Reactive Dog Just Needed One Thing

The Dodo

This dog was reactive to everyone — until his mom figured out the one thing he needed to feel safe. We talked to his mom about how how she used social media to feel less alone, and help others going through the same thing!

Transcript

00:00The world was just so scary for him.

00:10The first time we met Bale, we were visiting the shelter and they told us that he had been

00:15abandoned in the desert.

00:16The early days with Bale were pretty chill until one day we just lost it.

00:23We realized Bale was reactive to pretty much everything.

00:29He was terrified of people.

00:30He would get spooked by dogs, noises, inanimate objects.

00:38Literally anything that was new or he hadn't seen before, he was terrified of it.

00:42We got a trainer involved and she just said that he had fear reactivity because he hadn't

00:48been socialized properly.

00:51To help him kind of overcome this reactivity and fear of new people specifically, we decided

00:58that we were going to muzzle train him.

01:01So we started to introduce him to people when there were other dogs around.

01:12He also realized that he was fine with people if they had a dog.

01:15And once we learned that, it just changed everything.

01:19Eventually we realized if there's a dog there, it's no problem.

01:23So we haven't needed to use the muzzle recently.

01:25We have made so much progress.

01:28And now he has like 40 friends.

01:35This year we're going to move country and we're leaving the community that we've built

01:40here.

01:41We threw a party for Bale so that he could say bye to all of his friends, dogs, and friends

01:46because they have helped us so much.

01:51It has been amazing to have people here.

01:54We would literally drop anything to help Bale.

02:12I think the main thing that made me not want to give up was creating the Instagram.

02:16I would get people messaging me like, oh, we're going through the same thing.

02:20It's your best friends.

02:22And then I could see other people literally making progress with their dog.

02:26And I was like, you know what, I'm going to start documenting.

02:29I'll look back and I'm like, wow, I forgot he was like that.

02:35When you don't have any other people in your life, you know where you're going, right?

02:40Sometimes it's nice to have strangers on the internet kind of validate that for you.

02:49Hey, good boy.

02:52Good boy.

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