How to fix frustration reactivity?

If your dog feels fearful or anxious around other dogs or people, they may try to hide or get away from them. They may also approach them using threatening body language to make them move away. While on-lead, they might not be able to move away or closer. This can result in frustration, and their attempts to move away or to get closer can intensify. Consistently use reward-based training methods and keep them on a lead when needed. Choose quiet places and times for walks, when possible, to avoid triggers while you’re working on changing their emotions. If you encounter a trigger, calmly move your dog away, avoiding adding extra tension to the lead. Reward calm behaviour. Practice focus training to help them pay attention to you. Learn to recognise your dog's body language. This will help you understand when they're feeling worried or frustrated.

The methods that have received the best results for managing frustration based reactivity involve teaching the dog to turn and look away from their trigger before reaching/approaching their threshold. You are giving them access to something else rather than the approaching dog. The best way to do this is to reinforcing calm/wanted behavior with play or treats. Showing them that you can be more fun or cooler than the dog across the street can help them to be less frustrated when seeing another dog. They will think that even though they do not get to go see the other dog, they still get to play with you. But this needs to be done before your dog reaches threshold. Overtime, you should be able to decrease the distance between your dog and the trigger. Set-Ups are very important for frustration based reactive dogs. Treating and managing reactivity goes much faster if you can arrange a set up with your dog. Learning an emergency U-Turn is also helpful for both frustration and fear based reactivity. You want to use this when you un-expectantly run into another dog. The key to a successful U-Turn is to do a quick pivot and keep you composure stress free.

I've had some moderate success with the DMT strategy of saying yes or nice every time she spots a dog from afar and giving her a treat, and I have gotten better and redirecting her focus away from those dogs to me. We work hard to take walking routes that avoid as many of these types of paths as possible, but its impossible in our neighborhood to avoid all of them all the time. I know one of the pillars of training is managing behaviors while you’re working on training your dog so that the dog doesn't get to keep “practicing” the undesired behaviors. One thing I’ve been thinking about doing is taking her to the dog park but sitting outside at the benches and practicing just observing dogs from a distance without interacting. I’d love to hear if anyone has tried this and if it helped your leash reactive dogs ultimately be more desensitized to other dogs. I would love to be able to walk past other dogs at a closer distance and have her show some reasonable interest or excitement but be able to quickly move past it without a big reaction or over-arousal.