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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If a dog is ON leash and OFF leash dogs approach and attack and my ON leash dog bites/lunges/attacks, etc.  The OFF leash dogs are at fault. It does to matter the size of any of the dogs.  [/quote]

OP here.  I feel terrible for the little dog -- really terrible.  But there were two little dogs off leash surprising my big dog on leash on a DC street.  Not just one little dog.  And it happened very very quickly, before I could react.  You just don't expect unleashed dogs on DC streets. [/quote]

NP here. Dogs tend to be more reactive in general if they are on leash and an unleashed dog comes up to them. My young GSD is sweet and will take a lot of abuse from children and dogs he knows, but I am not letting him meet strange dogs face-to-face on the street in DC. I'll cross the street or have him sit/stay out of the way if I see a dog approaching whose owner is not paying sufficient attention (which is most of them). If I see an unleashed dog with their owner I will sharply request they leash and contain their dog. Most of them make the assumption that my dog is vicious and will do so promptly, which I am fine with. Walking a large dog in DC is definitely an exercise in hypervigilance, but we still get about 8-10 miles in a day on downtown streets. He's been attacked a couple of times but fortunately has not hurt another dog. We stopped going to the dog park altogether after he was a year and a half and about 10 dogs did a pile-on. The biggest thing we work on is recall, but many dogs if they get into sudden overstimulation may not actually hear commands to respond to them. But this is why we go to training literally every week and have done so since he was a puppy-- both to work on response, and getting him used to many different situations without getting overwhelmed.

So, basically, while I would not consider your dog dangerous-- it's a normal response, especially when both of you were completely surprised-- I would encourage you to go re-engage in dog training classes for a bit if you aren't currently going. An instructor can help you identify if there are any areas of concern, and can do things like test for and work on small-dog socialization if your dog is showing reactiveness to dogs similar to the ones that attacked him. And I also would encourage you to try to be a lot more observant of the areas you walk your dog-- for example, if there are particular yards where people do not secure their dogs, I try not to walk my dog in front of those yards. Or I will walk him on the opposite side of the street and reward him liberally for paying attention to me and ignoring the bad noisy dogs across the street. The result is that now, when many dogs have an aggressive stance and start hurling insults across the street, his first response is to look to me for a treat rather than to start shouting insults back.

Except for the FBI dogs, he still shouts insults back at them. Apparently their insults are more effective than the average dog on the street. :)[/quote]

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