Dogs Fighting with Other Dogs

One of the hardest situations to manage is aggression between members of your pack in a multi-dog household.

I have had two dogs who hated each other in my household before, and it is NOT easy. The level of hypervigilance and discipline required to keep everybody safe is totally exhausted.

How do we avoid that terrible dynamic?

The first thing is to very carefully and thoughtfully plan how you bring in additional dogs. There are a few things you can do to make the addition of new dogs easier.

Remember a general rule of social conflict that you see across complex vertebrate species - the more similar the individuals, the more likely there will be conflict.

What that means is that males will conflict more with males, similarly aged dogs will conflict more, similarly sized individuals will conflict more. The reason for this is that animals are always doing a calculus on the potential success of a conflict. If these factors are different, the power differentials are pretty obvious, leading to the smaller, weaker individual capitulating status quickly because a physical confrontation would be suicidal.

So, when you're picking out additional dogs, getting a younger or older dog by 4+ years helps enormously because the experiential gap is very obvious. Getting a male to a female pair helps enormously. Getting a smaller dog paired with a larger dog makes conflict less likely.

Another thing that helps to prevent conflict is to be realistic about your breeds.

Pits are a beloved staple in pet homes but they were initially created as fighting dogs. Cane Corso, Bullmastiff, Dogo Argentino, all of your molosser clade dogs were deliberately bred to be standoffish with same sex dogs.

There's plenty of dogs that were deliberately selected to work in groups together safely - beagles and other hunting hounds, sled huskies, toy dogs and retrievers for example.

Your chances of internecine conflict change accordingly.

Introduce new dogs very slowly, and control the environment so that conflict isn't set up in their interactions. Train them both together so that they develop a working relationship. Favor your older, wiser dog and reinforce their social order.

What do we do once conflict has started?

First, control the environment. Common resources must be controlled by the people at that point. Food is not freely available, toys are not freely available, the space the dogs occupy is tightly controlled.

Increase the number and options for containment. Doors, dog doors, and crates have to be readily available and you have to use them. Once dogs start fighting, it no longer becomes optional.

Never leave dogs alone together, they are only ever out when a human or multiple humans are available to shut down any conflict.

TRAIN THEM. Train them to a high level of obedience, and you cannot utilize a style of training that gives the dog the option to "choose" not to do it. The dogs have to listen to and look to the human in the equation with more reliability than they look for conflict.

In my case, I put both males who were in conflict through the entire Koehler Method of Dog Training Novice program. Both boys could be safely managed in space with each other afterwards with a very high level of precision. It stopped the fighting.

And ultimately, we have to make an overall welfare decision with those dogs who are in conflict - though I trained both dogs to where there was no more fighting, neither of them were happy. Neither could relax. They were constantly living in a state of edginess because though they weren't going to fight since I was there to manage them, they hated each other.

You can change a dog's behavior but you can't change their preferences, only the dog can do that.

Ultimately, though I loved him dearly and it hurt me enormously to do so, I decided to adopt out my cattle dog to a good friend as a working service dog so that both dogs could finally live in peace.

If you're in the middle of dealing with this difficult situation, give us a call, we can help!