Aggresion Toward Other Dogs

Name: Steve Squirlock
Email: s.squirlock@insightbb.com
Date: 2006-02-15 14:53:26

I have an eight month old yellow lab mix- Jamie. She has been spayed. We have two older dogs both spayed. She will periodically become agressive to them for no apparant reason. We have been taking her to classes run by Pet Smart and I have been reviewing articles on animal behavior. We do not want to send her to the "Humane Society" but are options are becoming somewhat limited. She is smart and learns rather quickly. We are afraid she my may injury our other dogs and we also have two cats - both declawed. Do you have any suggestions?

Date: 2006-02-16 00:02:34

Thanks Steve and Jamie for your great question. Before giving too much advice I would need to know the extent of the aggression. A huge red flag for me is if the aggressive dog has broken skin on a person or another dog. If Jamie has not broken skin on the other dogs this is still something we need to quickly address but has not passed a certain point. My first though is to try to figure out what triggers the aggression and then we can work on modifying her behavior. Resource guarding over food, attention, fear, toys, and their "place" in the household are commmon triggers of aggression. Sometimes aggressive can be brought about during play. Dogs may be playing and before you know it they its obvious they aren't playing anymore and you feel as though you need to separate them. Also in order to help manage her behavior I would look at the severity of the aggression. Does Jamie give warnings before she becomes aggressive and then things quickly escalate or has she shown aggression to anything else besides the dogs at home??? (Dogs maybe in class, cats, and most importantly people) I'll give you lots of credit that it sounds like you are trying very hard to manage her behavior. The first thing I would suggest without even seeing your answers to my questions would be to increase her level of activity. A general standard that I give is to add twice per day an additional 15 minutes of strenuous activity. It is important that these are additional sessions because many people start doing the twice daily 15 minute sessions and use that as thier main energy outlet for the dog. Please continue the high level of activity that she has already and add the additional activity. Try this for two weeks and re-evaluate the situation. Jamie is a lab puppy with lots of energy and I would state that at least 65% of all behavior problems are due to the fact that the dog does not have enough energy outlets. In my opinion this will not solve your problem at all but it certainly can't hurt and if it is something that simple then we can go from there. Please answer my questions when you have time and we can continue this. Also, bring Jamie in to see us at Happy Clean, and Smart, if nothing else it is a good training experience. One last question, has she always been somewhat like this or is this a recently developed behavior. Thanks again for your question and don't give up yet.

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