Reactive. Aggressive. Fearful. Naughty. Why the words we use about dogs matter.

Reactive.

It is probably one of the most commonly used words in modern dog training.

“My dog is reactive.”

“He's a reactive dog.”

“She became reactive after being attacked.”

“My rescue is really reactive.”

We hear it everywhere.

But what do we actually mean when we say reactive?

And perhaps more importantly, what happens when we stop thinking about the word and start treating it as an identity?

Because words matter.

Not just because we want to sound clever or use the correct terminology, but because the words we choose can change the way we see the dog standing in front of us.

Let's start with the obvious one.

A reaction is simply a response to something.

Every dog reacts.

A dog hears the post land through the letterbox and runs to investigate.

A squirrel appears and the dog chases it.

Someone walks past the window and the dog barks.

Another dog approaches and your dog moves away.

A stranger reaches over their head and they duck.

These are all reactions.

So technically, having a reaction doesn't make a dog reactive.

And yet somewhere along the way, reactive became a convenient label for a particular type of dog.

Usually the dog who barks, lunges, spins, growls, screams or otherwise loses the plot when confronted with a particular situation.

And that's where things start getting interesting.

Because “reactive” doesn't actually tell us very much about the dog.

It tells us that the dog responds.

It doesn't tell us:

What the dog is responding to.

How close the trigger needs to be.

What happened immediately beforehand.

What the dog is feeling.

How aroused the dog already was.

Whether the dog is frightened.

Whether the dog is frustrated.

Whether the dog is excited.

Whether the dog has learned a particular response.

Whether the behaviour is predictable.

Whether it happens everywhere.

Or whether it happens only in a very specific context.

And those details matter enormously.

Harvey The loving gentle giant who was "reactive" to everything and first got me interested in Behaviour

Is your dog actually “a reactive dog”?

This is where I think language can become unhelpful.

Consider these two statements:

“He's a reactive dog.”

and:

“He reacts to unfamiliar dogs when they're within about ten metres.”

They might describe exactly the same dog.

But they give us very different information.

The first turns the behaviour into something that appears to belong to the dog.

The second describes something the dog does.

And that distinction matters.

Because if I tell you your dog is reactive, it becomes very easy to start looking for evidence that proves the label.

Dog barks at another dog?

There we go. Reactive.

Dog watches another dog carefully?

He's getting reactive.

Dog stiffens?

He's being reactive.

Dog growls?

Reactive.

The label starts becoming the explanation rather than the beginning of the investigation.

And that can be dangerous.

Because a label can stop us asking questions.

Reactive isn't an emotion

This is another important distinction.

“Reactive” describes behaviour.

It doesn't tell us what the dog is feeling.

A dog can react because it is frightened.

A dog can react because it is frustrated.

A dog can react because it is over-excited.

A dog can react because it has learned that barking makes the other dog go away.

A dog can react because it has limited experience with something.

A dog can react because it is in pain.

A dog can react because it is already massively over-aroused from everything that happened before the trigger appeared.

And sometimes, we simply don't know yet.

That's okay.

“I don't know yet” is a perfectly respectable answer in dog training.

In fact, I'd argue it is considerably better than confidently guessing.

If we decide that a dog is frightened when we haven't actually established that, we can end up designing a training plan around an assumption.

And assumptions are notoriously good at becoming “facts” once they've been repeated often enough.

And reactive doesn't mean aggressive

This one really matters.

A dog can bark, lunge and growl without intending to hurt another dog.

That doesn't mean the behaviour should be ignored.

It doesn't mean it isn't frightening for the owner.

It doesn't mean management isn't necessary.

And it certainly doesn't mean we should allow a dog to practise the behaviour repeatedly.

But a reaction is not automatically aggression.

Aggression is a much more specific term.

And yet we regularly see dogs described as aggressive because they barked at another dog.

Or because they growled.

Or because they snapped.

Sometimes those behaviours may form part of an aggressive interaction.

Sometimes they don't.

Context matters.

A growl is information.

A bark is information.

A lunge is information.

None of those behaviours come with subtitles telling us exactly what the dog is thinking.

Our job is to investigate.

Maleficent A dog with many labels.

Then there are words like “dominant”, “stubborn” and “naughty”

These words have another problem.

They often tell us considerably more about the human's interpretation of the behaviour than the behaviour itself.

“My dog is stubborn.”

Okay.

What does the dog actually do?

“She's dominant.”

Okay.

What behaviour are you seeing?

“He's being naughty.”

What happened immediately before it?

Because naughty isn't really an explanation.

Neither is stubborn.

And neither is dominant.

They're labels.

Sometimes labels are useful shorthand.

But shorthand becomes a problem when we forget that we've shortened something.

