On-Leash Aggression?

[CarolineS]

Dresden has been well socialized with other dogs. Off leash, meeting friendly dogs, she is great. On leash, meeting friendly dogs, she is also great.

She used to get very excited passing strange dogs on leash and jump and spin around trying to get to them to meet them. There is no way I'm letting her meet every dog she sees, so we've been working on this. It has improved a lot with obedience training and she will now walk by other friendly dogs relatively calmly with just a little whimper to show her excitement.

Here is my problem. If we meet another leashed dog that is aggressive and it barks and growls at Dresden as we pass by, she just goes ballistic. She is at the end of the leash immediately, on her toes, barking, growling, spinning and generally returning the insult.

When she locks into whatever is driving her in this situation, nothing I do seems to get through for long. I know the dogs on our street that are liable to growl as they pass and if I spot one coming I ask her to heel and give the "watch me" command. I always have a pocketful of excellent treats with me. When she sees one of these dogs, all training flies out the window. Treats, corrections, commands, all fall on deaf ears, she is in another zone somewhere.

Today we passed two GSD's that always walk together and always make a lot of noise when they pass other dogs. The first time we passed, Dresden was totally out of control. Corrections given on the collar (prong) made absolutely no impression. I took her back so we'd pass them again (much to the delight of their owner who makes no effort to control them). This time as they neared I gave her a "sit/stay" command and tried to shove treats down her face, but when she's like this she'd ignore a sirloin steak! This worked better than the corrections, but she still broke the stay twice and lunged once.

I never know when I'm going to meet another dog like this when we're out walking, so it's not something I can work on every day. At the next level of obedience, we will be working with distractions, but I'm sure the instructors are not going to be bringing in aggressive dogs as distractions. I do need a plan on how to proceed when this happens. Any suggestions? I have high hopes that Dres will be my next therapy dog, but she has to be able to ignore all other dogs, no matter what they're saying to her!

[moondog]

Hi Caroline :)

Would you believe it...my sweet, almost-above-reproach little miss Luna used to do this, too . I'm not sure how my solution falls into the framework here, but I'll tell you what I did.

We have many houses here that are fenced right up to the sidewalk and some of those have dogs that vary from "Hi, how are ya" to "You come ONE INCH closer and I'm going to remove your face". Luna has always been fine with the friendly ones but she went through a period when she felt the need to talk right back and lunge at the others, whether they be behind a fence or on a walk. If they showed any aggression towards her, she kicked into gear and gave it right back. Well, I wasn't having any of that. So the first thing I did was anticipate when I saw someone coming or knew we were coming up on a barker in a yard and prevented her kicking into gear in the first place. Like Dresden, once she got the jump on me...I was at the losing end of the proposition.

I started by giving her a series of short pops (on a prong collar) to get her attention as we began to pass, exactly one millisecond before the moment she thought about kicking into gear. I continued the short pops for the entire pass and at the same time I would talk to her in a low, firm voice and tell her to pay attention to me and to mind her own business. Initially, I gave her a bit more space between her and the other dog by moving off the sidewalk into the street while passing. Once we had passed, if she had listened to me the whole pass she got praise and if she attempted to lunge (which resulted in a stronger pop from me) she got a lecture :D. I have read here a few times about using a sit-stay, but I wanted to keep her moving so there was somewhere for all that energy to go. For her, I think a sit-stay would have been a big source of frustration and counterproductive to what I was trying to accomplish.

She improved, and as she did I moved back onto the sidewalk for the bluff barkers first and continued to give her the distance for the serious ones. Didn't take her long to make the distinction. Before long, she would pass the bluffers without a hitch but I still needed to do my thing for the other dogs. All in all, it probably took a good 6 months or so before she really, REALLY understood. I now take her within inches of a dog on the other side of a wrought iron fence that would like to have her for dinner and she could care less. The only thing I do on approach is talk to her about what a "barky" dog that is. For an aggressive dog on a leash (there's quite a few people out there who just hang onto the leash and don't seem to be trying to teach their dog anything), if I give her 3-4 feet, one little pop on the choke chain and a quiet reminder to mind her own business before they're right on us, she passes like a lady. I haven't had to correct her for a long, long time and I still praise her for every single pass.

I don't know how you'd do it, though, without having some exposure to an aggressive dog. Seems like you need to be "looking for a little trouble" and taking advantage of it when you can ;) .

Wow, that was a mouthful! :D