One Bad Encounter Doesn’t Undo All the Hard Work

I saw a post on Facebook recently from somebody who had had a pretty miserable experience while walking their dog in a local park.

Their dog was described as anxious and reactive, and they had clearly been putting quite a lot of work into helping them become more confident. Then, during one walk, they were approached by several off-lead dogs whose owners apparently had very little control over them. One of the dogs gave chase, everybody became understandably stressed, and what should have been an ordinary walk turned into something considerably more dramatic.

There are plenty of things we could say about dogs being allowed off lead without reliable recall, and I’ve talked about managing those situations elsewhere. But one sentence in the post stood out to me more than anything else.

The owner felt that all the work they had done building their dog's confidence had been undone in that one incident.

I understand why it might feel that way.

You spend weeks or months helping a nervous dog become more comfortable around other dogs. You carefully manage distances. You work on engagement. You start seeing them make better decisions. Perhaps they can finally walk through the park without scanning constantly for trouble, or pass another dog without barking, lunging or trying to escape.

Then four loose dogs come charging over and suddenly it feels as though somebody has kicked the legs out from underneath the whole thing.

But has all that work really disappeared?

Probably not.

And, importantly, deciding that it has may actually make what happens next more difficult than it needs to be.

First, don't decide what the incident means while you're still in it

A frightening encounter produces an emotional response in humans as well as dogs, and I think that is worth keeping in mind before we start trying to work out what the incident has “done” to the dog.

Immediately afterwards, your dog may be highly aroused. They may be scanning, pulling, struggling to take food, wanting to leave, or reacting to things they would normally ignore. At the same time, you may be angry, embarrassed, shaky, or replaying the whole thing in your head while mentally writing the speech you would quite like to deliver to the owner of the other dogs.

Neither of you is necessarily in a particularly useful state to make long-term conclusions.

Once the immediate problem is over and everyone is physically okay, I would usually be much more interested in simply creating some space and allowing things to settle than in testing the dog to see whether they are “still okay”. There is no need to immediately walk past another dog to prove that nothing has changed, but equally there is no automatic need to rush straight home as though the park has become radioactive.

Walk somewhere quieter if that is available. Let the dog sniff. Let them move. See whether they begin to reconnect with you and whether their behaviour starts to return towards something more familiar. If it does, great. If it takes longer, that is useful information as well.

What I would avoid is conducting a behavioural post-mortem while you are both still full of adrenaline. The incident happened. It was unpleasant. Give it a little time before deciding what it means.

The following day is where things get more interesting

This, for me, is the point where the owner’s reaction can start to become almost as important as the dog’s.

Let’s imagine that, before the incident, you had been working on neutrality around other dogs. Perhaps your dog could comfortably notice another dog at twenty metres, acknowledge it, then disengage and reconnect with you. Maybe that took months to achieve, but it was becoming fairly reliable.

The next day, I would want to know what that same exercise looks like now.

Not because we are setting up a test, and certainly not because the dog needs to prove anything, but because their actual behaviour will tell us much more than our worry will.

They might be absolutely fine at twenty metres. If so, that is important. Yesterday may have been horrible, but the dog may already have moved on from it considerably more quickly than you have. Or perhaps twenty metres is now a little too close, but thirty is perfectly manageable. That tells us something too. We may have a dog who is temporarily more sensitive, and we can simply adjust the difficulty for a while.

If the reaction is much stronger and the dog is struggling at distances that would previously have been easy, then we take that seriously as well. But even then, I would be wary of declaring that we are “back to square one”.

Training rarely works in such neat, binary terms.

Dogs regress sometimes. Thresholds move around. Confidence can wobble after a difficult experience. A dog can have a bad week without having somehow forgotten the previous six months. We see the same thing in other areas of training all the time. A recall that was excellent yesterday may be poor today because the environment is harder. A dog that can hold a sit in the kitchen may suddenly struggle when there are children playing football ten metres away. We don't assume the sit has vanished; we recognise that the conditions have changed.

