Emmazool Posted January 10, 2019 Report Share Posted January 10, 2019 Hi everyone, This morning while at the park playing fetch, my dog, who is friendly and enjoys playing with other dogs, was attacked by another dog. There were no obvious signs of injury on my dog, but there was a good 10 seconds where the other dog was on top of my dog being super aggressive and my dog was crying like I have never heard him cry before. Everything was fine but I was scared! The other owner broke them up (I was around 40 feet away when it happened). I ran over to my dog and because of my natural human maternal instinct started petting and reassuring my dog and making sure he was not injured. A couple minutes later another dog started chasing and barking at my poor pup and he looked visible scared and anxious. I again had him come to be and sit while I petted him. He was obviously anxious after these 2 instances so we left the park. I feel like I may have made my pup's anxiety worse by petting and trying to reassure him. I'm wondering what to do in situations like this where there has been an obviously scary thing happen to your dog (dog on dog aggression) and you want to show them you can protect them but you also don't want to coddle or reinforce their fear and anxiety. I'm wondering about situations where there is obvious danger and also lesser dangerous situations where there isn't a dangerous thing that happened but your dog still seems to be scared (a couple months ago my dog was scared of music playing from the computer and coddling him during these moments seemed to make it worse). In my understanding dogs don't really differentiate between what is actual harm (dog on dog aggression) and what is not (music playing from computer) and my thinking is that the owner should behave similarly in reacting to both situations where a dog shows fear and anxiety. So, how can I respond to these situations that bring my dog fear, using positive reinforcement, to mitigate reinforcing fear and anxiety, while also showing the dog I am here for him and love him. Any thoughts, tips, advice would be appreciated. Thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GentleLake Posted January 10, 2019 Report Share Posted January 10, 2019 Welcome to the Boards, @Emmazool. I'm sorry you and your dog had such an unsettling experience. However, this forum is intended for questions pertaining to training their border collies for training on livestock and sheepdog trials. You'll get more responses if you repost in the General Border Collie Discussion forum. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Emmazool Posted January 10, 2019 Author Report Share Posted January 10, 2019 Whoops my mistake! I thought I was posting to the general forum. Not sure how to delete this post but please disregard it in this section! My apologizes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.