Glimmers..

Grouchy, Sassy, and I were on our afternoon walk yesterday when we were joined by an off-leash dog - a German Shepherd, I believe.  I saw the dog and its owner first and abruptly changed directions.  The dog, being off-leash, decided to come join us.  He was with us for a few seconds without Grouchy or Sassy noticing, but as soon as Sassy noticed and slowed, even as I was trying to get her to walk faster and ignore the new guy, Grouchy then noticed.  He, of course lunged and growled and I think I dropped the leash, thinking he'd be better that way.  He chased off the new dog and was very growly and pounced, but I don't think he used his teeth.  Just throwing his body and climbing on the other dog.  While none of this is good, I believe Grouchy just wants other dogs to go away and since I am unable to do so with both him and Sassy on leash, he takes it upon himself and is very successful at it.  

This is a learned behavior and we need to stop it, but up until now, I don't think I saw it so clearly.  When I caught up to Grouchy and grabbed his harness, the other owner called his dog away, Grouchy wasn't really intent on going after the dog.  He also initially charged the dog, which ran back towards its owner, and Grouchy ignored the owner, who was undoubtedly heading towards him.  After all this commotion, we headed back to our car and Sassy pooped off the path, I had to pull them both off the path to clean up and then we had two men walking down the path towards us.  I'm glad there was no dog, but Grouchy did great, he did not alert to the men, even though they were kind of slowly approaching, and as they passed, he didn't tense up at all.  I shortened his lead.  

So this tells me that he's probably learned that humans don't tend to come up to him and he doesn't need to worry about humans and that I am no use in stopping dogs from coming up.  I'm not sure if he's actually concerned about dogs or if he takes my fear of his reaction as his need to fend off the incoming dog.  

At least this incident today provided a window into his behavior.  I'm pretty confident we need to show him we can handle the dog situation better and he can become better.