An Italian greyhound with great canine aggression

Tonight I have been working with an Italian Greyhound who has a barking problem around other dogs as well as a deep fear of other dogs. No matter where her owner takes her, she will see a dog and start barking and charging, she has a very loud bark for such a small dog and can go on for a long time. From the moment her owner pulled her out of the car, she was crying, barking, pulling and stressed.

The behavior and level of behavior really concerned the owner. She has had the dog since she was a baby and the dog is now 18 months old and has apparently been behaving like this since a very young age.

Now, when a dog behaves this way from a very young age, there is a reason for it, but what is even more remarkable is that the owner has 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 had happened to this young female to make her behave this way?

If you’ve read any of my work, you’ve heard the phrase “we create dog behavior” and the same is true here and when I had a conversation with the owner about the early days of having the dog and what was allowed. do, the inevitable pattern began to emerge. To be fair, it’s not the fault of the owners as they were just following all the usual advice that every dog ​​owner you know brings up and regurgitates ad nauseam because they’ve heard it from every dog ​​owner they’ve ever met. so it must be true. That advice is that you should socialize your puppy and get him used to other dogs. The problem is that most owners interpret this to mean that you let your puppy get close to other dogs and learn from the consequences, whether good or bad. Owners seem to believe that all dogs will be fine with all the dogs they meet, so they gladly send their new pup away from them to meet and greet older dogs at will and hope the pup knows what to do.

Do you think the puppy’s mother would allow her baby to be put in danger? No, she wouldn’t; she would make sure that her baby is safe and secure with her. So by allowing a new pup to get close to other dogs, do you think you’re becoming a suitable replacement for your pup’s mother? Well, that’s exactly what you should be doing, just because he’s a dog, he still needs you to take care of him and take care of him, without positively encouraging him to leave you and see how he does with older dogs he doesn’t even know.

To put that in context, would you let a three year old go play with a group of kids in the 9-14 age range and leave them to their own devices? I hope not yet. We seem to think it’s perfectly fine to do exactly that with our pup, which is just someone else’s baby we’ve taken in to care for.

What does this mean for the puppy? It means that she will find the company of other dogs fearful and stressful because she is literally alone 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.

Because this repeats itself, probably every day, she learns that if she runs up to the other dogs barking, their owners take their dogs away from her so she doesn’t have to run into them and get scared. This behavior is then reinforced by her owner, who will scold her for barking and try to call the other dog back. This, of course, only reinforces the behavior because it interprets your interaction as a reward, so it does more of it and you give this behavior an even bigger reaction and it quickly becomes an established and ingrained behavior that teaches the dog to be increasingly stressed. other dogs

Within an hour, he was walking on a slack leash with his owner ignoring the other dogs and this was accomplished without force, fear, commands, food or toys. When the bitch gave the behavior the owner wanted she was rewarded with praise and fuss, when she walked towards another dog this behavior caused her owner to walk in the opposite direction so the puppy followed her and received praise and fuss for make the right choice. . It’s as simple as that, when you know how.