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The communication isn't great. In the past week I've had another "I think we should just let them settle this themselves", then the chap got upset because I put Owen on lead when Barry charged over, then grabbed him by the collar as he started aggressing towards Owen. His point was "you set this up to happen, Owen can easily outrun him" - this is undoubtedly true, but ignores the fact that Owen submits to most other dogs and a couple of times has laid down in the face of Barry's aggression which just exposes his bellow. If that happened at distance no-one would be able to intervene.
I do appreciate that this is almost certainly an excess of caution, but the chances are certainly not 0 that Barry puts his teeth on Owen, so there's no real reason for me to do anything other than ask them to control their dog and step in when I need to. If they came up to me constructively and asked about desensitisation I'd be thrilled! TBH, if they muzzled him I'd be up for all sorts of attempted introductions/solutions etc. I do appreciate that this must be really annoying for them. And stressful. But they're not handling it very well.
The positives sounds like the owners of Bazza recognise this is an issue. They seem to at least be communicating. Sounds like you’d both benefit from resolving it?
How well trained is Barry generally? Could some de-sensitisation work help?
Could they turn him away on lead, return, repeat?