Does my dog need friends?

While dogs can be a very social animals, a dog who isn't well socialised or educated in appropriate greetings can cause quite an issue for themselves or others around them.

Since lockdown there's been a huge issue around reactive dogs, or dogs with behaviour issues. Majority of this stems down to the fact the dogs were not able to appropriately socialise. Other factors also include a lot of these dogs are not well bred, unfortunately due to the demand of dogs during lockdown backyard breeding was rife. As we all know dogs with bad genetics can lead to a whole array of behavioural issues.

So while it is great that people have social dogs, if they're not able to understand other dogs body language and go all guns blazing then it can cause a lot of arguments between dogs. The other reality is also that a lot of the dogs owners also are unable to recognise inappropriate behaviour, this can be down to missing the opportunity to attend training classes because of Covid.

I believe that dogs can have friends, but don't need to socialise with every single one they see. A dog who greets every dog they pass is also likely to experience barrier frustration or frustration reactivity when they aren't able to greet the occasional dog. For those who don't genuinely know the difference it may still seem to them that their dog is being aggressive because they are barking and lunging at the end of the lead.

I have a reactive dog, who has his friends. But is not able to greet new dogs on every walk. If I am going to introduce a new dog to Woody it has to be very structured and controlled, to ensure there is no excessive tension and that the greeting is guaranteed to go well. Once he has his friends he plays to his hearts content.

The thing is that sometimes we forget, is that as humans we aren't friends with everyone. At best we are civil to strangers, but actually a lot of the time we are very cautious of those we don't know. So why as a general consensus do we expect our dogs to be okay with every dog we pass? You wouldn't expect a child to greet everyone they pass, and quite frankly it could be very dangerous.

Dogs can have friends, but they don't need to be everyone's friend.