It’s complicated, but here we go…
Respectfully, you have a flawed model for canine leadership.
- Dogs don’t care who feeds them.
- Dogs don’t care who takes care of them.
- Dogs don’t like it when you’re “nice” to them.[1]
(IMHO, it’s not so much about choosing to like or dislike: it’s more about their mind-and-brains triggering them to respond in different ways.) Addressing the aggression isn’t addressed by addressing the aggression—it’s addressed by addressing the thing that’s making your dog be aggressive:[2]
We humans typically and regularly fail on this point, because we just haven’t learned a better approach nor a better model for dog leadership. I’m holding my model up to the light so you can look at it yourself and decide if you want to put the effort into learning it so you can change your dog’s behavior with the help of a competent trainer. It’s complicated.
You’re looking at the aggression and you’re targeting the extinguishing of the aggression as your main effort, but you’re way off the mark: you need to have a better model of dog leadership so you can understand how
- you’re triggering your dog to take over as leader, how
- you’ve nurtured an unbalanced dog, who’s been driven to the point that
- he’s giving your mom feedback in the only way their mind-and-brain is able to communicate: by biting.
Human females think the best approach with all dogs is to be “nice” to them, while in reality behaving “nicely” to any dog is what triggers their natural programming to take over and be the leader. Don’t be nice to a dog, be its calm, strong, patient leader. It’s complicated.
Be nice to a dog, and you generally nurture an imbalanced dog.
Be strong and assertive to a dog, you generally nurture a calm, submissive, balanced dog.
You’ve
- triggered your dog,
- nurtured your dog,
- trained your dog
to be unbalanced—a euphemism for “wild,” Nature’s wild animal.
The more things go wrong, the “nicer” you consciously or unconsciously display your energies, and the slippery slope becomes more slippery and more sloped.
You probably don’t want to hear that, but in my model, that’s what’s going on. How you react to reading that will tell me something
- about you,
- about your energy and patience,
- about your leadership,
- about your humility, and
- about the likelihood that you’ll change what needs to change in order to bring your dog back to having a balanced, calm, and submissive energy.
When a dog is aggressive, the human has messed up. That’s hard medicine for most of us fragile, sensitive, emotional humans to take.
IMHO, all human females need to
- dial back their natural tendencies to be “nice” to a dog (e.g., baby talk in particular),
- look at their actions in the context of weak versus strong leadership,
- see how their nice approach triggers their dogs to take over,
- nurtures the creation of imbalanced dogs, and
- causes more problems in the relationship between canine and human.
Do I really think I’m going to get a host of followers by saying that? Nope, but in my model, it’s true, and it needs to be said. Those who get it, or those who are poised to get it will get it. Those who aren’t will get it—may get it—at a later time. Some people will never read this.
The risky part here and its Catch-22 is that because your dog is exhibiting aggression, I can’t go into detail on remediating the issue because keyboarding the problem, remotely, when I haven’t even seen the interactions is a dangerous methodology to attempt: read that as potentially fatal. Just Google
fatal dog attacks
and you’ll see the numbers. 5–7M bites per year. 1–3 fatalities per month in North America.
What’s making the dog become aggressive?[2]
I’m wondering if it’s the lack of strong leadership (being nice does not equate to strong leadership—it’s the opposite, so don’t fool yourselves) triggering your dog to take over, and his imbalance is further complicating things.
Get yourself a local, competent, non-aggressive trainer now. Work with that trainer to get them to educate you and your mom about what’s really happening. There’s a lot of work that has to be done, and it has to be done with both urgency and sensitivity and care, because the dog’s behaviors are the strong indicator in this case.
If your dog is a Yorkie, or a tiny chihuahua, there’s not a huge concern. If it’s a larger, stronger breed, well, that’s why the trainer needs to be contacted immediately, and why both you and your mom need to change your models for dog leadership.
It will take work on both you and your mom’s part. It will take time for the permanence to become permanent.
All dogs are rehabitable. You have to be willing to change. Your mom has to be willing to change.
Get that trainer…
—The DOuGTrainer
[1] It’s not that they don’t like it, but it’s that you don’t understand that being “nice” to them is exactly the thing that triggers Nature’s programming inside them to take over as your leader. Your being “nice” is what translates—in their mind-and-brain—it translates to your being a weak leader, which their mind-and-brain won’t tolerate, and that identification of your weakness is what triggers their mind-and-brain to make the dog take over as your leader.
The taking over—especially when they’re in an imbalanced state—is and can be what leads to the dog’s being triggered to display aggression.
Misunderstanding aggression and its causes further muddies the waters, because it leads you further down a path of misunderstanding that begins to be impossible to unravel due to a host of human insecurities, and, well, as I said, it’s complicated.
[2]Resolved above.