Living With Dogs (9 page)

Male dogs who have not been desexed are more likely to be boss dogs than females, but I have seen plenty of dominant bitches. About 15 per cent of the animals I see are boss dogs, and the animal’s size has little bearing on its desire for dominance. A high number of lapdogs write their own tickets. One of the most savage dogs I’ve encountered was a Chihuahua. The Rottweiler weighs at least 40 kilos and takes some stopping but, because of its smallness, the Chihuahua can at least be managed.

The vet who had the practice before me used to say, ‘Never trust a Chow.’ They’re mercurial, highly dominant dogs. When I voiced this opinion at a dog club, a Chow breeder stood up and said it was rubbish. I replied, ‘One day you’ll see what I mean.’ The following week at a show the breeder was attacked by his own Chow in the ring. The next time I went to the dog club, the owner still had his arm swathed in bandages, and he required plastic surgery.

The most common boss dog is the one who has its way, regardless of the owner. Everything is fine until you try to correct the dog. He will sit on your favourite chair, and if you try to move him, he’ll bite you. Dogs will also bolster their control by ‘food fadding’ — refusing to eat the food put in front of them. By not eating the food, they engender panic in the owner, who rushes out to buy different kinds of food, which produce the same response from the dog. They exercise this quite subtle control over their owner via the dinner plate.

The owner usually says, ‘I love him, even though he’s naughty,’ and has all kinds of excuses for allowing the bad behaviour to go on. It is a simple case of the dog being allowed to exert authority. The dog is perfectly behaved as long as you never do anything to control it, but the minute it has to submit to something in the vet’s surgery, the problem shows up. Owners try to explain away the dog’s dominance by saying the dog is nervous, after being frightened by a particular experience, often with a vet. They claim the dog has never been the same since something you, or someone else, did to him. No-one ever says, ‘The dog is biting to show his dominance, and I let him get that way.’ The problem stems from the fact that the owner has never taken control.

The mark of whether a dog is a boss dog is how it behaves outside the family. Boss dogs still want to be dominant when they are brought in to me at the surgery. When the dog snarls, the owner thinks it is because the dog doesn’t like vets, but it is because the dog is dominant. Most people won’t accept that their dog has become a boss dog, because it is a reflection on their failure to put the dog in its place. When I examine the dog, and he or she snarls, it is not because I’m a vet, but because I’m taking excessive liberties and he or she is saying, ‘I’m the boss dog, how dare you touch me!’

A woman came to the surgery once with a Blue Heeler. Before I did anything, she said, ‘I’d better put a muzzle on him, he doesn’t like you.’ She put the muzzle on, and when I went to touch the dog its eyes bulged, and it rumbled and growled. The woman said, ‘Butch, don’t be silly,’ but Butch didn’t give a damn. He was determined I wouldn’t touch him. Every boss dog will get ill one day, and someone has to handle them. The vet is supposed to be like Mandrake the Magician, gesturing hypnotically at the dog, which suddenly melts. When Butch was brought home at eight weeks, he should have been clearly told who was boss. Owners try to rationalise their dog’s behaviour, or give excuses for it. It’s the phase of the moon, or the hot weather, or the cold weather — everything except the truth.

A woman came to see me with a young Cocker Spaniel that had a problem in its mouth. When I went to examine the dog, it tried to bite me, and the woman explained it had been acting aggressively since it went to the clipper’s. I asked whether it was a boss dog. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘he’s always been like that.’ When I suggested that she should assert herself more, she replied, ‘But I’m a cat lady, Dr Wirth.’

Dogs don’t respond to being treated like cats. The woman had taken on her daughter’s dog, even though she didn’t like dogs. She was treating the dog like a cat, and the dog was in charge. It was a classic case of someone being dumped with a dog they didn’t like and couldn’t control.

I’ve had other dogs come into the surgery that are so aggressive that neither I nor the owner could control the animal. One young male brought in a Rottweiler to be desexed. The owner had the dog on a long piece of rope, but no-one could get within a bull’s roar of it. If anyone went near him, he went to eat them. Other clients in the waiting room were terrified, and standing up on the benches. When we asked the owner to reel the dog in he said he couldn’t, because he was frightened of it. We couldn’t handle the dog, so we suggested the owner take it away, get some control over it, and then we’d desex it. We never saw him again.

