Avoiding a Dog Fight — He Has No Plan B

1 Three ways out, and none of them is fully open

Most meetings between dogs never turn into anything. The two of them read each other, one offers something, the other answers, and the moment passes. That exchange is the safety system, and it runs on signals and on the option to leave.

A French Bulldog is poorly equipped for all three of the usual exits.

Three ways out, and none of them fully open. That is the whole argument of this page: he does not have a plan B, so the plan has to be yours.

2 It is not only the dog that looks aggressive

The usual advice is to watch out for dogs that look aggressive. It is not wrong, but it points at the wrong half of the problem.

What prevents most trouble is the exchange itself. So the risk is not only the growling dog across the street. It is any dog that expects an answer and does not get one — including the friendly, bouncy, over-enthusiastic one who only wants to play.

Here is what the research does and does not say, because the difference matters:

• People misread flat faces. In research on how people read dogs, flat-faced dogs were more often judged to be feeling something positive in situations that were not positive. Whatever your dog is feeling, you may not be reading it.
• Other dogs respond to them differently. In a 2025 study, dogs with medium-length muzzles did more tongue flicking when the dog approaching them was flat-faced, and offered play bows more often to other dogs with medium-length muzzles. The same study found no difference in the signals the two groups themselves produced. It was 30 dogs in total: small, and the first of its kind.
• Some breeds use fewer of the classic signals. A 1997 study of ten breeds counted between 2 and 15 wolf-like conflict signals, depending on the breed.
• What is not established: we did not find a study showing that other dogs read a flat face as a threat. That sentence gets repeated a lot online. We are not printing it as a fact.

The practical conclusion does not depend on knowing what the other dog thinks, which is lucky, because you cannot know it. Why other dogs react to a Frenchie goes through these studies one by one.

3 Distance is the intervention

Everything practical follows from one line: space is the intervention. Not more training in the moment, not more meetings with strangers so he “gets used to it”. Distance.

1. Read the other dog, not yours. Your dog’s face will tell you less than you want, and the research above is exactly why. The other dog’s face, tail and body usually still work. That is where your information is, and it arrives earlier than anything your own dog will show you.

2. Decide the meeting yourself. He cannot decline it; you can. Change direction early, cross the street, step off the path, put your body between them, and tell the other owner out loud that you are not saying hello today. Early is easy. Late is a scene.

3. Do not wait for his warning. He may be giving one that neither you nor the other dog can see. A sound you can hear is not the only warning he has — it is only the one that reaches you, and by then the distance is already gone.

4. Give yourself room to act. A wide line around a corner, the quieter hour, the other side of the street: none of it costs anything, and all of it buys the seconds in which a decision is still cheap.

Notice that none of this asks anything of him. The work is on the human end of the leash, which is also the end that can plan ahead.

4 The formats that make it harder

Two everyday setups make a meeting harder than it needs to be, and both are common.

Along a fence. Best Friends Animal Society describes barrier reactivity: a dog behind a fence, a window or a gate sees something he cannot reach, and the frustration builds into a bigger display than the same dog would produce with the barrier gone. Their advice is to manage the barrier itself — block the view, move him away, change the route — rather than let him practice the same scene every day. The chapter on barking covers the fence in more detail.

On the leash. Two dogs meeting while both are tied to people cannot do what dogs normally do: they cannot curve around each other, cannot control the distance, and cannot leave. Our opinion: a leash is a barrier too, so the same logic applies.

For a dog who has fewer ways to say I am done here, both formats remove the one option that was still open to him: stepping away.

5 Friends are fine. Strangers in the street are the problem

This is the point where it would be easy to write “keep your French Bulldog away from other dogs”. The research does not support that, and it would cost him something real.

The breed does not come out of the data as a fighter. VetCompass, run by the Royal Veterinary College in the UK, compared 2,781 French Bulldogs with 21,850 other dogs in veterinary records. Undesirable behavior was recorded in 0.1% of the French Bulldogs against 1.5% of the other dogs, and aggression in 1.1% against 2.3%. A pilot study in Italy — a first, small study rather than the last word — also found low scores for aggression toward other dogs. It used the C-BARQ questionnaire, in which owners answer questions about their dog’s behavior.

And isolation has its own price. A dog who never meets another dog becomes inexperienced, and inexperience carries its own risk. For a puppy the weeks of the socialization window matter more than for an adult, and that is a chapter of its own.

The line that holds both sides together is about format, not about dogs:

Regular friends are a different activity from negotiating with a stranger in the street. He can be good at the first one without ever being asked to do the second.

6 If it starts anyway

Prevention is what this page is about, and prevention does not cover everything. A loose dog can appear, and a meeting you did not choose can go wrong.

The first seconds of that have their own page, because the wrong instinct in those seconds is expensive: what to do if a dog attacks. Read it before you need it. Nobody reads calmly while it is happening.

The one thing worth settling in advance is who your vet is and how you get there, because after any encounter that involved contact, a flat-faced dog gets checked even if he looks fine.

7 Spike: our experience

Our stories and opinions on this page are our personal experience with one dog, Spike. One dog is not the measure for every dog — for your dog, your vet decides.

Spike’s reality  ·  Dominican Republic

“We step in when he announces himself, not when it gets loud.”

Spike does not usually get into trouble because another dog started something. He starts it.

What he does is easy to describe, so we describe the behavior instead of guessing at a reason:

• He climbs on other dogs.
• After he pees, with other dogs around, he scratches the ground with his back legs — a big, visible performance.
• Body forward, ears up, and no tail behind it to soften the announcement.

A dog with a long face and a long tail can climb on another dog and then take it back: ears down, a wag, a play bow, only kidding. That is the part Spike does not have. He cannot take back what he starts.

Two settings, two different dogs:

• Through a fence he winds the other dog up and then trots off, pleased with himself. The fence keeps it harmless, and he seems to know the fence is there.
• With no fence he climbs on, and there is no way back from it.

So his person does not wait for a growl. He takes him out of the situation at the announcement — at the climbing, at the ground-scratching, at the body going forward — and has had to do it more than once.

Where we live is part of this. This is a city with many street dogs, and not all of them are friendly. That is a property of the street, not of any breed, and your street may be a completely different problem. Learn your own place.

One thing we changed on our own walks: we stopped watching only the dog next to us and started looking ahead — open gates, corners and hedges, parked cars, doors that open straight onto the sidewalk. Everything we saw early ended in distance and nothing else, including a group of four large dogs. The trouble we had came from what we did not see coming: a dog on us from a few meters away, out of a yard we had already walked past.

And when something does have to be said to a loose dog, it is said loudly but without panic, in the language the dogs here hear from people every day. That is our experience and not advice: most people panic in that moment, and the dog knows it. We are one household with one dog in one city. Take the part that travels — look ahead, and learn what works where you are — and leave the rest with us.

About the Author

Spike’s Dad

Not a veterinarian — the human behind Spike, a dark brindle Frenchie, for 7+ years. What is written here is checked as carefully as we can against the sources listed above. When real life with Spike differs from the studies, we say so.

How this site is researched →