Aggression Management

I recently had a discussion with several other owners of flawed dogs, and was surprised to learn about some of the behavior issues they had each dealt with. Particularly among the behaviorism and dog nerd crowd, sharing the extent of your dog's behavior issues is almost taboo. Support is hard to come by because admitting that your dog wants to bite people or attack your other pets tends to open up a floodgate of judgement from those who think you could have tried harder, or done things differently, or have no business handling that dog in the first place.

Realistically, aggression is something that can't be cured overnight. In most cases it will never fully disappear. All aggressive dogs need some form of management, and management always fails eventually. Even if you take your dog's aggression seriously, and manage it to the best of your ability, seeking help wherever you can find it, you can and likely will experience some sort of management failure. This is where the judgement comes in.

Regrettably, through the internet it is difficult or impossible to express how you've read countless books, worked with multiple trainers and spent hundreds or thousands of dollars and endless hours improving your dog's behavior. People don't normally give you the benefit of the doubt, or believe a management failure was a freak accident or honest mistake. We keep quiet because it never seems to be good enough to say "This happened, this is what I learned from it, this is what will be changing in the future."

Handling Aggression Responsibly

Photo by Erin Koski

Regardless of how other dog people view your situation, responsibly handing aggression means asking yourself some serious questions, and being honest about the answers. Just because you can keep an aggressive dog in your home doesn't mean you should, and just because you can choose to humanely euthanize an aggressive dog doesn't mean you should. It's entirely up to you, whether you can adequately manage your dog's behavior to protect him and the people and animals around him, and whether you can live with the consequences of management failure. Here are the questions I have had to consider for my own dogs:

What Does Management Failure Look Like?

This one feels like it should be last, but I'm putting it first because I feel it is the most important. Both Brisbane and Sisci are human aggressive, as was my dearly departed foster Ulysses. It's a common issue in cattle dogs, a product of their "bite first, ask questions later" mentality. Uly was also dog aggressive, and management failures occurred with all three dogs. 

Management failure with Brisbane and Sisci looks like a small scrape on someone's leg. They both have excellent acquired bite inhibition and don't touch people with more than their little front incisors. Total management failure with them looks like giving someone at the beach my contact information because they decided to sprint past me with 6" of clearance while I was tying my shoe and got a scrape on their ankle because they practically ran over my dog. Of course this is not ideal, and is a liability for me, but it's something I can live with. Management failure for Ulysses looked like multiple deep puncture wounds and permanent scars. I could not live with that.

Does management failure at your house look like a toddler with a bruise on their cheek? Or does it look like a kid with a face full of stitches? If your dog gets out accidentally, will they put holes in the mailman? Kill your toy poodle? Just annoy the neighbors? Can you live with that?

What Does Management Genuinely Require?

What does it take to keep the world safe from your dog, and your dog safe from the world? For Sisci and Brisbane, it means using martingale collars and harness to keep them securely leashed. Sometimes it means using a head halter or muzzle. Management also means avoiding high-traffic areas, we don't go to the beach at busy times. We don't walk through the busy downtown shopping district, or sit at sidewalk cafes. For Ulysses, management involved a crate and rotate routine for him and Brisbane, and ultimately him being crated most of the time for safety. 

Responsible management of aggression means accepting reality and planning for likely failures. If your dog will bite anyone that comes to the front door, then keeping the door locked and confining the dog before opening it may be enough. If you have kids or other residents that can't reliably follow that protocol, then you need a backup plan like a series of baby gates preventing the dog from even reaching the door. If your dog will bite the baby when approached while she's resting, then you need to be realistic about how much "watching them very closely" you can do, and use a barrier like a crate or playpen to keep them separated.

Can We All Live With This?

Managing Brisbane and Sisci means being very selective when allowing them to meet strangers in public. It often means crating them when people visit the house. They have extremely full and active lives, and I don't think managing their human aggression detracts from their lives terribly. Behaviorally they are happy and relaxed, enthusiastic and fulfilled. Managing Ulysses meant taking him on an ever-dwindling number of places where I could be reasonably certain we could avoid other people and animals, and confining him for an ever-increasing amount of time at home while the rest of us worried about when the next attack would happen. It was stressful for my other dogs and my cats, but not nearly as stressful as it was to be Ulysses.

Is managing your dog fair to you, your dog, and everyone you live with? Can your family, all species included, comfortably exist in their own home with this management plan? Will your dog's needs be met without putting them or others at unnecessary risk? Most importantly, can you yourself handle the stress? Care fatigue is a real thing, and a permanent crate-and-rotate routine, separate walks late at night, and keeping a dog and toddler safely separated at all times in a tiny house, can all add up to a lot of stress.

Be Kind To Yourself

I cannot stress this enough. Management always fails, there is simply no way to anticipate every possible situation. All you can do is educate yourself, plan for the things you can anticipate, and be realistic. You will make mistakes. To be truly responsible though, you must do your very best to learn from those mistakes. There is a huge difference between "my dog growled at my baby so I put up a baby gate and now the dog is confined to the kitchen when the baby is on the floor. Now we're working on training the dog to feel good about the baby", and "my dog growled at my baby so I'm keeping an eye on them and moving the baby when she crawls too close to the dog". If you take warning signs seriously and do your best to manage issues, I don't think anyone should fault you when your baby pushes a chair over to the gate, climbs on it even though she can't walk yet, and falls over the gate onto the dog all in the ten seconds you were answering the door. You can't plan for everything, but you can forgive yourself for mistakes while learning from them.

