An Italian Greyhound with great canine aggression

Tonight I have been working with an Italian Greyhound who has a problem with barking 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 lunging, 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 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 from 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 owning the dog and what he was allowed to do. do, the inevitable pattern began to emerge. To be fair, it’s not the owners fault 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 you’ve ever met. so it must be true. That advice is that you should socialize your pup and get him used to other dogs. The problem is that most owners interpret this to mean that you let your pup around other dogs and learn from the consequences, whether good or bad. The 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 the older dogs at will and hope the pup knows what to do.

Do you think the mother of the cub would allow her baby to put itself in harm’s way? 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 look after him and take care of him, not 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 ranging in age from 9 to 14 and leave them to fend for themselves? I hope not yet. We seem to think it’s perfectly fine to do exactly that with our pup, who is just someone else’s baby we’ve taken 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 all alone.

Because this is repeated, probably every day, he learns that if he runs to the other barking dogs, their owners take their dogs away from him so he doesn’t have to run into them and be 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 it more 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 the space of an hour, he was walking on a loose leash with his owner ignoring the other dogs and this was accomplished without force, fear, commands, food or toys. When the dog gave the behavior that the owner wanted, she was rewarded with praise and ruckus, when she went towards another dog, this behavior caused her owner to walk in the opposite direction, so the puppy followed her and received praise and ruckus for make the right choice. . It’s as simple as that, when you know how.