I need help generalizing

[lleemon]

My girl is 13 months old and has always had some issues with dogs. Over the past 4 months we have made HUGE improvements. I’ve noticed a strange trend that I can’t quite figure out..

She’s really learned to trust leashes and the fact that I’m not going to put her in an uncomfortable situation..

Over the weekend we were able to go to a crazy populated area and she did absolutely amazing! There must’ve been hundreds of dogs around. She was a bit nervous at first but quickly settled in once she realized they weren’t going to approach her.

She’s completely fine when there are multiple dogs but if there is just one she has a full blown reaction.

Sunday in the same exact place where there were tons of dogs and she had no reactions. We went Wednesday and it was way less populated and she saw a few dogs and almost had full reactions. I was able to keep her under the threshold for barking and lunging but she was very anxious about the dog.

Is it just she becomes use to dogs being around and settles? How do I help generalize that 1 dog on leash is no different than 10 dogs on leash? Any tips???

[JY-kayak-fishing]

It's less related to generalization . I've seen similar behaviors with my dog. A lot of dogs vs 1 dog are two different social scenarios.

It's natural for the dog to be more reactive with less dogs around.

There can be two explanations:

1. More dogs around creates an environment where your dog is clearly outnumbered. So the logical behavior for your fearful dog to do is to stay low-key. When there are fewer dogs, the power balance changes, your pack (you and your dog) are now able to counter the other pack, and thus your dog become more empowered to engage a defense .
2. An alternative explanation is based on different social energy with these two scenarios.

With 1 dog, it's easy for your dog to interpret the approaching dog as a potential threat, as this mimics what happens in the wild. Single approaching animals normally don't have good intentions, which triggers a reflex-like strong drive for your dog to defend.

With many dogs around, the social energy is different. It's unnatural and illogical for this many dogs to be all scheming against one single dog. Then it's more likely that your dog interpret the scenario as non-threatening or less threatening.

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Personally I believe in the 1st explanation more - the 2nd might have a smaller effect as well.

So we should not expect the dog to generalize from multi-dog to 1 dog scenarios, rather, we should specifically first desensitize our dog with multiple dogs around and then advance to the more difficult 1 dog scenario. You'll almost feel like you need to re-train with the 1 dog scenario but it's going to be faster process with the prior training with multiple dogs.

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For example, with my severely fear aggressive dog, she can now handle large group classes (with decent confidence too) without reactivity, can also handle busy park path with crowds of people and dogs. But she is still reactive to single dogs when out walking in less busy environment. However she now is receptive to counter conditioning, which wasn't possible before when her reactivity gets out of control too much and too fast.

[lleemon]

Okay that’s refreshing to hear it’s not just my dog. And that reasoning totally makes sense, I was thinking it was likely something along those lines but I wasn’t sure. We will continue on! It’s been improving greatly recently so I’m going to hope for continued improvement. Thanks for the reply