also have a look at: Archie
Lynn and Ronnie contacted me in a very anxious state due to their 5year old Doberman (Indi) who had recently caused damage to one of their gorgeous King Charles puppies. They have five dogs in their household and manage them all with ease except for the Doberman who’s aggressive behaviour was just getting so un-bearable they were actually contemplating re-homing her for the safety of the other dogs and soon to be grandson. Lynn and Ronnie invited me into their home to meet the pack (1 Doberman, 1 Boxer, 3 King Charles) and after some careful observation I explained to them how the “pack” works and how sometimes we can be inadvertently encouraging the very behaviour we don’t want! I gave them some tips on managing them all and made some suggestions on how to get your pack living in harmony.
This is what Lynn had to say:
We have five dogs, two larger breeds, and three smaller as we breed toy spaniels. We contacted Tricia as our Dobermann Indy had been becoming extremely grumpy lately, this culminated in her accidently hurting one our small puppies. Looking back, things started to change after our ‘pack’ began to grow, and our male dog was castrated last year. After the incident, we were so concerned we even thought that we would have to re-home our Dobermann which would have been awful for her and us. After an initial telephone consultation, Tricia suggested a home visit which we agreed to. The visit proved to be extremely enlightening, Tricia pointed out to us that our Dobermann bitch was actually the ‘top dog’, when we had thought for five years that our Boxer dog was. She pointed out lots of behaviour that we had not previously noticed, this included our dogs as well as ourselves ! It all seemed to make perfect sense, and we have now changed the way we treat the pack so as to recognise Indy the Dobermann as the ‘top dog’, and to acknowledge this rather than confuse her natural instincts. Everything seems a lot less tense now, and harmony has been restored to the household.