I just met a guy and this afternoon we hooked up to work our dogs. He said he wanted to work on his young male GSD's dog aggression. We both had our male GSD's on prong collars and proceeded to fuss them and to walk by each other. We both communicated to our dogs "I see him, it's ok, leave it". My dog did fine and I praised him "good leave it, good leave it". However his dog lunged at mine and would have bit him had his handler not had good control of the lead.

I encouraged the handler to be more firm in his command to "leave it" (when approaching me and my dog) and to give his dog a correction when his dog began to show any sign of aggression. He did, however his corrections were, in my estimation, mild.

We then tied these particular dogs off and worked our other dogs for a bit.

A short time later we again began to work the two original dogs. We performed the same exercise. This time, however, his dog did not lunge at my dog but went into avoidance by leaning away from my dog and into the handler's legs as we passed one another.

The handler was concerned that perhaps his dog was being "broken" by the corrections. My feeling was that his dog was aggressive in the first place perhaps because of a bad prior experience. The dog's method of coping was to lash out at other potential adversaries. However the dog was now learning that lashing out was no longer acceptable and since the dog had not really yet accepted the close proximity of another male but did not want to be corrected, chose to instead cling close to the handler.

Do you think my observation might be correct or is something else happening? Thaks.

We can only try to picture how the exercise was "executed", where the dog is now etc. Try working the dog in conjunction with a distraction/reward in that if you have to correct the dog for a certain behavior, this is immediately followed up by somesort of "distraction"/ "motivation", just to take his mind of things. In turn instead of keeping the dog down there from compulsion he forms an association with the "re-directed" action thus the training tool forms part of stimulation, overriding compulsion alone and not leaving the dog "down in the dumps". <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />