December hiking

This weekend, I took Maya on a couple of hikes in one of our favorite 'secret' places, a tucked-away corner of National Forest land that nobody ever seems to visit.  Places like this allow Maya to be off-leash and me to stop scanning constantly for approaching dogs/people/bicyclists/etc..  In the nearly two years I've been visiting this place, I've only ever run into one other person, who was only there to round up his cows.

Of course, that changed today.  Maya was running around ahead of us, we were chattering away, and all of us were following an old forest service road.  Suddenly, Maya heard something in the bushes and let out a giant alarm growl.  Then she stopped, turned around, and ran to us.

This is a behavior chain I've worked hard to teach Maya, and I think it's pretty successful.  Alert, bark/growl once, then run to me.  I would like even better for her to simply be less alarmed, but that's taking longer to teach.  If I teach her that alarm barking is always followed by running to me, then at least I control the situation from there.  Which is why I have the only dog in the neighborhood who will bark at passing dogs just once, and then run inside the house to calm down.

The source of the growl-inducing scary noise was a jogger with two off-leash dogs.  I was pretty startled to see her too.  One of her dogs promptly ran at us, screaming and barking and showing its teeth.  The jogger yelled at it to come back, which it ignored, but then it got nervous about us and ran back to her after all.  Only, I guess she either wasn't carrying leashes or didn't bother to put them on.  So both of her dogs, even the barking and growling one, stayed off-leash as she ran toward us.

This was weird to me.  We moved off the trail, concentrated on rewarding Maya for appropriate behaviors, and waited.  As the jogger ran past, she said, "Oh, don't worry, he's very friendly.  Just likes to bark!"  Meanwhile, her dog kept showing his very friendly teeth and barking his very friendly head off.  It was never particularly worrying -- her dog kept his distance, and was clearly intimidated enough not to approach us -- but was something of a contrast in management choices.

The thing is, Maya is not a very friendly dog.  She is reactive, sometimes aggressive, and emotionally volatile.  This makes her potentially dangerous, and we treat her that way.  Consequently, she never gets to chase people or otherwise bother them on trails.  "He's really very friendly" dogs get to chase us and bother us all the time, and frequently do. 

Oh well, it mostly serves to create good training opportunities for Maya, who spent the entire episode staring incredulously at the barking dog and whining softly.  Not entirely calm, but responsive and relaxed enough to keep her cool.  She is a good dog.