Kodabear loves to walk, however any time he sees anyone he rears up on the lead because he wants to see them so bad. I use a harness to walk him and he does very well. I would say he is almost too social. Any ideas on how to stop him from rearing? I use a water bottle filled with rocks to stop him from doing other things that he is not suppose to do. I was just wondering if there was something less cumbersome and loud while walking.

Desensitization always worked best for me in cases like this.

Ripley developed a fixation with flat bed trucks and the noise they made. She would either try and flee or chase them. At the time I was pretty sure it was fear based, though even if it was excitement based I would have approached it the same way.

It was a reaction that could have led to injury of herself or someone else during a time I needed her to be in a structured and responsive frame of mind.


All I did was sit by the side of the busy street with her every day until she ignored them. At first she jumped or chased and I would just correct her, get her to sit again, and refocus her on me. Some days I would spend 5 minutes other days 20 or 30. The only reward she got was praise and it was a constant thing. Since I considered it a fear based reaction I wanted to pump her up as much as possible.


With a fixation on people or other dogs, even in a friendly and excited manner, I would do pretty much the same thing. Starting with just sitting on a bench in a high traffic area, maybe even going as far to have a "Dog in training" sign on the girls or close to me. Then I would just wait there, correcting when a reaction was poor by simply refocusing or repositioning, and rewarding when someone was ignored instead ad focus was on me.

I would probably even attach a command word to it like "On by" when people walked by and I wanted one of the girls to ignore them to help in the transition to the same behavior whilst walking.

Once it was achieved sitting I would move on to the same training but Mobile. If a reaction was poor I would stop dead and reposition or wait for calm and focus before I moved again. Holding a small but strong smelling treat in your hand is a great way to keep attention on you, I would reward the second I deemed the pass successful, but would keep moving forward.

That should lay the ground work and ideally lead to more focus on yourself while on walks instead of the surroundings. Obviously seeing other dogs or prey can and will be a challenge, but if you keep working at it you should be able to get a successful pass without too much incident.

Hope it helps,
~Chris~

Thank you. I have the perfect bench in mind. I thought this is how to approach it, but was not sure exactly how to achieve the results I wanted. Thank you for the detail it will help me teach my husband how to do it, also.