Should I have put my dog to sleep? I feel terrible.

Dear Mr. Frawley,

I was just reading an article that you wrote on your website and just felt like telling you my story. My name is Nicole, and my husband, Scot, and I recently had our 3 year old Staffordshire Bull Terrier (Rudy) put down for aggression problems. This has been the most painful decision we've ever made, and I am having a very difficult time coming to terms with our decision. We got Rudy from an out of state breeder that we thought was reputable. We had Rudy since he was 10 weeks old. From the beginning he showed signs of being very scared and nervous of basic things such as bags, boxes, noises, etc... We enrolled him in a very good obedience school, where our female stafford excelled. He seemed to do okay, but his personality did not change as far as the nervousness. We stayed in contact with the breeder and explained Rudy's personality, and they told us that he would be okay. Well, we believed them, so we kept him and loved him as much as we could. We tried to introduce him to objects and places and people in a supervised and calm manner. It seemed that no amount of encouragement and training changed him. We loved him so much that we didn't think the problem would escalate into something worse.

When he was approx. 1 year, he started fighting with our female stafford on occasion. The first couple of fights seemed to be about toys, so we never let them play with toys together, we separated them when they ate, and we separated them when we were not at home. Sometimes Rudy would just walk across the room and start fighting with the female for no reason. This type of behavior would happen every couple of months, and we couldn't figure out what was causing it because "most" of the time the dogs got along and played together, etc..

About a year ago, a friend who has been around Rudy since he was a puppy, was visiting our home. Our friend got on the floor and acted like he wanted to play with Rudy. Rudy backed up and started to growl. I immediately told my friend to get up off of the floor slowly and proceeded to tell Rudy "NO". My husband put Rudy in his cage, where he growled again at our friend. A while later, my husband let Rudy out of the cage and Rudy was standing in front of my husband doing nothing, and my husband reached down to pet Rudy's back, and Rudy immediately turned his body and let out a fierce growl. These were his first signs of human aggression, so you can imagine that we were very concerned. We again called our breeder and they told us that he was just getting older and becoming a "man". We thought that sounded ridiculous, so we called our vet and took Rudy in for tests. They took blood and checked his thyroid as well as a couple other things, which I can't think of at this time. We also scheduled him to be neutered that week. Our vet recommended a well known behaviorist also. We took Rudy to the behaviorist and explained the situation. He observed Rudy for a while and his opinion based on what we told him and what he saw was that Rudy was basically like a paranoid schizophrenic. Which may explain why this behavior would just come out of nowhere and we never knew when it would. He said that as a last effort we could try putting him on medication and trying a few different training techniques, which we did. He was neutered and put on medication for anxiety. While on the medicine, he stilled showed bad behavior by growling at my husband and myself on a few occasions if we would try to move him from the spot he was lying or something similar. So we basically knew that the medicine was not helping. We kept him on it for four months as advised and then weaned him off of it. He was doing really good for about 5 months, until last month when he started a fight with our female again for no apparent reason.

4 days ago we had our 8 year old nephew spend the night with us. This was the first time a kid has spent the night with us, but not the first time a child has been to our home. Rudy did fine until the next morning. My nephew, my husband, and Rudy were all in our living room. My nephew was telling Rudy to sit and down, and my husband was supervising the entire thing. Rudy was sitting and wagging his tail. He put his paws on my nephew and kissed him in the face with his tail wagging, but as soon as Rudy put his feet back on the ground he started growling and barking, and lunged at my nephew and tried to bite him. Luckily, my husband was right there and was able to grab Rudy's collar and lead him to his cage. We could not take it anymore after this. He was a loveable cuddly guy 99% of the time, but when he would do these things, we never knew why because nothing would happen to cause him to be upset, and afterwards Rudy would act confused as if he didn't know what happened. We decided to call the breeder one more time. They agreed that he needed to be put down now that he actually tried to bite a child. It's not like we were dealing with a yorkie or something, Rudy was very strong with a huge mouth and we knew that he had the capability to do serious damage. So, painfully, we decided that it was time that day. We took him to the animal hospital and spent some time with him and then it was over.

Basically, I'm writing to you because although I know it was probably the right thing to do, I feel absolutely horrible, and wonder if we really did do the right thing. A lot of our family and friends can't believe that we did this because most of them never saw the "other" side of Rudy. I still love Rudy with all of my heart, and I'm having a hard time realizing that what we did was the best thing after all we tried, and that we stopped a potentially dangerous situation from happening later on. If you have any words of advice as to our situation, I would very much appreciate it.

Thank you very much for reading my story.

Sincerely,
Nicole