up to mine. My dog flipped out. The teen said, “It’s okay, my dog is friendly!” I spat back, “My dog isn’t!” while she flipped out at the end of her leash. Thankfully she has never graduated out of her gentle leader so I always have control, but seriously. My (rescue) dog has leash aggression and anxiety but she still deserves to go on walks in peace.
We had a dog like that. He had plenty of socialization, but he just hated other dogs that weren’t our second dog. But he was cute so people always crossed the street to come say hi, even though I crossed the street to get away from them. I finally started yelling out “HE BITES!” and that solved the problem. He didn’t really bite, but he would growl and nip at other dogs, and I hated putting him through that.
“The dog doesn’t bite, but I am mean as hell.”
We have a retired working shepherd mix who has extreme leash aggression. We can’t even go for walks alone because in this area it takes two people constantly looking in every direction to spot and call incoming dogs and we still have an incident about once a week of some total dumbass actively telling us their dog is friendly as we are telling them to stay away and our dog freaking the fuck out. (Tourist neighborhood so it’s always someone new) So going for walks is a whole family activity.
As is common with leash aggression, he’s also totally fine with other dogs at dog parks or hiking in off leash areas. And thankfully there we can use his signals to tell him not to herd, after all he’s an incredibly well trained dog in the context of taking directional commands from across giant spaces.
Where we used to live we had neighbors who knew about him and would respect his needs for distance on walks but still let him play at the park with their dogs. Unfortunately that only came to be because of bad interactions and lots of explanation and apologies.
People just don’t understand dog anxiety and ptsd at all. He needs 5-10 miles of daily activity and we can’t always get him out to a huge open area and have to walk him on leash
Working dogs are no joke. We have a Doberman puppy, and I have to take him for hikes every day, plus he needs lots of self-directed playtime, training, some sort of job like nose work, interactive toys and games, and a bunch of time to chew. He’s an amazing dog when he gets all of those things, but if life gets in the way and we miss something on a given day, he’s like “I’ma fuck something up real good!”, and we can see the boredom kick into destructive searching.
As a working-line Shepherd owner, people just don’t understand that working dogs are on a whole other level.