Dog Aggressive Dog Training
Literally every day owners contact us and ask, “Can your dog training program fix our dog aggressive dog?”
I always respond with the same answer, “It’s impossible to guarantee that our training will make your dog love other dogs. What we can guarantee you is that you full CONTROL of your dogs when other dogs are present.”
I always give the analogy to people that aggression in dogs is a psychological issue, just like issues with certain people. No psychiatrist in the world will tell you that he can take a serial killer, pedophile, etc and guarantee he can fix their issue. So, the analogy I like to use is, “If you cannot guarantee it with a highly intelligent adult human being, there is no way you can guarantee it with a domesticated animal.”
With that said, I like to give a 70/30 rule dog aggression. The equation I generally find is that 30% of the dog aggressive dogs you can completely fix and rehabilitate and 70% of the dogs you can make much more manageable and controllable. Meaning, 70% of the dogs we train who used to see another dog and bark, lunge, and growl, will NOW walk by that same dog without any reaction. Also, he/she will listen and perform flawless obedience with other dogs being present. Below, is a good example of this. See this 1.5 year old Golden Retriever “Guinness” who could not be around other dogs or would react violently like you see 1:40 portion of the video, then, you will see the same two dogs at the 2:00 minute mark of the video:
To point out my 70/30 rule, those Golden Retrievers still could not be left alone in a kennel together overnight; however, this is just after 14 days of training and you can clearly see the difference in their behaviors.
So, this is an example of what 70% of the dog-on-dog aggression cases will look like at our dog training. They still won’t love each other and sleep on the same bed together; however, they are clearly much better and more manageable than they were prior.
To clarify, of the 70% of cases like this, some of them “could” shift over to the 30% with more time, patience, training, and consistency.
The key to getting your dog over his/her dog aggression is confidence building drills, obedience, pack leadership, and getting him/her around other positive dogs (muzzled if needed). You will never get a dog over their dog aggression by keeping them isolated from other dogs, generally this will only make the problem worse.
We can teach you the importance of socialization and confidence building drills such as object desensitization and noise desensitization you can start doing with your dog.