hi and thanks for tuning in today we are taking a look at dog aggression now of course dog aggression is a huge topic and there's a whole range of things that can cause them to overreact so what I've done today is I've put together some simple techniques and exercises that you'll find useful regardless of whether your dog is aggressive to bikes cats cars or other dogs but the main thing that I really want to portray in this video is a concept and it can be summed up in this famous saying it's not what you do but it's the way that you do it so see if you can get what I mean and enjoy the video so in this consultation I'm working with Tarna he's an eighteen month old Steffi Cross Mastiff and his owners asked me to come and assess him around other dogs because when he was about eight months old something like that it'd be started becoming a little bit dominant and aggressive his owner kept him away from other dogs because he didn't want any trouble and it's just sort of that period of time that he's been away from other dogs has got bigger and bigger and now he really hasn't been around dogs for a long long time so I'm not taking any chances with him we've got a muzzle on him we've got him on our harness there and I'm going to ask his owner to walk out onto the grass and then I'll bring one or more of my dogs out of it and I want to show you how I work this sort of situation so the first thing we need to do is really keep control of the situation so you can see I've got two of my dogs they're on leashes that's the two boys they're very good but the last thing I want is them jogging over to say hello so I'll keep control of them with a short leash you could use a long line inka they're in the foreground she's not going anywhere so she's free to wander around and of course taarna is on elite so you need that control to start with the next thing to look at is the energy of the dog so clearly my dogs are very calm and relaxed which is brilliant on a scale of 1 to 10 I'd probably put a moaner down at a two or three but Tarna here you can see his energy level is much more what I'd say is a seven almost an eight eight out of ten his tail is upright he's stiff and strong and he's pulling towards my dogs not really what you're looking for so when a dog's feeling like this confident strong and almost looking for a bit of trouble and sort of wanting to man up the best thing to do is give them some time just move them away they're not ready yet and times on your side you'll see taarna will calm down but you don't want to bring them over to meet the dogs in question when he's in that sort of state now what I'm going to do here is a very simple technique but it's very powerful it's something I call stop start change direction you basically put lead on your dog you walk them round and round doing anything except for focusing on the other dog in other words I'm going to focus my dogs on the grass to the right and the grass to the left come on guys it's going to smell the flowers tar nasone is doing the same and you're going to see that just a few minutes of this is going to calm his dog right down it's actually truly amazing I'll show you a shot of before and after but is it what he's doing now as well is he's going to get in front of his dog and I'm saying to a calm free something of AI is a lot you crouch down put your hand under his collar and if we have a look at his dog now you'll actually see this is just a few minutes later his dog's Energy's gone right down if you look at that tail we'll zoom in and have a look but the body language of this dog is so completely different to the body language and energy of the dog that we saw just before here is just ten minutes earlier confident dominant tail erect challenging you know is not that in this state you don't want to be taking him over and introducing him to other dogs it's only going to go pear-shaped so you want to do a little bit of work with them and you know ten minutes later here is tails in completely the other opposite direction hanging down he's relaxed he's very inquisitive he's a he's interested he's calmed right down totally different dog he'll have form far more success with them in this sort of a state so now that Tana has calmed down somewhat I'm going to apply a technique that I call the parallel walk and it's quite fascinating I'll just let all of this roll and talk you through it the parallel walk is exactly as it sounds it's where you walk parallel to the other dogs and as you can see we've started off quite far apart from each other walking parallel but we're going to move closer and closer together now the idea behind this is it's the exact opposite of sort of a predatory attack from the front if you think about it all animals are used to the sort of predatory locking on and running straight at another animal to attack them so if you're coming straight at an anima dog they can feel very threatened it's why when you meet a dog on the pathway who's coming towards you it can be quite threatening however dogs when they walk parallel like this it's far more like they're part of a pack if you think of a pack of wolves they all walk in the same direction and here we've moved much much closer together and tar neighs you know he's throwing his head around he's actually wanting to get towards my dog Jack so we just move away apart a little bit there but he's doing really well and these techniques are really what Tana is owner and I put in place for maybe 10 20 minutes until tonight come right down and then we're able to put him on a line and they able to meet my dogs now the purpose of this video is really just to give you a couple of ideas of how you can do that how to calm a dog down but I do want to show you a couple of clips of this video where Tony has a line on him so so here's just a couple of snippets of that stage and you can see I'm actually playing with my dogs so the first stage really is putting along the line on Tarn a so we can sort of let him go free but we still got that sort of control this is actually a horse lunge line he's such a big boy and then the next stage is actually letting my dog go so I've decided jack is calm enough he's just going to run off I can just tell he's not going to go over to this dog he's going to wander off and play which is great so here I used the long line to keep control of Tana and just gauge what he's like around all the dogs and it just gives you the ability to keep control of the situation if it starts to go pear-shaped and interestingly enough its little inca who's generally a very fearful little female dog who goes over and says I understand you look at those little tails waggling so they're communicating communicating really beautifully there she runs off there she's not too sure and this is when I know we've done it that Jack comes over he's the dominant dog here Tana is just letting him sniff first so Jack's in charge like a jacks tails right up Tana is just a little bit more submissive and I'll let you hear the noise because Tana is going to check Jack out here he's sort of gaining confidence and it could go pear-shaped here but I get the feeling it won't I think you sort of playing there thank you thank you wanna play a little bit now saying things what applies and what you witnessed there was too confident male dogs deciding who's in charge to want to play and say yeah it's time to drop the long line on the floor and just let him have a good run I'm very confident that they're going to get on really well the next stage was to take the long line off him and then when we were completely confident that he was gonna be fine and it had a good play we took the muzzle off and he just had a great old time here he is playing around with inka who's telling him to go away at this point and he had a great fun play with the jack as well you can see here they got on like a house on fire so there you have it in my opinion Tana is a good dog he's a lovely boy he's sociable but he is he has got a tendency to be a little bit dominant so you do want to understand how to be the pack leader at home that'll keep his dominance right down and he'll be far more tolerant around other dogs and some of the key stages in getting them off leash first of all we kept control of them at the very beginning using those leashes and the long line secondly we were constantly reading the energy the situation every situation was different and if it wasn't right then we just moved them away so just walk away focus on something else and just remember there's no rush take your time because time is on your side so there you go as you can see we turned a potentially volatile situation into a really successful day and we gave tonight some much-deserved freedom and socializing off leash and we gave his owner some hope back at today's home I also went through with his owner the importance of leadership because this will actually be the foundation on which the relationship is built now let me clarify the key concept I referred to at the start that it's not what you do but it's the way that you do it a concept which flows through all of that training in the video and all that I do basically you've got to keep control of the situation you've got to stay calm and take your time that's all for today see you tomorrow and until then have an awesome day
