One of the worst issues to deal with as a dog owner is with aggressive to highly aggressive dogs. Not only is a stressful and scary situation for anyone to deal with, but it is also very difficult to train out of them. There are a number of potential causes for aggressiveness in dogs, including lack of activity, poor training, and issues with dominance.

A lot of dogs are naturally dominant animals, and in order to deal with that situation an owner needs to be even more dominant. If the dog has a clear understanding of the hierarchy in the relationship they are going to behave better, but if they think they’re in charge they’ll do what they want and behave how they want. Sometimes with dominant dogs and submissive owners, it’s best to let the dog move to a different owner who is able to control the animal.

If they are acting aggressive because they don’t have an outlet through exercise, then this can enter a bit of a feedback loop: Because the dog is aggressive, you don’t want to risk exposing the dog to the public, which means that they don’t have their issues resolved and they continue to act aggressive.

The other potential cause we’ve mentioned is poor training. This often presents itself in the form of the owner not really understanding how to punish and reward there animal properly, which means that any bad behaviour of the pet dog could end up being reinforced by what they perceive to be a reward.