Blog — Prey Threshold

Many people throw this term “leash reactivity” around for the purpose of giving their dog a diagnosis, but what does it really mean? Firstly, your dog is displaying some sort of unwanted behaviors while being restrained on a leash. The “symptoms” of leash reactivity can be: barking, growling, lunging, biting, and even redirecting on the handler. Typically, this is in response to a “trigger” but it could simply be a stimulus that arouses your dog’s drive. So we have a stimulus and a response, but what is the underlying process? It’s different for different dogs, so let’s break it down....

  When I was first learning about dogs from my mentor, he taught me that a dog's temperament is based on their "prey threshold" i.e. what types of prey they are genetically programmed to hunt. So bird dogs have a certain temperament because they are tuned to birds (soft mouth). And you can imagine a bulldog, grabbing and holding onto the bull (hard mouth) and what kind of temperament and drive is required of that particular dog. And so on and so forth, in this way we account for all the different types of hunting dogs and their different types...