We adopted a 2 year old poodle a couple weeks ago. She’s been growling and has bitten our 6 year old daughter. Can this be dealt with through training?

Hi Cindy,

It's been a while since we spoke last, but I have a question about our new dog: but first some background. We have just recently adopted a rescue female miniature poodle that is 2 years old. We have had her for almost two weeks now and have been putting her through the ground work training as taught by Leerburg. She has accepted myself and my wife as the pack leaders (more so me than my wife but still minds my wife very well) and she is a very loving and quite obedient dog. We have a 6 year old daughter who the dog also shows affection too the few times we have allowed her to interact with the dog. The dog is very calm in her crate, calm in the house and comes every time she is called. She is calm around my daughter and us. When we decide to play with her which is just recently since she's shown such great progress thus far, she likes to play growl when running around etc. When she plays with her toys, she growls when we try to get the toys back so I get her to drop it with another toy or food and using the out command. Which is working well. But for now I've relegated her to not playing with her toys until I learn the best way to proceed here. You should know that dog comes when either three of us call her almost every time (this is without any obedience training from us since we've had her). If my daughter calls her she comes and sits beside her and loves to be petted by her. Once called over and told to sit (by my daughter) then she's allowed to pet her and the dog totally shows great affection to her.

Some concerns. When we first got her she did a little growling at myself, my wife and my daughter if touched in the back of the legs or if she thought my daughter was going to pick her up. This was the first day we had her at home and before we started ground work training. Since the training she has not growled at all at my wife or I but does still do it to my daughter once in a while (we are continuing to teach our daughter the do's and dont's about handling dogs). The other day the dog did bite my daughter twice in the arm and leg (small bites but bites non-the less) in a couple minutes when she was holding the leash and outside with the dog to go to the bathroom. She was not being supervised and my daughter says she was going to try to pick up the dog when it happened so I'm not sure if the dog gave a warning growl first or what (I suspect she did since she usually shows signs before reacting). We fully understand that she should not have been alone with the dog even for a couple seconds and take full responsibility for this lapse in protocol.

My question. I am not sure how concerned we need to be about the growling and now bites to my daughter. I take the bites very seriously and wonder if this is something that can be dealt with through better training and more diligence on our end or should this dog be separated from kids all together? The dog does show so many great qualities except for this and I'm not sure how much of this is a handler issue and if it can be totally remedied? We bought the dog as a family pet and want to be able to trust the dog around our daughter eventually. Do you think this is realistic or are we dealing with a dog that might not be able to be trusted around kids?

Regards,
Rene