Dealing With Dog To Dog Aggression

Does your dog get along well with other dogs?  Does the mere presence of another dog bother your pooch?  Would you like to be able to take your dog on a walk without lunging or barking at every dog he walks by.  Wouldn’t it be great to finally put an end to your dog’s constant barking at neighbor dogs?  If you’d like help overcoming your dog’s dog to dog aggression issues like these, then you’ve come to the right place. 

In this hub I’m going to introduce you to a new type of dog training philosophy that some trainers are calling, “Emotion Training”… and how it’s PERFECT for working with dog to dog aggression issues.

Instead of the traditional approach to training dogs that trainers like Ceasar Millan use, by forcing dogs into submission via force, Emotion Training takes a different approach towards rehabilitating aggressive dogs by teaching them to remain calm and “un-Emotional” in situations that would normally cause them to react aggressively to other dogs.

Emotion training accomplishes this by using an NLP (neuro linguistic programming) like approach.

If you are not familiar with NLP, it is an emerging type of psychological conditioning program that is used on humans to help them overcome their fears. And it helps them do this by putting emotions on cue, and reprogramming the minds emotional centers to trigger positive emotions instead of the destructive fear based emotions that some people are crippled by like the fear of water, heights, germs etc.

And this approach, while a modified one, is being used VERY successfully in dog to dog aggression cases in much the same way.

If this is starting to sound complicated, hang in there. The process may sound complicated, but the steps you need to follow to use this method are brain-dead simple. Here’s why:

The whole Emotion Training approach to dog to dog aggression is based off of ONE main principle…

Whenever you train an animal a behavior, it automatically is trained to retrigger the emotions felt when it learned the behavior.

You probably already know that emotions can be put on cue because of the famous Dr. Pavlov experiments shared in every high school science class. In these famous experiments Dr. Pavlov would ring a bell and then feed a dog some food over and over again, until eventually Pavlov observed that the dog ended up being trained to “drool” whenever a bell was rung; or said another way, the dog had been trained to feel an EMOTION of hunger on cue.

There is no limit to the number of emotions that an animal can be trained to feel on cue. Take a dog who is peacefully sleeping, yet jumps up and barks aggressively when he hears the doorbell ring. That is a perfect example of putting aggression on cue.

So if you can train a dog to feel an emotion of hunger on cue, or aggression on cue why can’t you put an emotion of peacefulness, happiness, or being relaxed on cue?

The answer is you can!

You just have to follow this three step process:

1. Identify what triggers your dog to react aggressively towards other dogs. Is it the sight of them? Is it when another dog get’s too excited? Is it when another dog tries to take a bone away from him?
   
2. Think of the opposite emotion you want your dog to feel, and train him a behavior that makes him feel that way.
   
   For example, many dogs automatically feel relaxed when they go into their crate or lay on a bed. If your dog is this way, then simply training them to go to their bed for a treat, WILL automatically trigger them to feel more relaxed. In fact you may have already trained them to do this and never realized that you’ve put being relaxed on cue.
   
3. Change the emotions your dog feels when he sees, touches or interacts with other dogs.
   

Staying with the example of a dog who gets tense when he sees another dog. Take your dogs bed and place it somewhere where you dog can see other dogs walk by, but where they won’t walk so close as to upset your dog. This could be your front yard, a park or anywhere. Then start asking your dog to lay on his bed for a treat the second other dogs come into view.

If you do this right, you’ll allow your dog to see another dog, but at a distance that doesn’t threaten your dog and bother him. By repeatedly asking your dog to lay on his bed when he sees other dogs for a treat, his emotional brain automatically forces him to start seeing other dogs as a hint that GOOD things are going to happen instead of bad.

By practicing this over and over, and slowly allowing other dogs to come closer and closer, you train your dog to stop seeing other dogs as threats, and instead think of them as precursors to a reward.

Of course this is just one example, and it requires you to adapt it for different dogs according to what they are bothered by, and what types of rewards they like, but the principles are rock solid and work almost 100% of the time when applied correctly.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Emotion Training can help your dog’s aggression check this out!