Hi, I just recently started the brain training program and reading up on all of the great information on this site, but I figured I'd post about my particular situation in hopes of any tips given that it's a bit pressing.
Dave is a 9 month old Husky/Malamute mix, and due to a job/circumstance change we had to relocate to a new environment with family and other dogs, probably just when he was really getting acclimated to our other home. We've been here for about a month and a half now, tried class training and now we're working through the brain training.
We have 2 older dogs here, a older female catahoula mix rescue that he loves and plays with constantly, and an older, bit immature male bulldog which usually erupts in aggression. I was hoping for advice with both situations, or just in general so I'll describe how he is with both of them. Given, Dave is young I know and we are getting him neutered late next month hoping that will help calm things down as well. It's just a majorly stressful situation, not being able to even have them in the same room anymore most of the time.
Female Rescue: They get along very well when calm, she acted as a sort of a motherly figure immediately to Dave, which is great. The problem is, Dave wants to play constantly with her and a lot of the time they'll run around and be cool, but even when she's resting or laying in a chair he's CONSTANTLY jumping up to her, squirming around and under her, biting her legs to take her down and pin her as playing I'd assume, but she's also had cancer and surgeries in her legs as well given that she's older. She just can't get a break from him unless he's absolutely exhausted. She gets more and more irritated as time goes on, growling louder until we stop it but she hasn't become actually "aggressive" in response yet.
Male Bulldog: This situation is much worse. When they first met, Roy (bulldog) sniffed around him, Dave rolled over and let him do whatever he wanted, submitting. It took about 10 seconds of looking and sniffing until Roy got to his underside, froze up for a second then just started lunging at him. He doesn't have a history of being aggressive, just whining and headbutting really. Roy would lunge while we tried to get him under control, but at that point Dave had a bad view of him I think. Since then, we've had times where we could all be in the room with all the dogs and everything would be okay until at some point Roy would just start hunting for Dave, trying to irritate him until they would fight each other, ignoring his owner's calls sometimes too. Now, I have to crate Dave and stay by his side just so Roy can travel through the house to go outside and Dave absolutely HOWLS the second he sees him. So far, we've tried walking them around together outside, keeping them calm together in the same room, giving them treats together, giving Dave treats every time he sees Roy as a stimulus, but we just can't get them to be friendly to each other. If we could just get them to coexist, we would feel like we'd have so much more breathing room to really give the rest of Dave's training the time and attention it deserves, not to mention saving us all some sleep.
I really look forward to any input you might have on our situation. Thanks in advance.
