Aggression...help!!
Hi
I wrote on here a couple of months ago about our now 7 month old boxer Mollie, and her becoming seemingly aggressive when she crossed over the road when on walks.
Fortunately, she seems to have overcome this, certainly when crossing over the road.
However, she always seems to have been very dominant, even from when we first had her at 8 weeks. In hindsight, we know it was wrong, but we bought her, having never seen the mother with her, or the rest of the litter. We visited the home on a couple of occassions, as it was easily 3/4 of an hours drive away, however the mother and father were always shut outside, and never seemed to be with the pups. The owner told us that the father sometimes played with them but the mother didn't seem to.
When visiting the owner told us that Mollie seemed to be the boss of the pack.
Unfortunately, looking back, we didnt realise the consequences of this!
She has always had problems on the lead since we've had her, putting paws on the lead and jumping up at us and growling. We have taken her to puppy classes, and learnt the basics such as sit and down etc, which she seems to cope with pretty well, although particularly when there is food around - the rest of the time it takes some persuasion!
However, we have noticed that she seems to lose it, the eyes glaze over and she is very difficult to control. In the past, we have always made excuses for her (hormones, overtired,traffic, food colourings etc etc). In fact, we changed her food as a pup from Baker, with all of the colourings to more natural products - on the suggestion of our trainer, and this seemed to make a difference at that time.
We have in the last month had her spayed (before any season as we were told this was best), and hoped this would be a way of calming her down.
However, all of the time she is still being dominant, particularly with my partner Julie. She is almost constantly jumping up and mouthing her, apparently trying to be above her in the pack. She is always biting jumpers and coats etc. After watching the Dog Whisperer ( I know from previous comments on this website that it is not always that favourably viewed BUT we are at wits end, to be honest!), we recognised a lot of problematic dogs that had similar traits to Mollie. Therefore, we have been trying to put her in her place in the pack, below the humans.
It seemed to be working for the first 3/4 days, but she has come back with a vengeance, being very aggresive towards Julie in particulr - even I haven't been able to control her tonight. She ran outside in the snow, got very excited, came back in, was jumping on Julie, trying to mouth her (which she has been constantly doing all weekend), bit her finger and drew blood, and then became uncontrollaby aggresive. When I grabbed her house line, she raised up on her back legs, put both front paws on it, and was growling, snarling and trying to bite me! Fortunately, we managed to get her outside and we isolated her, for a considerable time. When she came back in, it was as though butter wouldnt have melted!
However, putting her to bed later tonight, after tea and a good walk, she started again. Bribery with cream cheese was the only thing that would work to get her in her crate to go to sleep.
We are at our wits end with her dominating attitude and aggression. Fortunately, she has only ever been aggressive towards me and Julie and our eldest daughter (aged 19), and we have sort of been able to deal with her as best we can when she turns. However, if she were to ever go for our 2 youngest kids (14 & 9), I know they wouldnt be able to fend her off, and calm her down.
What can we do!!
Please help - tonights episode was almopst the last straw - she seems to be getting more intensively aggressive towards us.
As I say, this is a trained dog in terms of the basics, but we know this behaviour is unacceptable, and we cannot risk the possibility of her hurting any of our children - the way she is going this is becoming increasingly probable!
Please help - we dont know what to do, we want to keep her but we cant risk the kids!!