About Fear Aggressive Dogs

When people talk about dogs they had to put down. Usually the common thread when describing why the animal had these particular behavior problems are, bad breeding, some sort of abuse, or some kind of mental deficiency. Fortunately or unfortunately none of those reasons have any real bearing on the specific dogs behavior. Fear is normal, we may not like it but it doesn’t matter what we like when it comes to a dogs mind.

Every day many good, loving dog owners have to deal with fear related behaviors. Their success’s or failures are determined by how well they actually understand dogs, and how often they have dealt with that behavior in the past. For any dog professional to say that such behaviors are ingrained or un-fixable. Just goes to prove how little experience they have, regardless of how many years they have been dog training.

Fear aggression in dogs, is a very common problem. Dogs by nature are fearful, when anybody gets a new puppy or dog the common advice is to socialize, socialize, socialize. That’s all well and good, except some people don’t have the luxury of time nor the inclination to spend vasts amounts of time socializing their dog.

A related problem to this is, there are a lot of dogs that it doesn’t matter how much you socialize them. If we don’t know how to relax them in those situations, we will see very little to no progress with that dogs fear aggression issues.

On a final note, we will often have a lot of different explanations as to what caused the fear behavior in a dog, (the breeding, abuse or whatever thing again) those are not exactly accurate. Fear is a normal behavior for dogs that is often misunderstood by dog lovers. And quite frankly most people are not suppose to understand these behaviors. After all everybody drives a car, but how many of us understand how to fix that car when something doesn’t work the way we like.

The Spirit Dog

Copyright © 2009 A.S.PAPSZYCKI

4 Responses

  1. Some dogs may have a fear aggression because they have been
    traumatized in the past and are afraid of people…that’s one more thing that I know why they behave like that..

  2. Hello Janet,

    First off, fear aggression is a normal inherited behavior that’s prevalent in a significant amount of dogs, it fear aggression knows no distinction between breeds. That’s to say every breed of dog can display different levels of fear aggression. This could possibly be one of the main reasons why owners get rid of their dogs. Now, if you take a dog that was born on the more fearful side then introduce some idiots that torment the dog whether constantly or occasionally, the behavior will become exponentially worse. This now becomes not only an inherited behavior, but is reinforced by a learned behavior as well.

    I’m a little curios as to how you wound up adopting these dogs, since animal rescues or humane societies would normally put down any dog that has any fear issues.

    How well does your two guys listen to you in the circumstances that tend to make them a little nervous ? Also unless the male is used to wearing a shirt, you may be making him more nervous by making him wear it. We know it’s just a shirt but to him it’s something strange, which is never good for a nervous dog.

  3. I am wondering how much success people have had with feral dogs. I adopted two who are now about a year old. They are shepherd/ Australian somethings/ Retrievers. Both have fear aggression issues. They were with a pack of dogs on an abandoned vineyard, it is obvious men with sticks were an issue. They must have been an intimidating bunch…We are one step forward, two steps back and I am frustrated…the male especially is becoming unpredictable. I just made him a T-shirt that says “FERAL DOG IN TRAINING PLEASE IGNORE ME” I want to make myself a shirt that says “PLEASE Ignore my FERAL DOG IN TRAINING” but I know people will still stick their hands in his face : ( . Have taken positive oriented training courses and have been working extensively to make experiences with strangers fun and rewarding… Any success stories would be so appreciated.

  4. […] Spirit Dog stopped by recently to share his two cents about fear aggression in dogs. Most of his post from his blog he reprinted in the comments section of Yak Attack. It took me few […]

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