When my dog was a pup, she had an accident with a horse so we were unable to socialize her properly. Now we are having issues with strangers. Any suggestions?

Question

Hi,

    My name is Jennifer, I have been reading your site top to bottom over the last few weeks and have found a lot of great information. I was hoping to get some help on which video/book you think would be helpful for myself and our 1yr old neapolitan mastiff "Bella."

    We have had Bella since she was a pup and had a "horse accident" at 12 weeks old. The horse stepped on her toe and damaged a growth plate. She's had two surgeries at 12 weeks and 16 weeks. --- This really hindered my ability to get her out and "socialize" her. Over the past month she seems to have gotten very aggressive towards strangers and any newcomers. She's fine with some strangers and growls and sometimes will snap if another stranger approaches her too quickly or tries to pet her.  We recently started a Puppy class at Petsmart and the trainer had kneeled down next to her to grab her paw and she snapped.  Bella knows the basics of sit, down, stay, come. But definitely needs more work with it.

    I really want her to be a life-long family dog but we will not tolerate a dog that will be so unpredictable with strangers.  She's great with our family and our kids (2,5,12 yrs). Has never showed any type of aggression towards us, only  strangers. I do know being protective and weary of strangers is bred into these dogs but our older dog 8yrs is fine with strangers or people coming and going.

    Any help or advice you can give us would be greatly appreciated! I really like your training ideas and hope it can help us with Bella.

    Sincerely,
Jennifer

Accepted Answer

The best course of action for Bella is to NOT put her in situations where strangers make her so uncomfortable. As her leader, you need for her to know you will keep her safe and by letting strangers in her space she feels trapped and cornered.

Many people find that once they start telling people to not touch or approach their dogs, the dogs become more confident because they KNOW you are not going to let outsiders do anything to them.

Please read this article about becoming an effective pack leader.

This article was written for people like yourself, people who have great intentions but not enough knowledge of pack structure. There are links within the article that will take you to other articles on my web site.

I would recommend our DVD on Basic Dog Obedience and our new DVD on Pack Structure.

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

When you read the description of the DVD on the web site you will find out why we are not fans of taking an untrained dog or a dog with confidence issues to obedience classes like those at Petsmart. 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. Dogs cannot learn when faced with this kind of distraction.

If you read the testimonials on the DVD you will see that our customers feel the same way.

I also recommend that you read the recently written article titled THE THEORY OF CORRECTIONS IN DOG TRAINING.

While obedience training is not the solution to all behavioral issue it most definitely is part of the solution for every single behavioral problem.

I hope this helps.

Cindy