Hi all, I currently own a male dog. He is a 20lb ish West Highland White Terrier mix. He'll be 5 years old this October. I got him from a BYB, before I knew better, and I strongly believe genetics is one of the reasons he has behavior issues.
I bought him as a 9 week old puppy and I did everything by the book. He attended training classes from day one and I did lots of socialization. By 13 months old he was seriously same sex aggressive. I'd heard off lots of terrier owners that same sex aggression is very common in young, adolescent male terriers due to the serge of testosterone, so we rode it out.
He did get better to an extent. I would no longer consider him aggressive, but I do consider him reactive. He will growl and snap at any dog that gets within 10ft of him and we have been thrown out of every training class we have attended because he snapped at other dogs that came near him and I can no longer take him to agility trials, which was something I always wanted to do with my dog.
I can let him offleash on hiking trails and he'll ignore and want to be ignored. Unfortunately other dogs still approach him. He has never injured another dog, but he will snap. He's so much better offleash and will completely blank other dogs, even if they are close by.
I could probably deal with the above, if not for his other reactive behaviors. He is very, very reactive indoors. He barks at literally everything. Anything. Any slight bump in the house, someone coming down the street in a car, even just the refrigerator making noises, someone opening a door, he'll bark. Incessantly. If someone stands up in the house, or hug each other or even just talk in another room, he'll run up barking. And when someone comes to the door, including when the humans come home from work, he is horrendous. He will run to the window and bark for a good 10-15 minutes constantly, including when the person has come in the house. He once ripped his entire paw pad open trying to get to the door because he heard a noise, costing me several hundred in vet fees. He is constantly on edge, always waiting for the next noise in the house to react to.
Then there is the vets. When we have to go (often because he is accident prone) he has a doggy panic attack. Last time we went, I was holding him whilst the vet tried to inspect him and he bit me pretty badly on my hand, which meant I couldn't write for a week or so. So now he has to be muzzled and pinned down at the vets and sometimes sedated. I feel so so sorry for him. I know he doesn't want to bite, but he doesn't know how to deal with it.
In case anyone is curious, he gets 2-3 hours a day of exercise/stimulation, so he is not lacking in exercise.
His issues are really starting to affect us all. I currently live with my family in the suburbs. His issues are badly straining the relationship between me and my parents because we are arguing over the dog, everyone is constantly winding up with headaches because of his constant barking and it can't be nice for the dog himself. Probably the most pressing issue is the fact that me and the dog are planning on moving out in 2 years time to the city, where we will be living in an apartment and I am absolutely terrified that I will be evicted because of the dogs barking.
I will not rehome him. He's not even really rehomeable anyway. I appreciate that we probably need to get a behaviorist in, but I've got tons of things that I need to pay out for, and I can't afford a behaviorist until at least Spring next year. But none of us can go on like this. I'm really stuck on things to do.
I've done research on reactivity/excessive barking and I've tried removing him from the room when he barks, telling him off, teaching him to bark on command and using a quiet cue, distracting him. I've had very limited success. In 4.5 years.
Any advice in the meantime would be much appreciated. He has a full checkup at the vets every year and we have never found anything physically wrong with him. In every other way, he's an awesome dog, but we are struggling with this very significant behavioral issue.
Submitted June 14, 2017 at 08:00PM by AshBailey http://ift.tt/2sAYKcW Dogtraining
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