By Lauren Rubin, KPA CTP, CPDT-KA
Living in an apartment with a dog who growls, lunges, and barks at people or dogs is hard. It’s embarrassing for you, upsetting for your dog, and stressful for everyone. In a perfect world, you’d live in a home with a fully fenced yard, but life doesn’t work that way – you can’t just get up and move. But the good news is you don’t have to suffer until you can get a house.
I’ve been blessed in my life with two reactive dogs, and lived in apartments for 8 years with them. Here are my top five tips for surviving apartment life with your reactive dog.
A quick review of training terminology before this blog: your dog’s trigger is who or what they behave aggressively toward. If your dog growls and snaps at people, then people are the trigger. For dogs who are aggressive with other dogs, then dogs are the trigger. Skateboards, bicycles, cars, etc are all common triggers. Reaction/Reactivity is the response your dog offers when they see the trigger. Typical reactions are lunging toward it, growling, barking, snapping, etc.
1. Get the Right Equipment
If you have a large dog who reacts by trying to get closer to the scary dog/person, having solid equipment can literally change your life. Using a flat collar or a back-clip harness allow your dog to yank you toward their trigger. That’s the last thing you want! Try a front-clip harness or a gentle leader, both of which allow you to redirect your dog’s momentum away from the trigger so you can get out of there. Gentle leaders require training before your dog can comfortably wear them!
A quick side note – if you have any concern that your dog may bite their trigger if given the opportunity, train them to wear a basket muzzle. People generally give muzzled dogs more space, and you’ll be able to relax knowing that if the worst happens, your dog can’t bite someone.
2. Avoid the Wrong Equipment
Prong collars, choke chains, and shock collars exacerbate reactivity. The vast majority of dogs react out of fear (think “the best defense is a good offense”). Aversives (such as prong, choke, and shock collars) cause pain – this is why they work. Your dog wants to avoid whatever caused the pain to prevent it from happening in the future. When you were a kid, how many times did you put your hand on a hot stove top before you learned it was painful? Probably only one or two!
Imagine if you saw something you were afraid of. For me, it’s spiders. If I see a spider in the house, I holler for my husband to come save me. I generally dance around frantically until he removes the monster outside so I can feel safe again. Now, imagine if I saw the spider and yelled for my husband, and instead of helping me, he walked into the room and slapped me, and yelled at me to knock it off. Eventually, I might learn not to yell for his help – but I’m not less afraid of the spider. Instead, I’m now afraid of the spider and my husband. Not good.
Applied to dogs, aversives are very likely to increase fear in your dog. If you hurt your dog to stop the reaction, you’re actually reinforcing your dog’s fear that something is wrong. In some dogs, this can result in an increase in reactivity – essentially, your dog now barks and growls harder at the trigger. Barking, growling and lunging are distance-increasing behaviors, meaning what your dog wants is for the trigger to get the hint and leave them alone. If you got shocked every time someone approached you, wouldn’t you start yelling at passerby to give you space? Your dog pairs the shock or collar correction with the approaching trigger, and now things “oh crap, whenever I see a dog, I get hurt – better tell Rover over there to stay the heck away!”
Alternatively, some dogs will learn not to try barking or lunging. However, that root fear is still there…you just buried the warning signs. Now, your dog won’t react visibly. At first this seems ideal—until you realize that by removing the warning signs, your dog now only has one option. Biting. They can’t ask the scary thing to go away, but they still need to defend themselves, and their teeth are their best weapons. Yikes!
3. Make a Pre-Walk Game Plan
In a perfect world, you wouldn’t take your dog out if there was a chance they’d see their trigger. Unfortunately, you can’t avoid walking your dog in an apartment because not only do they need exercise, they have to potty somehow! This is where your game plan saves the day.
Once you’ve lived in a neighborhood for a couple weeks, you know the lay of the land – where the barky dogs live, which apartment has the dog that runs off it’s back porch at you, what time of day your dog’s archnemesis is out walking. Keep these things in mind as you make your walking game plan.
Scope out hidey-holes (I’ve hidden between buildings, behind cars, in bushes), turning off points, or corners and use them to your advantage. If you know the dog in Apartment 331M always lunges at their window, or the little kid in 121B will run out to grab your dog, avoid those areas. Your dog doesn’t care if you walk in a straight line or repeat parts of the walk, so take strange turns and zig zag to avoid your known problem areas.
4. Get Out at Weird Times
Walk at odd hours when your neighbors are sleeping or at work. In the apartments I lived in, this generally meant walking before 7am (ugh), taking my lunch late (1pm usually was safe), and walking my dog right after work (~530pm) and again right before bed (~9pm). By walking my dog before or after everyone else, we avoided a lot of potentially nasty encounters. It’s inconvenient (I used to hate waking up early!), but it’s much better than the alternatives!
5. Make Your Apartment a Safe Space
Both of my dogs also reacted to the sounds of their triggers outside. If another dog barked, children were playing loudly nearby, or the neighbors talked near the door, one or both of my dogs would start barking. You can help reduce these reactions by creating a bubble in your apartment.
Cover the windows to reduce visual triggers can help. If you don’t want to sacrifice daylight, try window vinyl stickers!
You can also reduce the sound of the outside by playing classical music or investing in a sound machine for white noise. You can get an inexpensive one on Amazon that does the trick.
I hope you find these tips helpful!