My Dog Bites…What Now?!

If you have an aggressive dog, and you don’t want your dog to act out aggressively, you better train it ASAP. There’s no way that your dog who has bitten people is going to randomly start biting fewer people. It doesn’t work like that. 

It’s all up to you, though. If you have an out of control dog, it is 100% your responsibility to handle it. No one else is going to come fix your problem – unless it’s animal control, and you won’t like the way they fix your problem. That may sound dramatic, but it’s what we’re talking about: the early death of your animal and the potential injury of a totally innocent kid, neighbor, or passerby.

Are you going to train your dog or are you a thoughtless jerk?

You have a timebomb on the end of your leash, behind your screen door, or in your backyard. How long until your leash isn’t fastened right, your dog busts through the screen, or someone leaves the gate unlatched? There’s always a mistake. They happen to everyone. The difference in that moment is going to be training. 

You can train your dog to recall no matter what: then if the leash pops off, you have your recall and you’ve conditioned your dog to a muzzle and he’s wearing one! You’re fine. Call your dog back and tie your belt around his neck. Do what you need to do to get home. Your door pops open, you call your dog back. No big deal. The gate is left open? You’ve taught your dog threshold inhibition or conditioned him to an electric fence in addition to the fence and it won’t even approach the open gate. Perfect. 

Training and management can keep you safer if you have an aggressive dog. It’s not perfect. Like I said, in 20 years as a professional dog trainer, I’ve seen almost every mistake that you could make, happen. Most of the time though, it’s people not taking it seriously and just not doing what I asked them to do. That results in bites. A lot. 

I know by now you’re thinking, “Okay, okay, so I have to train my dog, I get it. Where do I start?”

1. Call me first! Seriously, if you’re in Maryland, DC, Northern Virginia, Delaware, or Pennsylvania within 2 hours of Wilde Acres, you should come. If you can’t come here, please call a trainer in your area! If you can’t find a good one, reach out to me and I’ll try to use my network and find someone in your area. Look for balanced trainers that can confidently tell you they have worked with dogs like yours in the past. Anyone who promises fast results and that you will have a different dog with no aggression in a few days or in 2 lessons or with 2 weeks boarding and training is a charlatan. Results in dog training take time. That’s especially true in aggression. 

2. Get a muzzle and start conditioning your dog to it. 
   

   1. Buy 2 muzzles the right size for your dog. I like basket style muzzles and most of the time I use Baskerville Muzzles. Cut the mouth out of one muzzle. 
   2. Put your dog’s food or some treats in your hand, and place the nose of the muzzle over it. Allow your dog to eat the food by shoving its mouth into the muzzle to eat the food.
   3. Don’t let your dog eat food anywhere else for 3-6 days. It eats out of the muzzle or doesn’t eat. Don’t cheat. You’re only hurting everyone.
   4. Add it to other commands as a reward. You sat on command, awesome!: you get to eat from the muzzle. You came when I called, good job: here’s some food in the muzzle. 
   5. Leave the muzzle on for longer periods of time. Your dog will have to wear it on walks and anywhere it will come in contact with people.

Why am I so serious about this? Because if your dog bites a person, no matter how much progress you think you’ve been having, it will potentially have to be euthanized and then you can’t train it anymore. Get a muzzle, condition your dog to it, use it all the time. Don’t be lazy. 

3. Build your basic obedience training foundation. Don’t mess around with this! After your muzzle work is done, start using all of your food in exchange for obedience behaviors.
   

   1. COME: Most important command first. Using your marker training foundation start with restrained recalls, free recalls, callaways from food, and all of the other recall drills at your disposal. You will need your dog to have a rock solid recall. You could have a tiger off the leash and still keep it safe if it came every time you called. Just make sure you call it before he gets to those people across the park. Of course you will have your muzzle on when you are practicing this in public where there’s risk. 
   2. HEEL and other leash skills like loose leash walking and just being chill with you when you are sitting. Teach a solid heel. Most of our aggressive dogs will lose focus on us before they start to fixate on a trigger. That’s the point I will drive my dog’s attention back to me with pressure. Most aggressive dogs or even reactive dogs will break their heel before they lunge, bark, or growl. At that point you are giving a correction for failure to comply with the command vs aggression. The better your HEEL gets the more distractions you can add. When this is in good shape, then you can start taking your dog into situations that used to be impossible. If you have good leash control and a muzzle on, you can stay very safe and take your dog almost anywhere. Even with a bite history! 
   3. DOWN! I think DOWN is even more valuable than SIT when it comes to aggressive dogs. It’s one more barrier to movement than just a sit. SIT is a very ready position. It’s like one movement away from running. DOWN is like 1.5… but also I can see if my dog is relaxed or not easily in a DOWN. I want my dog to DOWN in an instant. No hesitation. If an off leash dog is running at us, a kid on a bicycle pops out around a corner, I misjudge distance and something else goes haywire, I say DOWN, and my dog hits the deck. There can’t be any stubbornness here. DOWN when I need it is not the time to fail. I start this with food and gentle pressure, but eventually the dog needs to know: if you don’t, I’ll make you. 
   4. Continue making these exercises more difficult when you reduce proximity to your triggers. If your dog is aggressive toward people in uniform for example, get your foundation built, get your motivation up, and then go hang out 200 yards from a fire house. As you get closer you will notice your dog become more agitated. Stop there! Let the dog resolve the stress in its own time. Take your time. Remember, you’re safe if you have your muzzle and a good HEEL. 

4. Build advanced obedience. I highly suggest conditioning your dog to an electronic collar. There are a lot of situations when dealing with aggressive dogs that they act differently when they’re on leash or off leash. The electronic collar allows for a distinct separation between handler and dog. The dog believes that it has autonomy and can make decisions on its own. It will obviously be held accountable for its actions, but will not feel like it is tied down. I believe that’s a big difference. I’m not going to detail the way to introduce the electronic collar here and you should really have a professional trainer, but I will say that you should do it in the absence of almost any distractions. Most people don’t have access to a training classroom where there are white walls, white floors, white ceiling in a matrix style multi-verse, but you could settle for something where there are no novel distractions, at least. Your backyard, your front, yard, a tennis court… Somewhere you’ve trained before. 

Consistent management is key to long-term success with an aggressive dog. You have to always be thinking ahead for your dog: Who’s coming over to your house? Who are you likely to see on this walk? Do you have your muzzle? Does your dog have sufficient motivation at this moment for the food that you have with you? Did you close your gate? I’m a big fan of physical barriers, and I love putting gates and pens up in the house. I know they’re not aesthetically pleasing but we’re talking about the life and wellness of my best friend and potentially my human family members. Put a kennel in your backyard. You may not want to, and it may seem inconvenient, but it will save you a lot of stress in the long run. Install one or more tethers in your house. You can use them in combination with a dog bed and a muzzle when you have people over. This is something you could eventually also layer the electronic collar over: for example, if your dog fails its bed stay, it gets a correction on the electronic collar versus leash pressure.