Reactive dog help
Hi all,
I’m looking for some advice on how to best discipline and settle down my reactive dog. A quick background - doggo is a 3 year old male staffy cross who knows? He’s very sweet, snuggly, his recall is mostly pretty good but holy hell, he can be a shit. He is high energy boy whom we adopted nearly a year ago. We both work full time but we spend all weekend with both dogs and he gets an afternoon walk a few times a week. That’s difficult because he strongly pulls on his harness.
He annoys our older dog by wanting to shake the bed that old dog just happens to be laying in. In those cases, he gets immediately sent outside for a few minutes to calm down. He’s always pretty settled when he comes back. He can always see us as the door is glass.
He tried to play tug o war with the blankets on our couch, I’ve caught him on our kitchen bench twice. Again, sent out side to settle down.
He barks at anyone who dares to walk past our house. We’ve got a vibration/noise collar that sometimes works but other times, he’s so worked out he just ignores it. He throws his weight against our locked screen door in an effort to get outside to the deck to bark. Our stairs are blocked off with a baby gate to secure both dogs in.
We never take him in public because we know he’ll lose his rag at another dog and we just don’t want to put him in that situation, nor anyone else.
We want to put him into reactive dog training but I’m not sure if that will even work for him? It’s also super expensive (will look into other training schools, it may have been just the one we started him in that was exxy).
I guess any help, suggestions or advice will be greatly appreciated regarding how to better discipline, train or adjust his behaviours. Please be kind, we’re at our wits end. We want to help him because he’s everything to us.