Aggression

Species: dog | Category: behaviour | Submitted: 27-Jan-07 10:39PM | viewed 1506 times

Suzanne asks about sola (dog - siberian husky, M) (age 0 years, 4 months):

I have an 18 month old female husky who can be quite aggressive to other dogs especially if they are submissive towards her, she stands over them and dares them to move and when they do she does a lot of growling and snarling much to the other dog owners disgust. But with our other male husky she is fine, though they would play fight 24/7 if given the chance. Any ideas to help the problem, thanks, she also has hepatic micro-vascular dysplasia!

Samantha says: It sounds as if she is displaying fairly normal dominant dog behaviour. Her posturing and growling over submissive dogs is her way of saying "I know and you know that I am the stronger dog and this is my way of showing it". This is very difficult for you to handle because other dog owners do not like it!
A helpful thing you can do is to establish yourself as the most dominant member of the family (together with all other human members of the household). Your dogs should eat after they have seen you complete your meal and should not be allowed to beg for tit-bits. They should sleep downstairs- never on your bed or sofa. They should wait for you to go out through a doorway first rather than barge through it in front. All of these things will help you and other family members establish yourselves as dominant in the family heirachy and the dogs as less so. This will hopefully make them look more to you and your responses to other dogs rather than handling the interaction in their own way.
You should take your dog to an obedience class if possible and learn to do simple commands such as "sit" and "stay" reliably. In this way you will hopefully have more control over your dog when she is out and about. She may also get used to other dogs in the class and learn not to pay so much attention to them.
This is a difficult problem and if these suggestions do not help you should enlist the help of your local behaviourist. If your dog does unfortunately get involved in a fight it is not wise to attempt to separate the dogs since you might get bitten yourself! If the problem is too bad you could always keep her on a long lead so that you have control at all times.

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