Our adopted a 2 year old female Bouvier has become very aggressive to strangers. Do you think she can ever be safe?

Question

The problem in a nutshell is aggression towards people. I need to decide how to try to handle it, or return the dog to the breeder.

    About a month ago my wife and I adopted a 2 year old female bouvier. She is the 3rd bouvier we have owned, all from the same breeder, all adopted as adults. This dog was originally in a home with 3 other bouviers, and reportedly had developed aggression towards the other dogs which is why the original owner gave her up. She reportedly had never exhibited any aggression towards people.

    She went from her original owner to the breeder, who had her for about 3 weeks and decided that she would be a good fit for our home. We met the dog and liked her, and we were around the dog for two days at a dog show. She met many strangers and was always appropriate, but on the timid side. So we decided to take her.

    At our house she was initially shy but accepting of strangers. Then, she began being aggressive towards them. By this I mean that on lead she would explode, barking and snarling and pulling against the pinch collar trying to get at them. I had enrolled her in obedience class, and she did fine the first two classes. At the end of the third class she exploded at one of the instructors. At the start of the fourth class another instructor came within 15 feet and she exploded.

    An interesting thing to me about this behavior is that it often is a 'delayed reaction'. That is, the dog lets someone into her space with no initial reaction, and then after a couple of minutes blows up.

    We got together with the breeder and a trainer friend of his, and they observed the behavior. The breeder was quite surprised at the ferocity. They think that the dog is confused about her role in the pack, and is trying to be the alpha. They think that if my wife and I better establish the pack order, the problem will go away. Admittedly we were doing some wrong things (evident from reading your www site), but we were also doing some right things as this is not the first adult bouvier we have taken in and neither of our other dogs ever did anything like this.

    We respect the breeder but we also realize that he may be not completely objective in evaluating one of his own dogs.

    So, the questions are:

    1) Does this sound like an alpha issue to you, and if so which of your instructional materials are going to probably be most helpful to us?

    2) What is your (admittedly a guess) opinion of the prognosis here? Meaning do you think that at best this would end up being like the dogs you describe as handler-biters, e.g. saved from euthanasia but always under tight security, or instead that this dog might end up being ?safe? with guests in the house?

    Thanks a lot!

    Tom

Accepted Answer

I have owned tough dangerous dogs my entire adult life (I am 59) I have owned dogs that were truly dangerous dogs. I have never had an accident with these dogs because I train these dogs, they respect me and I control the environment.

I would never allow a dog like this to be loose in an area where I had strangers. That would be like allowing a 12 year old to play with a loaded pistol.

So the question comes down to you. Are you willing to control this dog? Are you willing to establish leadership? My guess is this is fear aggression and not dominance. But even still, a fear bite hurts just as bad as a dominance bite.

A dog like this needs to be severely corrected for every instance of unwarranted aggression. Read the article I wrote on THE THEORY OF CORRECTIONS IN DOG TRAINING. Your dog's correction needs to be one it remembers the next time it decides to act stupid. I can't tell you if you can do this. I don’t know you.

I can tell you that I would train this dog with a remote collar and a muzzle if it were my dog.

I also think that you don’t really understand normal dog training, I don’t mean this as a insult, just a fact. If you did you would not be writing me. So with that said you need to educate yourself if you plan on keeping this dog. I have excellent FREE eBooks on my web site – read them. Also here are some DVDs to help:

Basic Dog Obedience
Dealing with Dominant and Aggressive Dogs
Remote Collar Training for the Pet Owner

So in closing, only you can answer your questions. I have the answers but I don’t know how much work you are willing to put into this.