My cousin's Westy jumped on my pillow and bit my face the other night. Do you have any advice?

Question

Good morning.

    My name is Erika and I share a place with my cousin who owns two Westys (West Highland Terriers). He adopted them both from a shelter in Oklahoma. He wanted to adopt the female, but the shelter said he had to take both the female and a male. Well, the female is precious. The male is adorable, but he's always growled if he's asleep and you try to wake or move him. He's been scolded, placed in the laundry room or outside, and ignored for this behavior. Well, just this week Duncan (the male) left my cousins room in the middle of the night and jumped in bed with me. He laid next to my head and was very sweet and loving at first. Suddenly (and seemingly for no reason) he growled once (and not near as loud or vicious as he has in the past) then bit me on the cheek right under my eye! I was shocked and froze. In fact, while I know I didn't hit him back or anything, I don't totally recall the next few seconds until I was standing in the middle of the room telling him to get to the laundry room. Well, my cousin was totally furious the next day when he saw my face and I told him what happened. He's contacted the shelter and told them to come get the dog. They foster the dogs into different homes until they are adopted and have 'adoptees' sign a contract saying if they ever get rid of the dog they have to go through this same shelter. I read several of your articles and felt we were probably right in just giving him back to the shelter. However, I had a school counselor tell me because we didn't know the dog's complete background just that he and the female had been found wandering in an empty lot  that we should have the dog trained, etc. etc. I jokingly told her, 'yes, or have him put down.' and she about freaked. I don't know about putting him down, but I certainly am not sure I want to keep him in our house and try to get him trained when he's already bitten. Do you have any advice?

    Thank you!!!

    Sincerely,
    Erika

Accepted Answer

I don’t want to sound critical but this is an owner mistake problem founded on a lack of understanding of dog behavior.

I recommend that you go to my web site and read the article I wrote on my philosophy of dog training. I think you will get some good ideas there.

Your dog is DOMINANT AGGRESSIVE, it's not trained and it has not had pack work done with it.

Read the article I wrote titled DEALING WITH DOMINANT DOGS.

These dogs need dog crates – that’s a huge part of getting a grip on them. They should NEVER come into the bedroom for any reason. They need to be trained with a prong collar and they need to spend a lot of time in the crate.

You may want to read the article I wrote on GROUND WORK BEFORE OBEDIENCE TRAINING.

You will probably find that you have not had the full picture on the steps of training a dog. Your dog must go through training steps before it can be considered fully trained.

You will read why I am not a fan of taking an untrained dog to obedience classes. No professional dog trainer would ever take his dog to an obedience class with 15 or 20 untrained dogs and try and train it there. Its crazy. The dogs cannot concentrate with the distractions.

If you make the decision to learn to train - get a prong collar. You can read about it on my web site. There is an article I wrote (with a number of excellent photos) on how to fit a prong collar, you can also read about the different types of prongs.

I would probably be working this dog with one of my dominant dog collars. I explain how to do this on my web site.

In a few weeks I am going to be releasing a DVD on dominant and aggressive dogs. It will be announced on my Table of Contents.