Category: About Dog Aggression
Controlling dog aggression by using a dog muzzle
If it is possible your dog might bite, or your dog is aggressive, snarky or reactive, or if your dog is in a situation where they are in pain, you really should consider investing in and training your dog to wear a dog muzzle. On the one hand, people can feel more confident when their…
How anxiety relates to dog aggression and why we need to treat it
While you may think your dog is aggressive because of the neighbour’s black dog or the guy wearing that crazy hat, it is now believed by the scientific community that anxiety or uncertainty underlies most dog aggression (1). That anxiety or uncertainty in dogs underlies dog aggression is not immediately obvious. As a result it…
What you may not know about rewarding a dog’s fear or aggression
Can treats reinforce a dog’s fear or aggression? A person that posted a comment on our blog asked us such a good question in response to our article, 5 Harsh Realities of Treating Dog Aggression that we thought it was worth a blog post. The question came after a statement that treats can’t reinforce (strengthen…
5 Harsh Realities of Treating Dog Aggression
On the surface treating dog aggression – if not a simple fix – can at least appear to be relatively straightforward. Teach your dog to do something that is incompatible with aggressive behavior. How hard can that be? Well, after the initial cycle of excitement and enthusiasm, there is the inevitable wake-up call to reality.…
Training your aggressive dog to pay attention might help improve dog aggression
Training your aggressive dog to stop paying attention to something else and shift their to you will likely help to improve dog aggression. People with generalized social-phobia that have been trained to pay attention to non-threatening positive material and ignore threatening material, showed significantly greater reductions in self-reported, behavioral, and physiological measures of anxiety than…
The World’s Worst Dog Aggression Advice
Everyone who has a dog seems to have an opinion on how to handle dog behavior problems and aggression is at the top of the list. Here is some of the worst advice for handing aggression in dogs that you should avoid. Being dominant, being “pack leader”, “alpha”, “top dog”, etc.. Act like Cesar Milan…
The importance of getting your dog’s attention at the earliest stage of aggressive arousal.
We and our dogs are unable to pay full attention to more than one thing at a time. Outside of dogs that are aggressive toward their owners, it means that if you can hold your dogs attention, they will not be attention to whatever else he is becoming aggressive towards. Dogs that are not attending to the threats…
Do treats reward aggression?
This dog was about to be euthanized because he was aggressive to kids and dogs. See what happens when you blow in his face and watch what happens when he gets rewarded for this behavior in this video by the late Dr. Sophia Yin. This is a must see for anyone who is counter-conditioning. Training Aggression? Counter-conditioning…
Do aggressive dogs have more trouble understanding humans?
Dogs are better than monkeys when it comes to reading our social cues to find hidden food and according to this study, Human-like Social Skills in Dogs?, are “unusually skilled as reading human social and communicative behavior”. Yet in a study with selectively bred foxes who were not selected for this skill, but bred to…