It Takes A Village to Create an Aggressive Dog

Part II: Responsibility

The first thing we looked into when we got our dog was look up how to train him. There’s a great wealth of information out there in the form of books, articles and videos as well as local professional trainers that you can go to for help, but not all methods will help. In fact, some methods will actually do more harm than good to your dog, and it’s important to be aware of the consequences and risks of any method you take on training your dog.

There’s a saying that dog trainers, despite having different opinions, all agree on one thing: that their method is better than everyone else’s. Although I can laugh at the lightheartedness and truth to this joke, what I’m writing here is not meant to say that one method is the only way to go based on my personal opinion. My bias and opinion aside, I try to make decisions that are based on thorough research and scientific facts in order to educate myself to the best of my ability so that I can make the smartest and safest decision for myself and my dog.

A lot of methods of training that I was exposed to as a first-time dog owner were dominance-based, where asserting your position as a “strong leader” are necessary in order to control your dog and get them to listen to you (this thought is based on some studies that believe in wolf-pack mentalities and pack hierarchies). Now I use the word “believe” because there are recent studies showing that dogs are too domesticated to follow the same hierarchies as wolves, and that wolves actually don’t have an aggressive alpha leader that we all believed before. Regardless, my concern isn’t with arguing on whether dominance exists, but rather, what we do as humans in order to assert this abstract position of power over the animals we have taken into our care.

Starting out, I did try to establish myself as the one in control to my dog: I wouldn’t greet him as soon as I got home (because it was him who should greet me first apparently), I stared him in the eye until he looked away, and I jerked the leash during our walks whenever he’d walk ahead of me. Luckily, I never took it any farther than that. There’s this one experience I had with my dog that has really stuck with me over the year, and it was the starting point of me turning it all around and finding a better method of training that was not only effective, but also constructive to my relationship with my dog. I remember it being a walk on a rainy day that was absolutely pouring out. In a rush to head home as soon as possible, I needed my dog to come with me in the same direction, but because he hadn’t been outside for very long that day, all he wanted to do was dig in the mud. I tried to pull him out the ditch with my leash but he just didn’t want to leave. Then, my partner who was with me said “just snap the leash”. I remembering being unsure at first, but I ended up snapping the leash anyway. All I did was jerk my dog’s head around long enough for him to snarl at me and then go back to his digging. This process of snapping his leash and him giving me a frustrated, annoyed look on his face continued a few more times until I just stopped. I remember just standing there in the rain watching him dig and feeling guilty and helpless. We eventually made it home after a while, minus any more leash jerking or leash handling out of anger. And then that was it. All it took was one rainy day of walking my dog out to get me back to the drawing board to more thoroughly research what I was doing and what more “humane” alternative methods there were. Clearly, whatever it was that I was doing was not effective, and it was definitely something I was not comfortable with.

This all happened before I was aware of how to read dog body language, and how they give us body cues and calming signals in order to convey that they don’t like what you’re doing and that they’re stressed because of it. Corrective measures such as alpha rolls, stare downs, physical punishment, scolding, corrective collars and leash corrections should all be avoided, not because of what training method they fall under, but because of what it does to your dog and your relationship to him.

For example, alpha rolling your dog causes an incredible, great amount of stress, anxiety and fear in your dog. For those that aren’t aware of what this is, alpha rolls are when you force your dog on their side so that their belly (their most vulnerable part of their body) is exposed to you as way to force them into submission. The number one concern I have with this act, is the amount of anxiety a dog will experience from this trauma. A dog being unwillingly forced into submission is the same as a woman having her shirt lifted up in the public for everyone to see. Not only will your dog feel threatened, but they will most assuredly also feel vulnerable, humiliated, scared, and anxious. Some dogs will learn to tolerate this and just not speak up and allow this to happen, and sometimes even put themselves into submission to avoid being firmly grasped and rolled over by you. If I didn’t even know anything about dogs, I could honestly say that I would not be comfortable with doing this at all. And I certainly wouldn’t be proud of myself as my dog’s trainer and owner if they were absolutely under control, but were scared of me as a result of what I did to maintain that sense of control over them.

The real danger to this, however, is that it can cause aggression in some dogs. As I said before, some dogs will learn to tolerate being rolled over. They’ll most absolutely be anxious from it, but sometimes they allow it to happen in order to avoid confrontation. However, if you push the wrong dog too far, they will try to defend themselves, and they will do this with perhaps a warning snarl or even a bite. It’s so important to be aware of what your dog is communicating to you so that they don’t get forced into a position where they feel threatened and have to defend themselves (we’ll talk more about aggression, triggers and preventing it in the next article).

There’s a wonderful artist online named Lili Chen (http://www.doggiedrawings.net/#!freeposters/ckm8) who draws educational posters on dog body language, calming signals, how to greet a dog, and many other great informative topics. Please look it over as it is a necessity for any owner to be able to understand our dog. Although dogs can’t speak in words like we do, they absolutely do try to communicate with us, they just do so more subtly through their body language, and it’s our responsibility to be aware of what their body cues are saying, understand it, and respond it to appropriately.

I know that there are some people out there that will swear by their training methods that have included adversarial acts, punishments or anything else that increase a dog’s anxiety, and say that it helped their dog and that it worked. I know that people will be proud to say that their dog has stopped snarling at other dogs because they “now know that their owner is the alpha, not the dog”.

I find two things very wrong with this.

1. Although it appears that stress-causing training methods have worked on your dog, what you’ve really done is make your dog become asymptomatic

2. The ignorance to understanding a dog conveying that they are stressed, could very well increase the likelihood of them becoming aggressive.