Context changes everything

Imagine a dog who sees another dog at 50 metres.

He looks.

He sniffs the ground.

He looks back.

He continues walking.

At 20 metres, he starts staring.

At 15 metres, his body becomes tense.

At 10 metres, he barks and lunges.

At 5 metres, he completely loses the ability to think.

Is that dog simply “reactive”?

Perhaps.

But that description doesn't tell us nearly enough.

There is a massive difference between a dog who can comfortably observe another dog at 50 metres and one who reacts as soon as another dog appears on the horizon.

There is also a massive difference between a dog who reacts only to large black dogs, a dog who reacts only when on lead, a dog who reacts only when another dog approaches head-on, and a dog who reacts to every dog in every environment.

The pattern is the information.

And that's why I prefer to ask questions.

What?

Where?

When?

How close?

How intense?

How long?

What happened beforehand?

What happened afterwards?

What does the dog do next?

Because behaviour doesn't happen in a vacuum.

The trigger isn't necessarily the cause

Another word we should probably be more careful with is trigger.

We often say:

“Dogs are his trigger.”

“People are her trigger.”

“Cars trigger him.”

But the thing that happens immediately before a behaviour isn't necessarily the reason the behaviour exists.

Imagine you've had a horrendous day.

You've slept badly.

You've missed breakfast.

You've been stuck in traffic.

You've had an argument.

You're late.

You're tired.

Then someone asks you a perfectly reasonable question.

And you snap at them.

Was the question the problem?

Or was it the final straw?

Dogs can experience something similar.

This is where concepts such as trigger stacking and the dog's overall level of arousal become incredibly important.

The dog we see reacting to the final trigger may have been carrying the effects of several previous experiences.

So perhaps instead of asking:

“What triggered my dog?”

we should sometimes be asking:

“What has happened to my dog today?”

A dog is not a label

This is probably the bit I care about most.

I work with a lot of rescue dogs.

And rescue dogs arrive carrying stories we often don't know.

We might know where they came from.

We might know something about their history.

We might know they were abandoned, imported, found as a stray or surrendered.

But we don't necessarily know what they learned before they arrived.

We don't know every experience they had.

And we certainly shouldn't assume that the dog we meet on day one is the dog we will have six months later.

So I am very wary of turning a behaviour into an identity.

Your dog isn't “a reactive dog”.

Your dog is a dog who currently reacts in certain situations.

That might sound like semantics.

It isn't.

Because if behaviour can change, then there is a very important difference between:

“This is who my dog is.”

and:

“This is what my dog is currently doing.”

One closes the door.

The other leaves it open.

Precision isn't pedantry

Sometimes when trainers talk about terminology, people roll their eyes.

Oh, here we go. We're arguing about words.

But I'm not interested in arguing about whether somebody used the word “reactive” correctly at a barbecue.

I'm interested in what happens after we use the word.

If calling a dog “reactive” helps an owner explain that their dog struggles around other dogs, brilliant.

But if the label becomes the end of the conversation rather than the beginning, we've got a problem.

Because good training starts with curiosity.

Not certainty.

Instead of:

“He's reactive.”

I'd rather hear:

“He reacts when unfamiliar dogs get within about ten metres, particularly if they're approaching directly.”

Now we have something.

We can work with that.

We can observe it.

We can measure it.

We can change things.

And we can ask the next question.

Words shape the dog we think we're seeing

There's a reason scientists are so careful about definitions.

If we don't agree on what we're measuring, how do we know whether we've changed it?

Dog training isn't exactly the same as a laboratory experiment, of course.

Dogs are wonderfully inconvenient creatures.

They don't read the research paper.

They don't care about our carefully constructed hypotheses.

They bring their own history, genetics, environment, experiences, relationships and personalities to the table.

Which means we need to be even more careful about pretending we know exactly what a behaviour means.

A bark isn't a diagnosis.

A growl isn't a diagnosis.

A lunge isn't a diagnosis.

“Reactive” isn't a diagnosis.

They're pieces of information.

Our job is to put those pieces together.

So, is your dog reactive?

Maybe.

But that's probably not the most interesting question.

I'd rather know:

What does your dog react to?

What does that reaction look like?

When does it happen?

When doesn't it happen?

What happens immediately beforehand?

What happens afterwards?

How quickly does your dog recover?

And what does the rest of the dog's day look like?

Because the more precise our language becomes, the more precise our thinking can become.

And the more precise our thinking becomes, the better chance we have of actually helping the dog.

So next time someone tells you:

“My dog is reactive.”

Don't necessarily disagree with them.

Just get curious.

Ask:

“Okay. What does he react to?”

Because that's where the really interesting stuff begins.

And perhaps that's the biggest lesson of all.

Don't let the label become the explanation.

The dog deserves better than that.