On another occasion an owner brought in a Cattle Dog with a broken leg. He had been hit by a car. We sedated the dog, but 24 hours later, when the shock and sedation had worn off, we were confronted by a savage dog. We told the owner we couldn’t handle the dog, and sent him down to the kennels. The dog greeted him with a resounding bite, and his immediate response was to demand that we destroy the dog. I pointed out that I would have difficulty handling the dog to destroy it. ‘I don’t care,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to see it again.’ He walked out of the surgery, leaving us with a raging dog in the kennels and instructions to kill it — if we could get near it.

Some clients keep getting boss dogs, and as soon as they lose an animal they come back with one just as bad. More boss dogs seem to be owned by women, perhaps because women are often reluctant to be assertive with the dog. I’ve even known situations where the husband can’t get in to bed with his wife because the dog is on the bed, and threatens to bite the husband when he gets in. It fascinates me that in some cases the woman does nothing to retrieve the situation.

Sometimes a dog’s dominance can stem from the owner’s neglect and failure to train the dog or correct its behaviour early in the dog’s life. I remember being called to deal with a savage Kelpie who was fenced in the backyard. If anyone came near him he became madder and madder. The owner called me to the house because the dog was too violent to bring into the surgery. When I got there the dog snarled and threw itself at the fence. I asked the man how he fed the dog. ‘I throw food out of the window,’ he said. Why did he keep the dog? ‘Because I love him,’ he answered.

I suggested we put the dog down, but we couldn’t get near him. I carry a stick with a lasso on it, for catching recalcitrant dogs, and eventually we were able to get the lasso around the dog’s head and pin it down long enough for me to give it an injection. The dog was seven, and he’d been desexed, but it made no difference. He had inherited aggression, which worsened with age. Even the worst temperament can be modified if you get to the dog when it’s young, but this owner had no control and he was clearly terrified of the dog.

This is an extreme example of a boss dog, and the owner had only compounded the dog’s existing problems. Initially the man had bought an unsatisfactory dog, which proved too much for him. His answer was not to dump the dog, but ignore it, and then he covered that by saying he loved the animal. Instead of seeking guidance on the dog he simply left it in the backyard, and the animal went from bad to worse.

People get sick of their dog’s uncorrected behaviour, but the owners are part of the problem. Often people who have difficulty asserting themselves in daily life tend to choose assertive dogs. Then you get the owner saying the dog has a behaviour problem.

Having a dog desexed may also help to curb its dominance. People think that desexing is done solely to stop reproduction, but it also removes the secondary sex characteristics, such as aggression, assertiveness and wanting to get out to mate, which all result from the male hormone. One client was very upset about the abnormal sexual behaviour of her Jack Russell: it was dominant, used to bite people, and tried to mount everything in sight, including human legs and the cat. We desexed the dog and the problems disappeared.

Dogs are very aware of the pecking order within a family. I’ve known cases where a dominant dog will struggle with the youngest child to make sure it doesn’t get pushed into the bottom spot in the social order. Whenever the child tries to assert him or herself, the dog will try to put them back into bottom place. If the child is more assertive, they will be challenged by the dog, but will eventually topple it. Dogs will never threaten you if you’re the boss, but if the dog has reached the stage of believing it is the boss, then you’ve got problems.

Allowing the animal to become a boss dog is the primary reason for behaviour problems in dogs. The second reason is that the dog’s instinctive behaviour has never been modified by the owner. When dogs dig up plants, rip down the washing, or piddle in the house, they’re just being dogs, but you have to modify that behaviour by teaching your dog to look after the house and the garden.

Dogs will also behave according to their breed characteristics. An owner may think their dog has a behavioural problem if it chases cars, but generally the dogs that chase cars are those that were bred to chase, like Border Collies and Kelpies. Kelpies are bred to react to movement, and it is a corruption of a natural instinct for them to chase cars, rather than sheep or cattle. Modify the behaviour and fence the dog in, so it doesn’t get run over chasing cars.

