(no subject)

[kirin76]

I was on a walk with my dog and my friend and her dog. Her dog is a mini-shanauzer and doesn't care about anything. My dog is a 65 lb "lab boxer mix" who can at times be nervous around other dogs, especially on leash. I took him to the new local dog park. He had a blast for about 20 minutes running around playing zoomies with the one other irish setter in the fenced area. I leashed him and went for a walk once my friend showed up. We stopped before the trail head to let this other person who had his dog off leash get far away from us. Well, we started walking down the trail and maybe 5 minutes later, we turned down this side trail we wanted to check out to try to find a different trail head and parking area. About 300 feet away, as far down the trail as we could see was the other person with his off-leash dog AND another off leash dog. So we turned around to go back to the main trail and take the loop the other direction. I heard the woman calling and calling her dog and realized her dog was not stopping, so I stopped my dog and tried to make him sit facing away from the other dog. Her dog got to 3-4 feet from me before I could get Max sitting. I ended up having to grab his collar to keep him from lunging at the other dog. I could tell the other dog was not really trying to be aggressive, but she came up to us at a full run and she got right up in his space and that seemed to upset Max. I tried to keep myself between her and Max and I finally got an almost sit from him when the other dog came up on the other side and startled Max again. He growled and barked (and snapped only once or twice) at both the dogs for maybe a minute or two until the other two owners finally came over and leashed thier dogs and then left. Was there anything I should have done differently? He had absolutely no problems with Dudley (my friend's schnazuer) the whole time. And he was more than happy to play nicely in the dog park when we got back to the fenced area and let him run around again for a few more minutes.

Thanks goodness for my friend. I was so upset that I couldn't say anything constructive so I didn't try. My friend told the other two (more than once) that they really needed to have thier dogs leashed on the trails.

So how do you deal with other loose dogs running up to your leashed, potentially reactive dog?