Many dog owners have the idea that meeting every dog you pass during a walk is an essential part of dog socialisation. It is not.
On-leash greetings are actually the opposite of what you want to do. Rather, they are a great way to cause fights, reinforce poor behaviour, and damage the bond between you and your dog.
Dogs don’t need to greet or engage with other dogs to be happy or fulfilled. In fact, allowing your dog to greet every dog you see can lead to longer-term behavioural issues: pulling on the leash, frustration, reactivity, loss of focus, loss of control and obedience, risk of injury and illness – just to name a few.
Rather than encouraging your dog to engage with other dogs, it’s far safer to teach them neutrality by asking your dog to turn attention toward you instead. This skill is easiest to teach with young puppies when you first introduce them to walking, by rewarding them for any attention they give you on a walk. But while it’s great to start building these skills when your dog is young, you can absolutely teach it and reinforce it with older dogs.
To create neutrality toward other dogs when you’re out in public, your goal is to make yourself more interesting and “valuable” to your dog. We want our dogs to understand that going out with us anywhere (from a neighbourhood walk to dog-friendly events) is a chance to play and engage with us and not other dogs. By avoiding setups where our dogs routinely greet strange dogs, we can teach them that paying attention to us is more fun and rewarding.
Remember, just because your dog may typically be happy-go-lucky, doesn’t mean that all dogs are easy to get along with and it doesn’t guarantee that the chemistry will be good between your dog and the new dog right from the start. If you happen to stumble across a dog out in the world and you don’t feel comfortable with having your dog meet him, that’s ok. You can politely excuse yourself from the greeting by saying that your dog is in training and you need to keep him focused.