09/12/2024
Meet Molly! 🐾
Molly struggles with aggressive reactions towards other dogs. Aggressive reactions can come from a variety of feelings.
Some times the source of aggressive behavior is fear. When the source of the aggression is fear, you’ll often see a shift in body weight away from the source of fear or discomfort. You might also see signs like their tail tucked between their legs or ears going back accompanied by a lip curl, growling, snarling, etc.
Other times your dog might be feeling angry. Say you’re at a dog park and another dog comes up and wants to play too roughly. If the other dog continually harasses your dog in an attempt to initiate play, your dog may start to feel angry about that interaction and want to be left alone. When anger is the underlying emotion, you’ll often see forward body language, ears pointed forward, tail up and sometimes over their back, piloerection (hackles raised), along with other more overt signs of aggression such as snarling, snapping, lunging, etc.
Regardless of the source, the protocol is much the same. Conditioning a positive emotional response to the trigger. So how might one do that?
To condition a positive emotional response, you’ll want to present the trigger at the low enough intensity not to trigger the aggressive response, and then also pair the trigger with something positive, like food. Eventually the dog learns the trigger (i.e. the sight of another dog) now predicts something pleasant. In doing this, we’re able to actually change how the dog feels about the situation rather than suppressing the undesirable behavior through the use of aversive techniques like corrections.
