To greet or not to greet?
When, how and under what conditions should we allow our dogs to meet and greet each other? BIG topic, hotly debated and I’m going to try and make it as simple as possible.
To summarise, my strong opinion based on my study, research and personal experience of a dog that struggles with greeting others in a sensible manner is that we shouldn’t allow on lead greetings between dogs who do not know each other and that off lead greetings are fine between dogs who are comfortable with it and have the social skills to do it correctly. So this is a bold statement and it lives in the realms of ‘ideal world’ which we simply don’t live in so I’ll explain why I think it’s the case and what we can do to manage this for our dogs out there in the real world.
While dogs are not humans and I don’t think humanising them is overly helpful, it helps to put yourself in their paws here for a moment. How weird would it be for you to feel the need to approach and converse with every person you passed in the street? Weird? Yep really weird. You will exchange hellos and chats with people you know but not perfect strangers. So why do some dogs feel the need to do this, mine does for sure, he thinks it’s perfectly acceptable that he should meet every dog and get the opportunity to play with them - or does he? You see I don’t think he actually does, I think he just doesn’t know what else to do and in a way when I didn’t know any better I created it. After all form 8 weeks of age he was no longer being taught by other dogs, he was being taught by me.
I was like most people when they get a dog, I thought he needed to see other dogs in order to ‘keep his social skills up’. Get out there and meet some dogs, so I did. We stopped and chatted with other dog owners while my puppy got excited and eventually frustrated at the end of his lead trying desperately to interact with these dogs. Because remember up until this point he had had open access to his littermates to play with so why would he think any different? Some would want to play back, some would have their own issues and be aggressive and others would just ignore him but because I had him contained on a lead for the most part he wasn’t able to learn anything other than other dogs are exciting and being on this lead is frustrating (something I’m still dealing with the fall out of now). Because his nature is friendly and ‘all in’ we just built up even more excitement and frustration around other dogs.
Now you do get dogs that are naturally cool with meeting other dogs on leads, they can just do it, say hi and move on by, but then if you have that dog you are probably not reading this! (Those are the dogs that if you get into an on lead greeting situation you hope that you meet!)
I look back and I imagine a world where I’d put all my effort into teaching Elvis that if we meet another dog then we just walk on by calmly, or at the very most, if it’s unavoidable, we meet have a quick bum sniff and move on. Actively approaching another dog, stopping and chatting to that dogs owner and letting the dogs get all tangled up in leads was never a thing. Would he have then forgotten how to be a dog and just stood staring at them hopelessly if he had been taught to mostly pass other dogs calmly instead, I don’t think so. He might when he did encounter an off lead dog not want to charge up to them and interact because they were super exciting and he had a lot of frustration to work through around other dogs. It’s if buts and maybes but what dogs that struggle with dog to dog interactions lack is usually the ability to disengage and ‘socialising’ them with every dog they see won’t help that it will make it worse.
It’s stressful for you and it’s stressful for them and it impacts so many other things. So that’s why I’d prefer it if on lead greetings just weren’t a thing amongst dog owners, unless it’s an arranged meet between pals. When dogs meet on lead they are contained by us, mostly unable to behave how they would naturally, we break their behaviour chains for them. We also keep them static - like little pressure cookers ready to go off. A dog that’s done the nose to nose and then bum sniff part of a proper dog meet and greet then wants to do one of two things, play with the other dog or move on. If they are on lead and we don’t let them they can’t do either properly. They either try to engage in play and we stop them (frustrating and confusing) or we keep them in place staring at each other when they don’t want to be anywhere near each other (frustrating and confusing). If they are lucky they meet and decide they just want to move on and then we actually do but thats not really how human interactions work as rule. Some dogs just cope, some cope by staying still and not causing an issue for us but are still uncomfortable, some cope by barking, lunging and generally causing us problems. These dogs get labeled as dog reactive and lacking social skills - for the most part they always had them it’s just that something, usually as a result of our behaviour not theirs has broken them along the way.