Has your dog suddenly become aggressive? Is your dog becoming aggressive with age? Are you asking yourself why is my dog suddenly aggressive towards me? You’ve been noticing how your dog is suddenly aggressive to other dogs in the house, around the neighborhood, in the park or has it become aggressive at night? This sudden change in dog behavior is critical to address before your dog suddenly turns aggressive towards a child, the elderly or some other indefensible individual or animal leading to catastrophe.
If your dog has suddenly become aggressive, then it is worth you understanding that the vast majority of aggressive behavior is the result of the dog attempting yet failing to escape a stimulant that goads him, which is why it reacts aggressively against this stimulant.
Keeping the dog and the negative stimulation in each other’s presence only reinforces the aggression. Better than calling a dog “territorial” or “dominant”, “alpha”, “possessive” or “predatory”, “It is more productive to simply identify the specific behavior of concern and the cause of that behavior – that is, what evokes it and what reinforcers are maintaining it,” explains dog behavioralist Dr. James O’Heare in “Aggressive Behavior in Dog: A Comprehensive Technical Guide for Professionals”. So, to begin resolving the issue of sudden dog aggression, you should seek to identify what stimuli evoke the dog’s behavior are whether you can remove them or the dog from them, rather than maintain them in place and ensure a reinforcement of the dog’s unwanted behavior.
What Ends a Dog’s Sudden Aggression?
Prevention of any reinforcement of aggression is the ideal solution to the problem of a dog suddenly becoming aggressive. In other words, being always alert to what may stimulate a dog to aggressive escape. If you see your dog become ambivalent, meaning confused, unsure whether to appease or engage with whatever is stimulating it to respond, then immediately detach! Break the connection between the stimulant and the dog before the dog can become too sensitive to that which it wants to remove itself from.
There is no doubt that disengagement also reinforces behavior in the dog. If every time you approach your dog and it begins to growl at you, you back away, then you are reinforcing this behavior. However, as Dr. O’Heare says, “while it is true that disengaging reinforces aggressive behavior, it is also true that allowing an aggressive display to intensify will likely result in reinforcement of more intense or problematic behavior.”
Intensity of behavior is as much an issue of reinforcement as the behavior itself. As a guardian of your dog, what is preferable, a dog growling at you or one lunging itself violently at you every time you show up?
“If, in any particular situation, guardians can prevent reinforcement of the aggressive behavior, then this is an option you might explore with them, but generally it is safer and more productive to observe carefully for incipient stages of arousal, and disengage the dog from the situation as early in the sequence as possible and take steps to prevent this mistake from recurring. Of course, again, the key is always to arrange the environment such that the aggressive behavior does not occur!”
This may be a hard pill for you to swallow if your dog, not being medically ill and, thus, in need of veterinarian instead of behavioralist insight, yet having come to find you worthy of being avoided, prefers not to associate with you anymore due to its conditioning.
Can you modify this conditioning? Yes. But your first step is to acknowledge that whatever circumstances made you unappealing to your dog are the cause for the dog’s sudden dislike of you and its aggression toward you. The same applies to the dog’s aggression toward other dogs. Unless the dog is physically sick, its aggressive behavior is conditioned. It’s been reinforced whether intentionally or accidentally.
How To Make An Aggressive Dog Friendly
Basically, if you’re after socializing an older aggressive dog or even a puppy, you need to keep in mind that there is such a thing as a dog’s personal space. No matter how tolerant your dog may have been, it may be that you’ve inadvertently breached its private space one too many times. If you own a rather timid or risk-averse animal, it wouldn’t be hard eventually to provoke it if you’re constantly hugging it, petting it, squeezing it, lifting it, etc. Soon enough it’s going to snap and your dog will suddenly become aggressive.
Introducing an aggressive dog to other dogs may not sound like a sound way of rehabilitating or taming a dog conditioned for hostility. But this is necessary to socialize the dog with its peers. Still, you need to ensure you know first how to calm down your aggressive dog. It is common to find in many rescued dogs that often fail to achieve dog socialization skills an easy ability to learned how to calm down, which leads to their being put down (euthanized). Yet you cannot train a dog that first requires rehabilitation from poor conditioning. You must first put the dog through rehab, help it mature, socialize appropriately. Then, you can train the dog to listen and obey. Consider the following explanation in the video below.
Before you start wondering where to surrender a dog that suddenly becomes aggressive, fearing whether an aggressive dog will always be aggressive even if you neuter it or use a shock collar to help end its aggression, think first about discovering the stimulus that you want to control and purge it from the situation to keep it from arousing your dog’s hostility. This is called stimulus control and should be your next step in helping eradicate your dog’s antagonism. It will require trial and error. Here is a good example in the video below.
How You Can Save Your Dog From Its Own Aggression
By controlling what stimulates the dog, you’re controlling the impulse in the dog to become aggressive toward that stimulant. A dog lacking in impulse control is a dog still being stimulated by something that it feels unable to escape and which you’re not breaking away from the dog. Prolonged stimulus will only reinforce the dog’s aggression against it. The fearful animal will perceive the threat as intolerable and rather than distance itself from it, the dog will attack it. It will not control its impulse once triggered, which is quite unusual behavior from an animal that would typically distance itself from a threat rather than meet it.
It is conceivable that your aggressive dog may suddenly revert to being friendly once you remove the provocation that induces its behavior, provided the dog is not otherwise ill and biologically out of sorts. If the matter is entirely behavioral, then it is environmental in nature and the circumstance requires modification to incentivize the dog toward new behavioral patterns through the reinforcement of proper behavior, once the dog has calmed down and its stress level is normal. It won’t learn better to behave otherwise. But once the dog is at ease, then this becomes the right time to enforce a new behavior, providing the correct cues that help the dog overcome its phobias. To achieve this, you need sound training guidance from a professional. We recommend the following program.