I have a dog that is very reactive; yet this was not always the case. When I first adopted Holly (the brown dog) she was really excitable and sometimes her enthusiasm ended in bodily injury, mostly mine. Nevertheless, she was a one year old playful pup. Because she had been locked up in a bathroom for most of her life, never trained, walked or socialized, she had really bad manners, with both people and dogs. I believed that I could train her how to interact properly with humans and that letting her work out her communication with other dogs would be the fast track to teaching her dog park etiquette. So, I allowed other dogs at the park to correct her and often to give her a little roughing up. She eventually started fighting back and now I have a fear-aggressive dog.
The most important thing I realized is that if you have an aggressive dog, the only way to control them is training them to do other things than aggress. Give your dog fun things to do and let them know that you make good decisions by not setting them up to fail. Honestly, I was the one who needed training. I could have avoided many of her problems if I’d known how to direct her energy properly. Afterall, often dogs will teach each other to behave like wild animals, whereas we want to teach them to behave like pets. You often hear people say in reference to dogs showing aggression toward each other, let the dogs work it out…and in some situations this is true. However, in the case of badly socialized dogs, they often make bad choices based on lack of experience. I mean would you let your kids work things out in the playground if one of the kids was a bully and punching the other kids in the face? Of course not, so don’t let your undersocialized dog just work it out.
