Hi {{first_name}} ,

Seventeen pitbulls. Pulled straight from kennels at the LA city shelters and put into a playgroup together. That was a normal Tuesday.

The dogs most people would not go near. The ones already labeled aggressive. And the single most important thing those years taught me about dog-to-dog aggression is something most people get exactly backwards.

In This Issue

Reading time: 4 minutes

Before anything else, understand this. A dog that is aggressively lunging, barking, or trying to get to another dog is not being bad. He is responding to a perceived threat. Whether that threat is real or not does not matter to the dog. In his mind, something is coming and he is handling it.

Lunging may not always be aggression..  That’s an important thing to consider.  Is the dog being aggressive or is he trying to engage playfully?  Is he trying to “go say hi”?

That changes everything about how you approach the problem.

If you go into the situation thinking the dog is misbehaving, you will correct the wrong thing at the wrong moment and make the dog more reactive, more suspicious, and harder to reach. The correction has to be about what you want, not what the dog is doing.

This is the piece most people get wrong. They see the dog lunge at another dog and they correct the lunge. Pop on the leash. No. Stop it.

That is not the correction I want you to make.

Here is what I want instead. Before you are anywhere near that other dog, you teach your dog what you want from him. A look at me. A down. A leave it. You build that in a neutral environment with no trigger present. You get the dog solid on those behaviors.

Then when you introduce the trigger, the other dog at a distance, and your dog starts to fixate, you engage your dog by focussing on movement.  Get the dog to check in with you…  ENGAGE!  Then when the dog is in a clearer headspace, give an obedience command. Sit. Look at me. And if the dog does not respond to that command, that is when you correct. You are correcting the dog for not doing what you asked. That is a correction the dog can understand because he knows what was asked.

Correcting the lunge itself tells the dog nothing useful. It just adds pressure to an already pressured moment.

When a dog has a problem with another dog and the two dogs are close, the instinct is to tighten the leash and drag him away. That is the exact wrong move.

A dog in fight-or-flight mode has two options. Get away or fight. On a tight leash he cannot get away. So he fights. He will bite the other dog, bite you, bite whatever is in reach because the leash has removed his exit and left him only one option.

Keep the leash loose when you are moving the dog away. Use pops, not sustained pressure. A pop gives information. Sustained pressure gives the dog something to pull against and pushes his drive higher.

Before you ask for any obedience, move. Turn 180 degrees and walk the other way. Do not stop and tell the dog to sit while he is in drive. That is the most common mistake I see on walks. The dog is locked onto the other dog, every muscle in his body is pointed at the threat, and the owner stops and says sit.

The dog is not available for that command. He is somewhere else entirely.

Walk away. Give him the movement. Let the brain reset. Then, when you come back around, ask for the sit. Now the dog is reachable. Now the correction means something if you need to use it.

I want to be honest with you about something. You do not cure aggression. There is no fixing it. What you do is build a system of management that keeps the dog out of situations he cannot handle while teaching him, slowly and consistently, that other dogs are not the threat he thinks they are.

Maya had issues with other dogs when I first got her. She would lunge. We worked through it with corrections and structure. She did not love dogs in her face. She never did. But she learned to accept them. She could lay next to another dog's crate and watched over him. That is what management done right looks like.

It is not a cure. It is a life your dog can actually live.

1. Free Training Content on My Website

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Until next Tuesday,

- Robert