Dog Obedience Training – Difference Between a Warning and Aggression

Dog Obedience Training – Difference Between a Warning and Aggression

There are lots of reactive dogs out there due to lack of early socialisation, poor socialisation and bad experiences. Those dogs might not be comfortable with any other dogs or they might be selective with which ones they accept. I often surprise my reactive dog clients with my older dog who is very calm, most of the time dogs that the owners described reactive or even aggressive do not react to her. Why? Because she shows calming signals that make the reactive dogs feel safe around her.

Dogs use body signals to communicate with each other and sometimes those signals might seem aggressive to us, but there’s a difference between an aggression and a warning for space. Let’s look at these behaviours a bit closer.

Warning

A dog who doesn’t want another dog near might show signals that seem aggressive such as tense body, freezing, growling, showing their teeth and snapping. The purpose of these signals is to stop the other dog from approaching. When it happens, the signals stop. These are warning signals and if received well, the situation never escalates further.

These are completely normal signals that dogs show when they want space, it might be due to them not liking the approaching dog, not feeling like they want to socialise or if they have something they do not wish to share, for example.

Aggression

Dog aggressive and reactive dogs might show the same behaviours or worse such as snapping and biting without any early warning signs, however, the difference is that they do not react to other dog’s calming signals. They will show aggression no matter what the other dog is doing, whether they have stopped approaching or not. This is no longer just a warning, this is a sign of dog aggression. Just a sight or another dog near by can trigger this behaviour and no matter how well the other dog shows that the message was received the reactive dog doesn’t calm down. This is not normal behaviour, this is behavioural issue that needs to be dealt with a dog trainer and requires dog obedience training to teach the dog a better way of reacting to other dogs. The training also means management: not putting the dog into situations that will reinforce aggression.