Hi, we rescued our dog Phantom when she was almost 3 years old and now she is 5. While she is perfect with people and children she has always been iffy with dogs. She is excited to see them and sniff them, making excited squeaks and tugging to get close, but once she sniffs them she is kind of done. At the dog park she keeps her hackles up for a longggg time and generally they go back up several times, even if her tail is wagging happily. Additionally, she gives "warning growls" to 70% of dogs that try to play with her and then she disengages/walks away. Occasionally a dog meets her criteria and she plays really well. She's never started a dog fight. She's had incidents where she gets really nasty if a dog tries to mount her, but I've always been able to pull her away before there was a fight.

I think she is generally a bit uncomfortable and on edge around dogs. Does anyone have tips for training her to be better with other dogs? What's the appropriate response, training wise, when she growls at dogs?

Don't feel to bad, my girl Cali does the same thing, she is 5. She will be okay with my other girl Mika though. Cali is a super dominate girl, so if every dog knows that, she plays OK..not great, just okay. If they hierarchy isn't established well for her, she is grouchy big time.

Good luck, sorry I don't have any tips- I just give up with Cali, she is stubborn and is who she is.

How often do you go to the dog park? Maybe just spending more time there will help. One of our dogs didn't have much socialization with other dogs, but he is getting better. On rare occasions when he is calm, he gets lots of praise!

I don't think growling is necessarily a problem. It's her way of telling other dogs to back off, and I think it's important that she can do that. If you tell her off for growling, the risk is that she will stop growling and just go straight to bite without warning. Similarly the wagging tail could be a sign of unease rather than a happy wag, especially if it is fast, short wags rather than a big wide wag. Maybe she just likes to have a lot of space around her.

I also think it can sometimes take dogs a little while to work out how to play with each other, so if she sees the same dogs mutliple times she will probably get more comfortable with them.

Sounds like she is communicating with the other dogs very well, she may just be choosy with which dogs she wants to play with; just like how some people don't get along with another specific person for whatever reason. Giving other dogs a warning growl is a healthy response to let them know she doesn't want to play with them. Just keep taking her to the park and keep a watchful eye to make sure the other dogs are respecting her warnings. Sometimes when I take Kale to the park, there could be 8-9 dogs there and Kale won't play with any of them, and another time he plays with several or just one the entire time. He usually goes off sniffing and does his own thing lol Just the act of being with other dogs (playing or not) is social behavior.

We've been going to the dog park about once a week/two weeks for 2 years now. Her behavior hasn't really changed much from the beginning. I guess I never really thought about the fact that maybe she just doesn't want to play with a bunch of strange dogs and that isn't abnormal. I did some googling and found its not very uncommon for adult female dogs to have little interest in dog park play. I do praise her when she is friendly with other dogs. I guess I should just ignore the growls (since she doesn't antagonize, just growls and turns away).