Start teaching a dog when it is young. If a puppy does something wrong in your presence, like digging a hole in the garden, smack it lightly over the bridge of the nose, or on the rump with an open hand. This simulates the mother’s bite. A mother will growl if she doesn’t like what the puppy is doing. Then she nips, to reinforce the message. Adapt this technique, and the dog will soon understand when you are angry. Your growl means what their mother’s did — that you’ll act if they don’t do what you want them to. You should progress rapidly from smacking to using voice control.

The minute a puppy is brought home at eight weeks, apply pressure so that it knows who is boss dog. The puppy should know the rules before it is six months old, and those rules should be kept, because dogs need consistency. If you don’t set the rules early in your relationship, you’ll spend many years repenting.

A dog’s temperament becomes extroverted at about 12 weeks of age, and it will show the dog’s tendency to be dominant, aggressive or fearful. You must treat fearful dogs with extreme patience and encouragement, and let them know that you, the ‘boss dog’, are supportive. Unless you’re the ‘boss dog’, you can’t help the dog overcome its fear. Socialisation may help, but if the animal is fearful of humans, or other dogs, you must expose it regularly to that fear, and through familiarity, it will gradually lose that fearfulness.

Like humans, some dogs are born with a bad temperament, and they can be identified almost immediately. While owners can often get the animal to behave for them, in many cases the dogs won’t be handled by anyone else. One sign of this poor temperament is ‘fear aggression’, where the dog will show its fear in threatening situations by becoming excessively aggressive. Because the dog is in fear, and you persist in frightening it, it will bite you.

Fear-aggressive dogs respond badly to a situation they’re unhappy about. When the dog is scared, it will excite the ‘fight-or-flight’ syndrome, and the dog will either stand its ground and defend itself, or it will run away. You must work out which situations frighten the dog, and gradually try to modify the behaviour. It takes a great deal of patience to help the dog to learn that there are more dogs than itself, and more humans than its owner. The earlier you start this desensitisation, the better the result. Sometimes children aggravate the dog’s fear, and risk being bitten, but parents must warn their children about handling dogs. A good parent will train the family dog, and also educate their children about what to expect from the dog.

Some fearful dogs cling to the owner’s lead for security, and become frightened when the lead is taken off. Again, you must try and build the dog’s confidence by removing the lead when there is no-one else in the park. Encourage the dog to explore, while keeping its eye attuned to you.

Many so-called behavioural faults in dogs are no different from those found in children. They all like attention, and they need to be noticed by the leader. Barking is a dog’s way of communicating that it is happy, disturbed or wary.

The greatest number of dog complaints to local councils involve barking. The electronic collar, which costs around $300, has been proposed as a high-tech way of stopping dogs barking. It is claimed that the collar works by giving the dog a shock each time it barks, or by releasing an unpleasant odour. I have found that the collars fail to work because the central ingredient is missing, namely leadership from the ‘boss dog’ to fix the cause of the barking. People are trying to overcome their failure to train their dog by using some ‘whizz-bang’ electronic device. In some cases the devices temporaily stop the dog barking, but many animals don’t react, or they cease for a while, then start again. You cannot teach a dog by excessive aversion therapy and there is also the issue of cruelty, with many states banning their use.

Ultimately the collars won’t work because they don’t follow dogs’ instinctive manner of learning, which is to take leadership from the boss dog. Dogs still possess the same make-up they’ve always had, and you defy a dog’s behavioural instincts at your own peril.

Dogs need to be taught about barking at a very early age. From day one, every time your dog barks, investigate why it is barking. If it is barking for no apparent reason, you should scold it. You must make it clear that it is not acceptable for the dog to bark at possums at 3 am. The dog will quickly learn when not to bark. At the same time dogs need to be allowed to be dogs, and that includes barking when something strange upsets them. If my dogs bark in the middle of the night I get up and investigate the cause straight away.