I realised I am always referring to George's "reactions", but haven't really explained what they actually are.
When experiencing extreme stress, just like humans, dogs can respond with one of their survival modes: fight, flight, freeze or fawn.
For reactive dogs, something that non-reactive dogs consider non-threatening - and that humans know is safe - can cause extreme stress triggering one of these survival responses.
George's survival mode is fight. If a trigger is too close, he barks, jumps and lunges towards it - usually while stress-panting or hyper-ventilating. Sometimes he mixes whining in with the barking.
It's pretty intense and dramatic.
Occasionally there's a growl first, but usually it is a quick switch to barking and lunging. He'll always freeze or stiffen for a split second beforehand - so fast that you can miss it if you're not looking out for it.
He tries to get closer to the trigger to drive it away and create more distance.
At home, he barks and runs towards noises. If he sees a cat in the garden, he will bark and jump at the door - often wagging his tail at the same time. He's more likely to growl first at home.
In the car, he barks and scrabbles at the windows.
The fight reaction is the loudest - and arguably the most obvious - of the survival responses.
When George was a timid puppy, his mode was flight. He would run away from the other puppies at puppy school, although he stopped doing this as his confidence grew.
As fight mode is noisy and gets a lot of stares, comments and attention, sometimes I wish he still preferred flight. It might be nice to have a quieter reaction😆
He does occasionally freeze if the trigger is far enough away. That's my cue that he is over-threshold and we're already too close. It means we need to create distance or block the trigger before a full-blown reaction happens.
A perhaps lesser-known survival response is fawn. This can appear as appeasing behaviours such as rolling over to show their stomach or licking. This one is tricky, as it can easily be mistaken for "happy" or comfortable behaviours.
Whatever the survival reaction, the dog is over-threshold - and you need to get them away from, or visually block, the trigger.
George's fight mode is effective at making triggers go away, so it becomes a reinforcing behaviour. Each time it happens, it's reinforced further.
That's why I try to prevent George reacting as much as possible, whilst gently teaching positive associations with the 'scary' trigger.
Nobody said it would be easy!