As a trainer specializing in aggressive dogs (now often called “reactive”), I know that owners often contact me as a last resort: the dog has either bitten someone or come very close to it. I can tell you hundreds of stories about owners who have persisted with their dogs, doing everything right in regard to training. I can share hundreds of success stories about dogs who improved and went on to live peacefully without ever biting (or attempting to bite) again.
I’ve managed to lower dogs’ –- and owners’ -– anxiety as much as 80 percent of the time using behavioral modification techniques developed by the best and brightest behaviorists in the country. As part of training we also reteach new behaviors, all while keeping their emotions under threshold.
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I love my job and feel privileged to work with so many deeply caring humans and so many resilient, willing dogs. There is a huge downside, however. It’s coming to grips with the 10 percent to 20 percent of my client’s dogs who do end up being put down. Sometimes there are no good explanations or even a realistic cure for a tiny percentage of dogs who bite humans or other dogs. Some aggression is labeled “idiopathic,” meaning we don’t know the root cause and thus it’s hard to find an adequate tool to use that lowers the aggression. And, sometimes, owners give up. I don’t blame them when that happens. I know how incredibly difficult life becomes when your dog is a true liability.
Why are we seeing so much aggression in dogs? There are as many forms of canine aggression as there are reasons why so many dogs and their owners face this perplexing issue. It is the No. 1 problem facing dogs and owners today. It’s dangerous for dogs because we aren’t a forgiving society when it comes to bites. One bite and the dog could very well be put down, as this recent story about a Beagle biting a young boy demonstrates: Biting is dangerous for humans, too, because dog bites not only hurt, they can turn deadly (it’s rare but it happens).
Dogs do warn before they bite, even though we humans are often oblivious to the warning signals. Some signals include: a stiff body, a closed mouth, a hard stare. It may not look to most humans that a dog with its hair up and running at another dog or a person is actually afraid, but it’s often the case. Many dogs are guilty of a false bravado and they are, in fact, engaging in a distance-increasing behavior. They feel anxiety caused by a situation and they react. They don’t have many ways to express fear but charging and baring teeth at whatever scares them can be an effective way to do that because often the scary thing backs off or even runs away. We humans do not like this choice a canine makes.
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A famous dog trainer said recently that “a growl is not a warning; it’s a gift.” She said that because we’re lucky that most dogs do growl to warn us that they are uncomfortable. Humans should take any growl seriously and instead of a knee jerk reaction to punish it, they could take the time to figure out why the dog growled. Both common sense and science tells us that meeting canine aggression with human aggression only increases the aggression in the dog. Punishing a dog for being aggressive is like coming home to find your house on fire and you try to put the fire out with more fire.
There are concrete causes of aggression. Some include a physical complication (thyroid disease or a brain tumor, for example), inherited aggression, or territorial reasons. Based on my 20 years of working with dogs -– many of them in shelter settings -– I know of another real cause: The mother dog is too often in a highly stressed situation when she has the puppies. Just as human babies born to stressed mothers are often born with emotional or physical concerns, so are puppies. Puppy mills and unscrupulous breeders ensure problems in their puppies by not having calm, unstressed mother dogs. If a breeder won’t let you see the mother dog and how she is kept, run -– don’t walk -– from any puppies from that dog. Buying a puppy from a pet store all but guarantees that your new best friend came from a breeding operation where the calmness of the mother dog is never a consideration.
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