The Beginning.

After a suggestion from somebody on a dog forum I am a member of, I've decided to start a blog to keep track of Tia's progress with her on lead reactivity towards other dogs.

So, I suppose I'll start from the beginning. Tia is my first dog, she's a Staffordshire Bull Terrier and she's 18 months old. She loves most things, mainly food, playing and cuddles. Something she doesn't love quite so much, is other dogs.
Unfortunately, the first two times she ever went outside on the ground after her vaccinations, as opposed to being carried, she was approached by two different rude, boisterous dogs who towered over her and utterly terrified her. This was not a good start. However after meeting lots of other friendly and under control dogs, her confidence gradually began to grow. She was (and still is) happy to play off lead with most other dogs and even made friends with a couple of larger dogs. This wasn't easy though. Even throughout the time while her confidence was growing, she was jumped on and lunged at by several out of control dogs, each time setting her back a little in her progress.

We were nearly at a point where she was comfortable around pretty much any dog, large or small, familiar or a stranger, and then she was chased by a Husky. I don't believe the dog wanted to hurt her, but as most people know (although apparently not the owner of this dog) Huskies and other similar breeds have a high prey drive and also do not respond as well to recall training as other breeds, so are usually kept on lead.
Her experience with the Husky set her back a lot, she was clearly nervous around any large dog after this, but not reactive yet, and for a while I had to keep her on lead or a longline at all times because she'd run away if a dog that was larger than her approached her. Unfortunately we'd also recently moved house and I didn't know anybody in the new area with a larger dog for her to build her confidence back up with.
Not long after the Husky Incident, she was jumped on by a Labrador when she was on the longline. What I think happened was, she objected to the Labrador jumping on her by growling, the Labrador objected to her objection and then a fight broke out. It wasn't a serious fight and neither dog suffered any physical damage but I have been dealing with the psychological damage every day since then.

She now barks at most other dogs she sees while she's on lead, no matter what size they are, although she is better with smaller ones. Off lead, she's still fine and happy to play as long as the dog isn't too big but on the lead, she just wants them to go away and the only way she can express this is to lunge and bark and growl. Not a good look for a Staffy, which let's face it, do not have the best reputation among the general public, who can't tell that she's doing it because she's scared and not because she wants to eat Fido on the other side of the road.

So, after that rather lengthy explanation, I'm intending to use this blog to record our progress and the work we're doing, but also to make note of things that could be important towards fixing the problem, like where we were when she reacted e.g. field, pavement, woods, what type of dog it was, the distance at which she didn't react and other things like that. Thankyou for reading!