Learning Puppy
puppy learning bad manners?
So I have a 3 month old german shepherd puppy who loves to play with other dogs, but on my street, almost every house has an unruly dog.
So whenever I walk my pup, we always run into an aggressive or hyperactive dog. Now my pup is starting to bark and growl at them.
For ex., today, we bumped into an aggressive rottie that one of my neighbors has. My pup has always ignored him, but the rottie was tense and zoned in on my pup while the owner held him back and my pup started pulling on the leash and growling. I said NO and he stopped and we kept on walking.
What do I do? When he’s 90 pounds and starts getting aggressive to every dog on the block, I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to hold him back the way I did today/
The barking could be be aggressive/territorial, and it can also be frustration because he wants to go do a meet and greet and he’s not being allowed. I’ve seen plenty of situations where it was the scenario that triggered the growling, barking, and pulling. The dogs will often react to eachother very differently when the circumstances change and there isn’t that tension and frustration from one dog that’s guarding the boundaries of its territory and the other that’s being restrained by a leash.
All beside the point though. Your real problem is a common one: people often think that to be properly socialized a dog has to play with other dogs as often as possible. As long as we allow this and it’s always a positive experience, you end up with a well-adjusted, friendly adult dog with no aggression issues. Right? Or maybe not.
Alot of people acting on this theory raise their puppies in the dog park, thinking that heavy doses of that environment will create a dog that interracts with other dogs in a healthy way. If not that, they pretty much just let their pup play with other dogs on a regular basis from a very young age. And yet, many of them STILL end up with dogs that become un-controllable when passing other dogs, whether it’s due to aggression, frustration, or general overexcitement.
In my opinion when dogs have too much play time and too many opportunities to interract on their own terms and make their own decisions about what to do around other dogs from an early age, even if the intentions are good, it sparks its own unique set of behavioral problems. For alot of dogs that get raised this way, the presence of another dog in the environment ALWAYS triggers excitement because from the beginning we always associate it with excitement and never with calmness. They are conditioned to focus on the presence of the other dog, not to ignore it. It becomes compulsive. They have learned that there is so much fun to be had in interracting with other dogs that they cannot pass up an opportunitiy to do it. This is why alot of them will go crazy with the frustration of not being allowed to go play every time they want to.
In other cases they have been put through so many scenarios where they were allowed to charge forward and do whatever their instincts told them to do that they now make no distinctions. When there is another dog close by, they are now the boss. You are a spectator. They step up in front of you and take the lead and make a decision for themselves about how to handle the situation and act accordingly. This is how they think it’s supposed to go. Being restrained by the leash only increases the frustration level and excitement level in the situation.
You need to condition your pup to ignore other dogs. That means play time should end and she should not be interracting with other dogs at this point. She’s had enough of that. Up until now we associated other dogs in the environment with fun, excitement, with your puppy being cut loose to go make decisions without your guidance. We need to change that and teach that when the puppy is moving in sync with us other dogs and other humans are meaningless background chatter, nothing he needs to be concerned about. We need to work on that ALOT, like maybe for the next several months. Then once your dog has learned to be calm in these situations you can introduce her to other dogs on your terms.
You will need to use food as a high value reward and train at a distance where she clearly notices another dog in the environment but is not close enough yet to go into high alert. Work with her in obedience drills until she’s focused on you and not even noticing that other dog. Then once you have her focused on you at that distance, start to gradually close it and practice scenarios where you continually ask her to ignore the other dog and give you her attention.
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