Appreciate the Good Parts

I had a management failure with Brisbane a few weeks ago. We were at his first barn hunt class, and I allowed him to greet a very tall older man with poor dog-interaction skills. Briz is uncertain about tall guys and old people, but is usually fine greeting for a few seconds and then coming back to me for treats. This has been very good for him. My mistakes this time were assuming that a person related to the trainer had decent dog-interaction skills, and allowing Brisbane to interact for a couple of seconds too long based on that assumption. In the future I will be more selective about who I allow Brisbane to meet, and make sure I have him disengage after a few seconds no matter who he is greeting.

A few days ago Brisbane met my best friend's 18-month-old twins for the first time. Briz is very good with kids. He was totally comfortable, gave very appropriate signals, and enjoyed some gentle patting from tiny hands. Old people and tall guys might be scary, but I truly appreciate that Brisbane is totally cool with babies.

"He Just Wants to Play!"

"He just wants to play!" This was the lament of a pensive dog mom, watching her rambunctious and, frankly rude, pup being introduced to a playgroup at daycare. We watched as he charged up to dog after dog, meeting teeth and growls every time. "All these dogs are aggressive!"

Photo by Erin Koski

Though that particular dog owner may never come to grips with it, the reality is that her dog was the one causing the problem. I adore playground kid analogies for dog social behavior, so here's one. The owner saw her dog bound onto the playground, shouting "Hello friends!" He frolicked around inviting the other kids to play, but they punched him and threw rocks at him instead.

What I saw was a kid sprinting around the playground, zooming up to people and slapping them on the back while shouting "Tag! You're it!" He wasn't just doing it to other playing children either, he did it to everyone. Kids that were playing hand clapping games with each other, kids that were reading quietly on a bench, even someone's grandma got thumped as he zoomed by. The kids reacted in predictable fashion, shouting 'stop it!' or 'go away!' or trying to slap him back.

Despite his rudeness, a couple of kids did attempt to engage with the rowdy one and join his game of tag, but he didn't seem to notice and just zoomed onto the next person. When one tagged him back quite forcefully, he turned on them, fists flailing, shouting "DON'T HIT ME!" He was completely incapable of engaging with anyone on the playground, and just whirled in circles tagging anyone in reach while shouting "Tag! You're it!" until physically removed from the playground to calm down.

Break It Down

The rowdy kid/dog seems like he "just wants to play" because he races around play-bowing, licking other dogs in the face, and zooming in circles. The thing is, without any sort of mutual agreement to play together, charging up to a total stranger and enthusiastically "tagging them" is rude. Most of the time, play begins with something like "Hi, wanna play tag?" "Ok!" If you skip this step, you're just running up to people and abruptly hitting them for no reason. Those that respond negatively, shouting or taking a swing, aren't being aggressive. They're just communicating that they don't want to play, and find the behavior quite rude.

If the rowdy one had genuinely wanted to play when he raced into the yard, he would have engaged with one of the dogs that tried to play back when he rushed up to them. Instead, he ignored them when they politely tried to play, and got mad when they matched his own level of enthusiasm. Instead, he was so overly excited he wasn't capable of playing with anyone.

It's Not Them, It's You

If your dog manages to piss off most of the dog he meets when he "just wants to play", he's probably going about it all wrong. If every dog at daycare or the dog park is mean to your poor baby, he almost certainly has terrible manners. Teaching him impulse control and helping him stay calm enough to play works a lot better than blaming the other dogs for not being more accepting of his specialness. They are dogs, after all.

I Got This

I recently read a blog post that described how the author was changing their own perception of their agility performance by changing the specific words they use to describe it. Instead of saying their dog did something, they began referring to their team. "We blew our contacts", or "we popped out of the weaves". I really love this concept, and it really puts the focus on the dog-handler connection rather than just the dog. We're not competing in agility just yet, but I've begun doing a similar thing with my own reactive dogs and their many triggers.

Photo by Erin Koski

One of the most poignant things I ever read was a small note in one of Patricia McConnell's books, where she mentioned that she places herself between her dog and whatever it is that they fear. It's a way to let them know that they don't have to deal with it alone. To me, this feels like it cuts to the very core of my relationship with my dogs; in all things it is my job to protect them.

"Tension Travels Down the Leash"

We've all heard the same thing a million times. Keep the leash loose, but not so loose that your dog can get into trouble. Maintain a calm demeanor in the face of things you know will totally set off your poor pup.

But let's be realistic here. It's easy to act upbeat and positive when we encounter a trigger at a manageable distance. "Hooray, you saw a dog! You get cookies!" That's the kind of training we like, manageable and fun for everyone. But, unless you're very lucky, it doesn't always go that way.

How do you keep your cool when the situation is terrible and you already know your dog is going to have a meltdown. "Shit, we have to walk past that yard where the horrible dog sticks his head halfway under the fence and roars at us, can't get far enough away without walking in traffic, and here comes a kid on a skateboard! Ok, act happy."

"I Got This"

This is what I'm now saying to my dogs as we pass through a situation they clearly see as hellish. It has helped me take a mental step back and go, "wait a second, this is just a regular day on the sidewalk, we're all safe and there's nothing wrong". My focus shifts from my dog and their behavior to my own, and I stop reflexively tightening the leash to prepare for trouble.

Placing myself between my dog and that horrifying muddy boxer under the fence is still part of the drill, but I'm no longer staring down at my side and going "Stay on that side of my, dammit!" as my dog tries to dart around me. Instead, I'm striding confidently ahead because I know the slobbery mess can't get to us. We're safe. I don't need to reassure my dog that I will bravely protect them because this is no big deal. Nothing bad is going to happen to them, I'll make sure of it. I got this.