A difficult encounter with another dog is no different in principle. It may alter what the dog can cope with for a while, but that is very different from saying that everything learned before the incident has disappeared.

Regression is not the same thing as erasure.

Keep doing the work that was helping

If you take nothing else away from this piece, remember this:

If you were doing useful work with your dog before the incident, don't suddenly stop doing it afterwards. Yes, you may need to make it easier, quieter, shorter or more predictable for a while, but broadly speaking the work you were doing is still the work your dog needs.

If you were practising engagement, keep practising engagement. If you were working on neutrality around dogs, continue with that. If you were building confidence in busier environments, you might temporarily dial the environment down a little, but I would still want to keep that process moving.

The temptation after a bad experience is often to become much more protective. Again, that is understandable. You don't want a repeat performance, so perhaps you avoid other dogs altogether for a few days, then a few more days, and suddenly a week has become three weeks. Meanwhile the thing that was previously helping the dog become more comfortable has quietly disappeared from their life.

That doesn't mean I am suggesting throwing them straight back into the deep end. Far from it. If the Sunday morning park is full of dogs racing around and you are still feeling tense about what happened, perhaps Tuesday afternoon is a more sensible first return. If you normally work at twenty metres, perhaps start at thirty. Give yourself and the dog a chance to succeed.

What matters is that the training continues.

This is also where all the relatively unexciting foundation work starts to become useful. If your dog understands your markers, if they have a history of checking in with you, if they know how to disengage from something in the environment, if they understand that moving with you or responding to you is worthwhile, then none of those things suddenly disappear because another dog behaved badly yesterday.

In fact, this is when you get to use them.

The work you did before the incident isn't the work that has been undone. It's the work that's going to help you through what comes next.

And there is another side to this that I think is easily overlooked. Continuing to train may be every bit as useful for the human as it is for the dog.

You see another dog at a sensible distance and your dog looks at it, then checks back in with you. You walk a familiar route and nothing particularly exciting happens. You run through an exercise the dog knows well and they respond pretty much as they always have.

Those moments give you evidence that you are still working with the same dog.

That matters, because after an upsetting incident the owner can easily start seeing everything through the lens of what happened. A perfectly normal glance towards another dog suddenly looks like the beginning of a reaction. A slightly slower response becomes evidence that confidence has collapsed. Every small behaviour gets interpreted against the memory of the bad encounter.

Sometimes the human needs a few ordinary, successful repetitions just as much as the dog does.

Be careful what you take back into the park

Dogs absolutely learn from bad experiences. They can form negative associations with places, situations and other dogs, and I would not want to pretend otherwise.

But humans have a particular talent that dogs are rather less accomplished at: we can spend days rehearsing something that is no longer happening.

We replay it in the car on the way home. We think about it that evening. We tell somebody about it the next morning. We imagine what we should have done differently, what might happen next time, and what we are going to do if we see those dogs again.

Then, three days later, we go back to the same place carrying the whole incident with us.

The lead is perhaps a little shorter than usual. Our arm is tighter. We start scanning before the dog does. We spot another dog in the distance and change direction earlier than we normally would. Maybe we start talking more, reassuring more, fussing more, trying to communicate that everything is fine while our entire body is communicating that we are expecting something to go wrong.

Dogs notice that.

This is where things can become a little circular. The owner thinks they are responding to the dog's anxiety, while the dog may, at least partly, be responding to the owner's tension. Nobody is doing anything deliberately wrong, but the memory of the incident starts influencing the next walk before anything has actually happened.

This is why I think the phrase “dogs live in the moment” needs a little qualification. Dogs certainly remember things and learn from experience, but they do not usually spend Thursday evening worrying about something that might happen next Tuesday. Humans do that very well.

That capacity for anticipation is useful in plenty of areas of life, but around a nervous or reactive dog it can sometimes become part of the problem.

Going back

At some point, assuming there is no genuine safety reason not to, I would generally want to return to the environment where the incident happened.

