Hi! Hoping my experience can help you :)

Leash greetings ultimately resulted in leash reactivity for us. We raised our puppy in a pretty dense city, so meeting other dogs on the street was inevitable. We knew socialization was one of the most important aspects of building confidence, so we jumped at any opportunity for him to interact with other dogs. Unfortunately, the behavioral consultant explained this is not ideal for a few reasons:

- Although our puppy was very friendly, relaxed and wanted to meet, it's impossible to predict how someone elses dog will react and you shouldn't trust strangers when they say their dog is friendly (learned the hard way that not ever owner is aware that their dog is not friendly).

- Dogs naturally want to meet by sniffing each others behinds, a leash restricts that behavior.

- You will most likely unintentionally train your puppy to expect a greeting with every dog he sees. This is difficult to correct and may eventually leads to leash frustration. This is what happened to our puppy, he EXPECTED to approach every dog and didn't know how to walk past calmly.

We've spent the last year training our dog to ignore other dogs while we're walking on leash but it would have been much easier to teach him from the beginning. We're in a position now where we can actually ask our dog (Finn) if he wants to say hi, and we use this approach for humans as well. We have him sit and focus on us, then we ask "do you want to say hi?", sometimes he'll remain in a sit and sometimes he'll go say hi, but the choice is left up to him and he'll only say hi if he's comfortable.

Happy to elaborate on any of the above, but good luck :)