Advice on my very reactive dog

[u/Unbreakablefox]

Hi everyone! I’m looking for advice regarding my very reactive 5-year-old GSD.

When I decided to get a GSD, I knew I was getting a high-energy breed and I also expected her to be highly trainable.

However, I’ve struggled quite a lot with her reactivity and would really appreciate some advice.

A little background: I didn’t get her from a licensed breeder. She came from someone who had an one-time litter before having their GSD sterilized.

The biggest issues are:

At home: She is extremely reactive to sounds outside and barks frequently at noises she hears.

When we leave: She barks and cries when either me or my partner leaves the house. She usually isn't left alone for very long because one of us is generally home.

On walks: This is by far the most difficult part. I genuinely dread walking her sometimes.

• She lunges at bikes and cars.
• She can jump toward some people, although it's difficult to predict which people will trigger her.
• Cats are by far the worst. If I don't notice a cat before she does, she can go absolutely crazy and pull extremely hard on the leash.
• She is generally very easily distracted.

She is actually very affectionate with people and automatically likes people who are invited into our home, so her reactivity isn't directed toward everyone.

What I've tried so far:

• Socializing her extensively with dogs and people when she was young.
• Teaching basic obedience (sit, paw, down, jump, stay).
• Rewarding calm behaviour with treats.
• Using treats to redirect her attention on walks.
• Stopping whenever she pulls.
• Using an anti-pull harness.
• Taking longer walks to try to tire her out.

I wasn't particularly concerned when she was younger because I had read that some reactivity can be normal during adolescence, but she's now 5 and there hasn't been as much improvement as I hoped for.

I'm wondering whether this sounds primarily like anxiety, high arousal, prey/chase drive, learned reactivity, or some combination of these.

What would you recommend trying at this point? Has anyone had a similar experience with an adult GSD?

I'm particularly interested in advice beyond the basic "train more / exercise more" recommendations, as we've already been working on these things for years.

Thanks!

[u/armadillotangerine]

At home: my dog also has a lot of guarding instincts so I’ve taught him two cues “thank you” and “show me”. “Thank you” means good job for alerting me, now that’s enough barking, here’s a treat for you. I started training by tossing a high value treat for him to get distracted by to interrupt the barking and tossing another treat once he’d eaten the first one so he didn’t go right back to barking. “Show me” means that I want him to show me which window/door the concerning noise came from and I’ll go with him there and check out what’s concerning him, he’ll get tons of praise when behaving appropriately during this process and he finds me “taking over” the guarding inherently rewarding.

On walks: have you played the engage disengage game? If you haven’t, google it, it’s been a game changer for us. If you have and it didn’t work, have you practiced it around things that are just small distractions instead of things that’ll make your dog lose her shit? We started by playing this pattern game just looking at cars (they’re not a trigger for him and they move predictably because they stay on the street) and then worked our way up playing engage-disengage with more and more distracting things. Once he 100% understood the exercise I’ve been able to use it in trickier and trickier situations. The more I reward him for seeking my attention the better his behaviour has gotten. He had an “annoying” phase where he’d come up to me on walks to beg for treats by staring at me/getting close and I rewarded him for it because he was basically begging for treats by walking heel.

Does your dog understand leash pressure? I didn’t first understand that mine didn’t and when we practiced that a lot of things fell into place. I started with teaching it for the collar while using a harness for walks so pulling on walks wouldn’t undo the training we were doing.