Not necessarily straight away, and certainly not because we need to demonstrate that we are brave or prove some sort of point. But I would be wary of permanently abandoning a park, route or environment because one unpleasant thing happened there.

If you go back, make it achievable.

Perhaps you choose a quieter time. Perhaps you walk around the edge rather than straight through the middle. Perhaps you give yourself more distance from other dogs than you normally would. There is nothing wrong with making the first visit back a relatively easy one.

Then watch the dog in front of you rather than the dog you are worried they might have become.

Are they sniffing normally? Can they engage with you? Can they respond to familiar cues? Do they notice another dog and then move on? Are they a little more vigilant than usual but still able to recover?

Those details tell us far more than a broad label such as “traumatised” or “back to square one”.

If the dog is showing us that they are struggling, we respond to that and make the task easier. If they are showing us that they are coping perfectly well, then we have to be prepared to accept that as well.

Oddly enough, that can sometimes be the harder part.

An owner who has spent several days worrying that their dog has been set back can become so focused on finding evidence of damage that they miss the evidence that the dog is actually doing okay.

One bad afternoon should not get to outweigh six good months

There is something quite powerful hidden inside the statement that “all our hard work has been undone”.

It gives the incident enormous importance.

One person who failed to control their dogs suddenly has the ability to erase months of training, hundreds of successful interactions and all of the progress you and your dog have made together.

I don't think that is a particularly useful way to look at it.

That is not to minimise what happened. Your dog may genuinely have been frightened. You may have been frightened too. And if somebody allows dogs with poor recall to rush into another dog's space, that is poor management regardless of how friendly those dogs supposedly are.

But that unpleasant experience sits alongside all the other experiences your dog has had. It does not automatically replace them.

And, crucially, you still get to influence what happens next.

You couldn't necessarily stop those dogs crossing the park. You couldn't control somebody else's recall training. You may not have been able to prevent the chase once it started.

But you have considerably more control over tomorrow.

You can continue the training. You can create manageable situations. You can give the dog useful information. You can help them practise the behaviours that were already becoming familiar. You can make things easier for a while without making the world disappear completely.

Perhaps most importantly, you can resist deciding in advance that your dog has been permanently changed.

Progress was never dependent on every walk going perfectly.

If it were, none of us would get very far.

Sometimes there really is a bigger problem

There is an important distinction to make here.

I am talking about unpleasant encounters, not serious attacks. If your dog has been injured, then veterinary care obviously comes first. Similarly, if you see a significant and sustained behavioural change afterwards — a dog who suddenly refuses to leave the house, cannot settle, stops eating, becomes extremely fearful outside, or develops reactions far beyond anything you were dealing with before — then that deserves proper attention.

Some experiences can have a substantial behavioural impact, and there is no value in pretending otherwise.

But there is equally little value in assuming that every difficult encounter must have caused one.

Watch the dog. Look at the behaviour over several days and several walks. See what is actually changing before deciding what the story is.

The work is still there

Your dog may be a little worse on the next walk. They may bark at a dog they would normally ignore. They may need more distance for a few days, or perhaps a couple of weeks. You may find yourself feeling more apprehensive too.

None of that means you have failed, and none of it means you need to start again.

Behaviour rarely improves in a perfectly straight line. Confidence certainly doesn't. There will be easy days, difficult days and occasionally a day where somebody else's badly managed dog decides to add itself to the training plan.

What matters is what happens afterwards.

Keep communicating with your dog. Keep giving them opportunities to make good decisions. Keep using the training that was already working. Make things easier if they need to be easier, but don't throw away the progress simply because the next few walks don't look quite as polished as the ones that came before.

And perhaps give yourself the same allowance.

You might need a few ordinary walks before you stop scanning every corner. You might need to see your dog cope well a few times before you fully trust that they are still okay.

That's fine too.

The incident may have shaken your dog's confidence. It may have shaken yours.

But one difficult afternoon does not get to define everything that came before it, and it certainly doesn't have to define everything that comes next.