Dog Aggression assessment

 This video shows Noah, a young dog who was adopted from the SPCA and labeled as dog aggressive. Since his owner adopted him, she hasn't attempted to put him around any other dogs, but she wanted to see if he could potentially be suitable for a dog daycare. We weren't actually planning on recording so we didn't get on camera his first introduction to the dogs, but take our word for it, he was quite explosive. 

How do you test a dog for aggression?

It looked a little bit like this. In our attempts to recreate his explosiveness, we used two dogs. One was mine and one belongs to one of my trainers. My dog Lobo has been trained to greet dogs on cue so it was easy for me to direct him to go up to the gate and go nose to nose with Noah, which is how we were able to trigger a little bit of his aggressiveness. The second dog we used, Olive, has not been trained to greet on cue but is a very well socialized dog and I wanted to include a little bit of the interaction so that you can see how a well socialized dog reacts to the kind of energy that Noah was putting off.

How do you check a dog's temperament?

What is important to note when you're looking at this is that Olive has not actually witnessed any of Noah's aggressiveness. She is simply responding to the subtle body cues and energy that he is giving off. Although to the untrained eye it may look as though Noah is relatively calm here, Olive is actually telling us a different story. Prior to us getting the camera and beginning filming, we did witness Noah explode at the fence towards the other dogs in the yard two times, and we did discipline him for that behavior. 

What classifies a dog as aggressive?

The form of discipline that we used was simply a squirt of water from a squirt bottle. That was all it took to send Noah the message that we disagreed with his actions.After doing that two times, Noah started making different choices at the fence line and that's when we determined it was okay to start introducing him to other dogs.

 We did this with a muzzle on at first for safety because we had seen how explosive Noah could become. Through our careful process of introducing Noah to the right personalities at the right times, we were able to fully integrate him in with a group of 15 dogs without any further explosions or any further corrections needed.

Can you train aggression out of a dog?

After about 15 minutes of Noah showing us that he can make good choices with his social interactions, I determined that I felt confident enough to remove the muzzle. Noah did great for the remainder of his session but this does not mean that we're gonna bring him into a daycare just yet. We're gonna want to repeat this process several more times to make sure we have consistency in his behavior and that he can start and finish the process without any outbursts at all.