Italian greyhound with strong canine aggression
Tonight I worked with an Italian Greyhound who has a barking problem around other dogs as well as a deep fear of other dogs. It doesn’t matter where her owner takes her, she will see a dog and start barking and lashing out, she has a very loud bark for such a small dog and can go on for a long time. From the moment her owner got her out of the car, she was in full cry, barking, pulling and stressing out.
The behavior and level of behavior really worried the owner. She has had the dog since she was a baby and now the dog is 18 months old and has obviously been acting like this from a very young age.
Now, when you make a dog behave this way from a very young age, there is a reason for it, but what is even more remarkable is that the owner put up with it for so long. Italian Greyhounds are not very common as pets, I have only seen a handful in all the years I have been training dogs and they are a lovely breed, so what happened to this young female to cause her to act this way ?
If you’ve read any of my work you’ve surely heard the phrase “we create the dogs behavior” and the same applies here when I spoke to the owner about the early days of raising the dog and what she was allowed to do, the inevitable pattern began to appear. Honestly, it’s not the owners fault as they just followed all the usual advice that is spouted and regurgitated ad nauseam by every dog owner you’ll ever meet because they’ve heard it from every dog owner you’ve ever have met, so you must Be sincere. This tip is that you need to socialize your puppy and get him used to other dogs. The problem is that most owners interpret this to mean that you allow your puppy to approach other dogs and learn from the consequences, whether good or bad. Owners seem to believe that all dogs will get along with all the dogs they ever meet, so they happily send their new puppy away from them to meet and greet older dogs at will and hope the puppy knows what to do!
Do you think the mother of the puppy would allow her baby to be in danger? No, she wouldn’t; she would make sure her baby was safe and secure with her. So, by letting a new puppy get close to other dogs, do you think you are becoming a suitable replacement for your puppy’s mother? Well that’s exactly what you should do, just because she’s a dog she still needs care and grooming, not to be positively encouraged to leave you and see how she does with older dogs she doesn’t even know.
To put this into context, would you let a three-year-old child go play with a group of children between the ages of 9 and 14 and leave them to their own devices? I hope it still doesn’t seem like we think it’s perfectly OK to do just that to our puppy, who is just someone else’s baby that we’ve taken care of.
What does this mean for the puppy? This means that the company of other dogs will frighten and stress her because she is literally on her own and relies on her wits and instincts to survive. Her new family is nowhere to be seen, so they clearly don’t care about her, so she feels completely alone.
As this repeats itself, probably every day, she learns that if she runs into other barking dogs, their owners take their dogs away from her so she doesn’t have to meet them and be scared. This behavior is then reinforced by her owner who will tell her off for barking and try to call her back from the other dog. This of course just reinforces the behavior because she interprets your interaction as a reward so she does it more and you give that behavior even more of a response and it quickly becomes an established and established behavior that teaches the dog to be always more stressed around other dogs.
Within an hour she was walking on a relaxed lead with her owner, ignoring other dogs and this was achieved without force, fear, commands, food or toys. When the dog performed the behavior desired by the owner, it was rewarded with praise and a fuss, when it went to another dog, this behavior caused its owner to go in the opposite direction, so the puppy followed her and received praise and a fuss for the correct decision. It’s that simple when you know how.
#Italian #greyhound #strong #canine #aggression
