By its very nature, a dog is an aggressive animal. Aggression is necessary to not only hunt, but also to protect territory and resources, and mate successfully. Breeding has diminished this behavior immensely over the centuries. However, dogs remain more than able to inflict serious injury on humans, other dogs, and themselves.
If you are attempting to properly train an aggressive dog, you are actually trying to reprogram mother nature’s hard-wiring of your dog’s brain. That doesn’t mean that the task is impossible – not in the least. As dog-owners, there are numerous things we could do, to effectively subdue and train dangerous, aggressive behavior out of your dog.
1) It is vital that you socialize your dog. By doing this, you are getting your dog to learn through their experience with humans(other than you) and other dogs. In addition, this conditions your dog to easily accept and deal with new situations and people without fear or anxiety – two factors that rear their ugly heads in the form of aggressive behavior. Socializing your dog is more of a consistent concerted effort, rather than strict regimental training.
2) Seriously consider group dog-behavior classes. These are a great opportunity for your dog to interact with other dogs and humans, as well. Ideally, these types of classes will be initiated when your dog is still a puppy or quite young. Often, an unruly, imbalanced dog will be turned away from such group-classes, because they pose a danger to the other dogs, their owners, and themselves. If this is the case, you and your aggressive dog will be better suited for intensive on-the-leash obedience training with specialists experienced in dealing with these particular dog-behavior problems.
3) Don’t waste any more time waiting for the perfect solution to your dog’s aggressive behavior to fall in your lap. Get ahold of a system, guide, or program and stick to it. Training the aggression out of your dog doesn’t have to be a tall order. However, the longer you wait, and the older your dog gets, the harder training your dog not to be aggressive will be.
A Mastiff puppy aggressively toying with the cat might make for a great photo, but a full-grown Mastiff doing the same with someone’s baby definitely is not. An aggressive adult dog is the result of dog-owners that relish the spontaneous, “cute” behavior of their puppies, yet completely fail their dogs, by hindering their mental development with a lack of discipline. This is a recipe for a dangerous, destructive situation to arise. In addition, your dog continues to struggle with aggression, anxiety, and confusion around other dogs and humans(often your own family). They are yelled at or scolded, but they will NEVER realize why.
All too often, the laziness and ineptness of the dog-owner results in a tragic accident involving their dog. Thousands of dogs are destroyed every year, because of attacks on humans or other dogs. These incidents are readily attributed to the particular breed being “naturally dangerous and aggressive”. That is a cop-out, actually better translated as certain dog-owners being “naturally lazy and irresponsible”. There’s no way around it. The training of your dog has everything to do with the training of YOU and vice versa. If you aren’t fully prepared for the investment of effort, money, time, patience, furniture, frustration, and love that is necessary to properly rear a dog, please do the world a favor – don’t get a dog. To help you make a decision, you have to educate yourself first about dogs. You can visit some of the sites that cover pets especially dogs so you’ll have an idea on what to expect once you become a pet owner.
