The problem Abbey has is that she is scared of other dogs but rather than run and hide she is actively aggressive towards them. This makes walking her a nightmare, even when she is muzzled.Now from the research I have done it all seems to boil down to two opposite approaches. One is to gradually introduce the socialisation aspect both at classes and out on walks and to remove her when things get out of hand for her. This approach is slow and gentle and takes patients, dedication and time whereas the other method is more hard-love kind of ‘in-at-the-deep-end’.This involves a kind of saturation effect by keeping things as normal as possible for the rest of the pack and just letting Abbey be part of it and see how the others handle the situations that arise.
Today there is a local event called ‘Pooches Play Day’ which, if last year was anything to go by will be very busy which we thought might be pushing things a bit for Abbey. However, we have woken this morning to rain which will keep the numbers down so we are going to take all four. Abbey will be muzzled to prevent any accidents and we will just have to see what happens.