Owner Directed Dominance/Conflict Aggression and Territorial/Resource Aggression. Help!

[AntonioMontemayor]

HI Adrienne, our toy poodle has been progressively displaying owner-directed dominance/conflict aggression and territorial/resource aggression.  It’s been quite distressing as he is like Jekyll and Hyde.  Ok and sweet 98% of the time and then suddenly capable of up to level 3/4 bites on us, his family. It’s a good thing that he is very small (10lb) so the damage is minimal. He only misbehaves inside the house though and not outside.  Anyway, we have been told to radically change our relationship with him as follows.. (1.) Attention - Only give attention when we initiate it and only when he does something we ask him to do. Also, give attention only when he does something good; (2) Resources (food, toys) - Once his bowl is on the floor, we can’t add anything else to the food even if he does not eat.  Bring out his toys only when we are going to play with him. We start the game and we end it; and (3) Resting areas/space – He can’t anymore just sleep anywhere he wants in our bedroom.  We are putting a small pen in our bedroom where he will sleep.  Roaming around the house will be restricted and we will also keep him on leash all the time when he's with us.  He will have another (bigger) pen in the living room where he can stay when not supervised.

I wanted to ask your advice on how to best implement the third item above.  (1) What do we do if he refuses to go inside his sleeping pen in the bedroom or resting pen in the living room? (2) When waking in the morning, should I have an activity with him first before putting him in his resting pen in the living room (since he had just spent so much time his sleeping pen)? Or should I just keep him in the yard until breakfast is over (he's not allowed to stay beside the dining table anymore)?  (3) When not in his pens but on leash inside the house, can he basically be allowed to roam so long as he is behaving properly?  We are planning to just let the leash dangle and not keep it tied to us. If he does something improper, how do we use the leash? Just give it a tug to let him know he is doing something wrong?

Thanks a lot for your inputs!

[Adrienne]

Greetings,

Thank you for the details. 

When dealing with aggression that involves bites or potential bites, the best approach is consulting with a dog behavior professional. This is for safety and correct implementation of behavior modification. Now, there are professionals and professionals. The most qualified are those who have made of made of behavior modification their main area of specialty. They are the specialists in the field, sort of like with a complicated stomach issue one would see a gastroenterologist or a person with a nerve problem would see a neurologist. I tend to refer my most complex aggression cases to board-certified veterinary behaviorists or certified applied animal behaviorists. 

I am not sure what kind of professional you have consulted with to provide the plan you have posted, but ideally he/she would have conducted what is known as a "functional behavior assessment." Its purpose is to identify the function of the behavior and this is done by by asking questions, collecting data, identifying what happens prior to the behavior (antecedent) and after the behavior (consequence), developing an hypothesis, and then based on all this info, it is then possible to develop an accurate behavior intervention plan. Veterinary behaviorists (since they are also vets on top of behavior specialists) also offer the advantage of running tests to rule out medical causes of aggression (some medical conditions may lead to behavior changes like aggression).

I am not sure what criteria this behavior professional has used to diagnose "dominance"/conflict aggression (a term which lately has fallen out of favor) please see article: https://www.braintraining4dogs.com/members/archive/dominance/

The term dominance aggression has therefore been dropped by professionals and replaced by the term conflict-induced aggression. 

Dogs with conflict-aggression tend to exhibit somewhat ambivalent body postures (e.g., they may have ears back, tail tucked while aggressively lunging forward) but at least they display warning signs (tensing, growling) prior to biting. Their aggressive behavior tends to occur in specific contexts such as when approached while they are around food, toys, sleeping areas. Their aggression is more of a strategy to stop an interaction they aren't comfortable with versus acting out of true "dominance."

Most behavior modification plans for such cases involve management and behavior modification using desensitization and counterconditioning. You can read about these two behavior modification methods below so you can familiarize with them in case you decide to work with a behaviorist in the future:

https://www.braintraining4dogs.com/members/archive/desensitization/

https://www.braintraining4dogs.com/members/archive/counterconditioning

 

What you are describing here as behavior intervention sounds more like a "rank reduction program" which is nowadays considered outdated. Sure, a lot of it entails management which is important to keep every body safe and prevent rehearsal of the problem behaviors, but it sounds like there may possibly even be leash corrections involved, when dogs with aggression are often very stressed and benefit more from a stress-reduction program along with force-free behavior modification..

 

I don't have the whole picture of how and when your dog engages in aggressive behaviors, and personally, I use quite different behavior modification intervention methods, and therefore they will likely clash against with what your consultant is wanting you to work on. Therefore your best bet is to ask who you are working with for specific advice, since you are following his/her protocol, so you are all on the same page (they should be always available to answer any questions along the way), or even better,  I would advise to work along with a board-certified veterinary behaviorist. 

 

A veterinary behaviorist can also address any underlying anxiety considering that behavior modification alone may not work with highly stressed dogs (dogs who resource guard are constantly stressed by the threat of losing access to their resources). He or she may therefore prescribe anti-anxiety meds to reduce your dog's threshold so that you can more easily work on behavior modification. 

 

I hope this helps,

Best,

Adrienne