If you have a dog who displays aggressive tendencies is can be extremely stressful having to worry about when or if they are going to attack a dog. There are many reasons that this aggressive behavior can be occurring, including, improper socialization, dominate/territorial behavior, the dog’s breed, etc. However, I am not here to share with you all the reasons your dog may be acting aggressively, I am here to give you some tips of how to handle your aggressive dog when you are walking them out in public.
- Do everything in your power to keep your dog’s attention on you. When they are focusing on you, they may not notice if other dogs are around.
- If another dog begins to approach you, pull your dog’s leach sideways. If you pull the leash straight back, you will be giving your dog control and that is the last thing you want to do if you have an aggressive dog. By pulling the leach sideways you will be giving yourself the most control and your dog the least.
- If you get the feeling that your dog is about to start acting up, try your best to distract them with specific noises that you know your pet will respond to without yelling or screaming.
- Work to keep your dog away from any other dogs that may be around. If you notice that your dog is behaving well around the other dogs and is keeping their attention on you, offer them a treat for this good behavior.
- Ask a friend if they would mind meeting you at a park (or any neutral spot) with their own dog. Bring a towel with you and keep both dogs on a leash. Keep both dogs several feet apart and rub the towel all over your friends dog in order to get the dog’s smell all over it. Then bring the towel to your dog and allow them to smell the dog’s scent without the dog’s having any contact.
- Try just hanging out with the two dogs several feet apart, until they stop paying attention to each other. You just want them to have a nice experience together without actually coming into contact with each other. The idea of this is to give your dog a good experience with another dog so they can begin to understand that other dogs can be their friend.
- Try this several times until it becomes no big deal for the dogs to be together, then you can try letting them meet each other up close and personal, once they have gotten accustomed to being around each other.
Depending on how well this goes, you will either go back to the separate space haning out time, or you’re dog may have just made a new best friend! Hopefully the latter is the case, but it may not be, and you shouldn’t get discouraged, your dog just may need more time to adjust to being around another dog. In any case, don’t give up, keep trying to assimilate your dog with other dogs because canine friends can be an extremely beneficial thing for both you and your dog.
