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My two Schnauzers act get very aggressive when playing. It starts out fine, but gets ugly with lots of snarling.

No food aggression, they sleep together and Cooper follows Tillie all over the place. Tillie is 2 and female. Cooper is approx 1 and male. Tillie is a schnauzer mix. She seems most aggressive. We had her first and added Cooper 6 months ago. There have been a couple times when Tillie has been bitten by cooper on the neck and the skin was broken. What can we do????


Asked by Member 1071318 on Nov 17th 2011 Tagged agression in Behavior & Training
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SNEAKERS

There's not a whole lot you can do. What you're seeing is, a natural "Aggressive Negation" for the Alpha Position.
Tillie has tenure and age, and thinks she should be the boss, but, Cooper is a Male, and of course he's going to want to be "First Dog" around there. :D
You can separate them temporarily, scold if you want, but, beyond that, THEY are going to have to settle their "positions" by themselves. And WILL !
There may be some additional bloodshed, but, it will be minor as before. They don't want to hurt the other any more than necessary, to get their "point" across.


SNEAKERS answered on 11/17/11. Helpful? Yes/Helpful: No 0 Report this answer


Bruno

Sorry Sneakers, but I think that dominance stuff is BS. Most canine professionals don't believe that dominance hierarchies are of any importance to domestic dogs, it's an outdated theory based on the behavior of captive wolves in zoos, which is a stressful, unnatural environment and causes aggressive and neurotic behavior. Wild wolves rarely fight with pack (family) members.

I think what's happening here is that the two dogs are just playing roughly- they might not have learned proper bite inhibition as puppies for some reason, or they get so excited they don't notice the pain. Also Schnauzers are pretty high-energy, tenacious pooches and tend to play rough anyway.

I think you should just break up their play sessions when it gets rough, give each one a short time-out.

I guess I'm assuming that you know the difference between rough play and real fighting- to me it's pretty obvious, but not to everyone, I've found.


Bruno answered on 11/17/11. Helpful? Yes/Helpful: No 0 Report this answer


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