The Spectrum of Reactivity: From Red Flags to Green Zones with the Dog Reactivity Chart

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Understand the spectrum of reactivity with this reactivity chart. Discover the importance of learning your dog’s body language and signals and how they stack up when it comes to dealing with reactivity.

A key factor to working through reactivity is understanding your dog’s triggers, the signals that they’ll give before they go over threshold and react, and also the safe distance (green zone) that you have before a reaction is imminent and your dog explodes.

In this blog post I’ll break down the dog reactivity chart, a basic chart showing the common stress signals that the majority of dogs will go through before reacting to a trigger. I’ll also briefly touch on body language, trigger stacking, keeping calm, how to avoid reactions and the importance of stress management for these dogs.

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Introducing The Dog Reactivity Chart

Having a dog reactivity chart can be super useful on your journey with helping your dog break through reactive issues.

The chart is basically a group of behaviours from green zone behaviours, through to red flags and more over the top reactive behaviours that occur from crossing their threshold.

Having a mental picture in your head of these behaviours can help you understand not only how your reactive dog is feeling towards a trigger in the distance but also if they’ll be able to handle it coming any closer.

Our dogs constantly give signals as they make their way up this chart, closer to their threshold and an explosion, the majority of owners just don’t know what to look out for until it’s too late.

With this chart to hand you will start to be able to read your dog on walks and be able to work, condition and socialise them from the right distance to their triggers.

Changing How Your Dog Feels With Distance

Distance is one of the most effective weapons you’ll have when it comes to leash reactivity.

By knowing what distance your dog can get to their triggers without reacting and also without getting too worked up and stressed, you can do a lot of work when it comes to changing how they feel about a trigger.

If a dog crosses their threshold and starts reacting, or if they are too stressed to even take treats then they are too close to the trigger, their fight-flight-freeze kicks in and they struggle to control their “reactive behaviour”.

One of the first few things you should do when it comes to reactive behaviour is try to figure out your dog’s safe zone. This is the distance your dog can be from their trigger without exploding.

For some dogs they may need a lot of space from their triggers, whilst some dogs may be more tolerant to triggers until they get closer. Regardless of which kind of dog you have you need to figure out their safe zone.

Keeping Your Dog Below Threshold

Once you know your dog’s safe zone, the next step is avoiding them reacting through keeping them below threshold.

A lot of dogs get stuck in a reactivity loop where they have repeated the behaviour so much it becomes like an instinct to react. The more and more they go over threshold and react, the more challenging it gets to teach a new pathway, but it isn’t impossible.

If you can keep your dog under threshold by using the dog reactivity chart and figure out when they are getting uncomfortable and need more space, you can start teaching them an alternate way of behaving when they see their triggers.

You have to remember if your dog has been reactive for a while then the issue will take some time to fix. Think about it as a form of therapy, if you constantly have the same negative thoughts then you have to be intentional with your thinking and do things like meditation and changing the way you think in the moment. Once again it’s a long process but is one that requires consistency, it’s challenging but it isn’t impossible.

Pushing The Threshold and Stress

Knowing your dog’s threshold can also be beneficial to help you push it. As you work through reactivity there will be a point where it’s time to start challenging your dog.

Once you start building more engagement and reliability with your dog, you can start pushing the limits a little. You have to be careful not to overdo it and cause regression but if done properly it can be a great learning curve and help speed things up with reactivity.

When pushing the safe zone you are trying to teach your dog that you have the issue under control and they still have nothing to worry about.

You want to set your dog up for success so make sure you know they can handle it by keeping an eye on their body language and keep in mind the dog reactivity chart to see whether you should pull them out of that situation or not.

The Dangers of Trigger Stacking

A common issue many reactive dogs will go through is trigger stacking (this also applies to dogs that struggle with self regulation, anxiety, hyperactivity etc).

Trigger stacking in dogs occurs when your dog encounters multiple triggers and stressful experiences. These constantly stack up over a period of time and lead to an explosion of behaviour (and over reaction).

You may go to walk your dog and a dog in a garden may bark at your dog, your dog won’t react but that experience may have got to them. Next you may encounter children rushing and screaming past your dog, causing stress and a bit of overstimulation but no reaction still. Finally you may be on your way back from this walk and a bin may get knocked over by the wind causing your dog to explode.

Trigger stacking can make a molehill into a mountain, if our dogs are consistently stressed and struggle with self regulation and also don’t get a chance to get rid of that stress that builds up for them through proper exercise and rest, they may seem to get more and more on edge over time, even more frantic and easier to climb the dog reactivity chart and explode.

Reducing and Eliminating Stress

One thing many owners struggle with when it comes to their dogs is stress. Stress is an every day part of life for us and our dogs, it’s how we handle it that is the most important.

When it comes to stress are we resilient enough to bounce back? If not then how long are we stressed for? What can we do to reduce and eliminate it?

Let’s go back to the example of negative thoughts. An experience may happen that sparks a negative thought. You can stay in that negative thought for the day if you aren’t careful, it may even spiral out of control causing more negative thoughts and maybe even a bad mood. The other option is that you can work on your thoughts through meditation or simply reframing that negative thought with a positive one when it arises.

So what things are great for helping dogs battle with their stresses? Exercise and rest!

Exercise

Now when talking about exercise, I don’t mean going on big walks or running around like headless chickens. A lot of reactive dog owners say they walk their dogs for 2-3 hours and don’t see any change in behaviour yet they encounter triggers on walks and end up becoming more frustrated and stressed.

Proper exercise should realistically be away from triggers and distractions, although for many this isn’t possible. Proper exercise should also be high intensity, allow the dog to run but also allows them to think and implements self control.

My favourite exercise for reactivity so far is using a flirt pole and basic obedience. Doing 20/30 minutes a day of this is enough to help reduce those energy and stress levels in Jasper.

Rest

Rest is also super important for dogs that find themselves highly strung a lot of the times.

Rest is where the body heals and processes everything, but it must be good quality rest for it to be effective.

Dogs should sleep about 12-14 hours a day but many don’t due to not being able to settle down and being in high states of stress.

Plenty of owners (me included) start screaming “my dog is stressing me out!” and opt in to fill their time with more things trying to get them to tire out and sleep when in reality they are like cranky kids who really need to focus on providing structure to enable them to achieve the proper rest and relaxation instead of anything else.

Sometimes a stress detox could be the answer for dogs who have been in a stressed state for elongated periods of time. You can download my FREE 3 day stress detox that you can easily follow and customise with your dog from home.

A stress detox works to cut out everything that is causing stress in our dogs including walking and replacing it with proper exercise, puzzle solving, sensory activities etc.

This period of time is to focus on bringing that dog back to a baseline where it’s a lot easier to train, listen and make the right decisions.

A stress detox has the goal of getting your dog into deep REM sleep on a regular basis and meeting their needs so the body can eliminate bad hormones like stress and make way for even better feel good hormones.

After the detox period you slowly start to add back in activities again.

Final Thoughts

Having a dog reactivity chart can be very beneficial in the progression of your dog’s training towards other triggers.

Understanding this chart and making it your own can help you find your dogs safe zone and start doing the work to help them make better choices.

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Before You Go

If you are struggling with reactivity you can download my reactivity starter bundle for FREE which includes tips to manage a reactive dog plus a 3 day stress detox you can put your dog through to help them relax, de-stress and reach a baseline where they can think clearly and make better choices again.