First, let’s talk about your dog becoming asymptomatic. Imagine this: you’re walking your dog on leash on the sidewalk and you see another dog approaching but your dog is not comfortable with meeting other dogs on leash because they feel trapped on a leash. So when you pass each other by, your dog is seeing this dog approach closer, even though they’re uncomfortable and they’re conveying to you and the other dog that they’re stressed, but no one seems to be picking up on their cues. So by the time it comes to your dogs being close enough to meet, your dog decides that they’re too uncomfortable because this other dog is too close. So they react by lunging, barking, snarling and snapping their teeth in the air.

So what does the normal dog owner do in this situation? They might slap their dog clean across their nose, or even fully roll them over on their side and say something threatening along the lines of “NO” in a low, serious voice. After several incidents just like this, your dog stops their snarls at another dog, and you begin to think, wow they respect me as their alpha now. In the sad, sad reality though, what you’ve only done is make your dog think “ok, snarling results in me getting hit on the nose, ok I won’t do that anymore”. On a surface level, that sounds great, but what you missed to understand is that although a snarl may already seem aggressive, snarling is used as a way to convey that they may want that dog to leave because they’re too close, or that they’re upset/frustrated. By punishing your dog for something they do out of fear, you’ve created a negative association with greeting dogs because they get hit every time they’re trying to say “please give me more space, you’re too close”. So instead of your dog pleading to another dog to move away because they feel threatened, they’ll instead think “I’m not allowed to snarl because I’ll get hit, but I think this dog is scary so I have to make them leave and give me more space in another way”. And usually, this next step a dog will take when feeling trapped may be a severe reactive outburst of lunging or even a bite (all of which will be explained in greater detail in the next article on aggression and reactivity).

What’s effectively been done here is that your dog has stopped showing signs of their stress and anxiety because they get punished for it. So it becomes hidden and bottled up until it may become too late. It’s important to allow your dog to show their stress, despite it seeming aggressive. It’s much better that they clearly communicate their anxiety than they hide it.

One of the most important things to know about dogs is that they learn through association, which is why it’s so important to use appropriate training methods that don’t use force or punishment. If you continually correct them in a way that they find unpleasant, that very thing that you are correcting them over (such as how they greet another dog) will have a negative association with it, making the next time they see a dog an unpleasant experience because they’ll always remember that when there’s a dog around, they get hit or rolled over.

Dogs don’t understand that their lunging and barking is “wrong”. They think that they are protecting themselves, and it actually is a way of communication. It’s not a healthy form of communication because it takes a great deal of anxiety to get to that point, but all the same, at least your dog is using words, not their teeth.

The strength of a dog learning through association is one to be taken advantage of, not used for punishment. A dog learning that they get punished for doing something “bad” will never work because there is no definition of bad to them. I find dogs to be entirely hedonistic, they love to play, run, sleep and eat. They don’t think about ethics or falling in line with society like humans do. This is why I feel that positive reinforcement is the healthiest way to train and build a relationship with your dog.

As I’ve said before, dogs learn through association. So when a dog comes across a trigger that they find scary or threatening, instead of punishing them, making them feel more aggravated, you reward them using a desired stimulus (i.e. food or a ball) before the “undesirable” reaction is reinforced. Think of positive reinforcement this way: let’s say you’re afraid of spiders. You’re locked in a room with a friend when you suddenly scream when you see a spider. You’re so deathly afraid of spiders because you’ve had a traumatizing experience with from when you were a kid. So, what your friend does, is whenever you see the spider, before you even get the chance to scream and feel a great deal of fear and anxiety, your friend hands you $100. You go “oh ok, I’m still afraid of spiders but this is nice.” You look again at the spider, and then your friend gives you another $100. Eventually this process will continue to the point where your first instinct when you see a spider, is no longer to scream and feel an overwhelming sense of fear, but instead you say, “ok I see a spider, now where’s my $100?”

In the same way with dogs, what you’re essentially doing is replacing the “poor” behaviour for a healthier, more constructive one. It may not necessarily cure them of their fear, but it will absolutely allow them to tolerate it until they may approach it closer and closer, comfortably. You’re not adding to your dog’s stress, you’re helping it dissipate and show your dog that it’s not something to be fearful of. Remember to be patient with positive reinforcement. You’ll see wonderful responses with a clicker tool, but keep in mind that training is no quick fix. Some people might think that spending 4-8 months on training is patient enough, and understandably so, but really, 4-8 months for behaviour that is embedded in emotion and trauma to be completely replaced with stress-free stimuli and behaviours may take years. You’re building up your dog’s confidence and their associations up again. It may not be the fastest method, but it is absolutely the safest, least stressful and healthiest one.

I apologize for not saying too much on positive reinforce because there’s much to be said and learned about positive reinforcement such as how to use a clicker, ways to target your dog’s attention on you, etc. But all of these should be learned through a professional trainer who can help identify your dog’s sources of stress and help teach you to read their body cues and how to direct your dog’s attention on you without force.

I’ll again talk in detail on how to use some positive training techniques when dealing with a reactive/aggressive dog in the next article, but please consult a professional trainer when dealing with a fearful dog. What I write in these articles are examples of how they affect your dog positively and negatively, and aren’t meant to be the sole source of training information. The internet is a great resource full of wonderful information, but the one-on-one help a trainer can provide to you and your dog is worth more than any number of youtube videos.

All of these things discussed in this article are what you, the owner are responsible for, when you have a dog. Please be open to learning, evolving with the times, and being aware of the practices you place on your dog and its affects on them. Next, I’ll be talking about what aggression and reactivity are, and how positive reinforcement and punishment based trainings affect them.