A thousand shades of grey
In this post, as always, Kay Laurence stretches us one step further, one step deeper towards better understanding of the dogs in our care. I’ve been moving away from the phrase “reactive dog” for awhile now, although still catch myself occasionally reverting to the easy label as a shorthand as an alternative to what seem to be more damning and harmful ones. The professional terminology has indeed been shifting across a spectrum from “bad/disobedient dog,” to “dominant/fear/aggressive” dog, to “reactive dog,” and now to “dog behaving in a certain way in response to certain environmental conditions”—a clunky, inelegant phrase for sure, but closer to the truth of the matter. I love the equation she draws between a dog who reacts and a dog that cares. Lovely stuff as always. Well worth reading and rereading again.
Thanks for sharing this. I have always thought the label ‘reactive’ was a strange one. Reacting could describe pretty much everything we want, as well as don’t want, from our dogs. I suppose one of the biggest problems is our inability to truly interpret what’s going on in the head of a dog, as well as the limited way we describe what we see in very anthropomorphised terms.
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Thank you so much!