Why Is My Dog Behaving Badly?

Hey, guys, My name is Dr. Lara here at Heron Lakes Animal Hospital. Today I'm here with Misty. Misty's here because she is having what we would call some behavioral issues. And so Misty is right around 2 years old and all of a sudden mom has noticed. Not all of a sudden. Little by little, Misty has been nervous around men. And initially it started off that she would cry like somebody was stepping on her when they came home and or they would come into the house with a man. Now, just the other day, Misty went to try something a little bit different, maybe a little bit more aggressive. And when I looked at the patient's history, the first thing that I looked at was the age. Typically there are two time frames when dogs are going to show signs or behavioral signs. One is going to be between seven to nine months of age and then again between two to three years of age. Misty is at right in between that two and three year window. So it makes complete sense as to what's going on. Mom has not noticed her showing any signs of pain or anything like that. So some of the different things that we can try. First thing you're going to have to do with something like this is you are going to have to go ahead and figure out what is triggering this. Ideally, okay. Otherwise you're going to have to put your dog up and then they're not going to be allowed out when people are there. The one thing that I told mom was when the men are coming over, what I was to put Misty up either in her crate or you can put her in a room or somewhere where she's penned off and bring the man in, have them sit down, get settled and then try bringing the dog out. Because sometimes what may happen is if Misty is being territorial, she will resist and try and prevent somebody from coming into her territory versus if that person is already in her territory when she comes into the environment, she may be more accepting of that. The other thing that you'll want to do is you'll want to go ahead and you'll want to positively reinforced in Misty situation when men are present in her territory. That is going to be in one of a couple ways. One, it's either going to be in the form of a treat. Two, it's going to be in the form of some sort of toy, a special toy that she doesn't ever get to play with, or three, it's going to be some sort of real amount of praise or love or cuddling. One thing that you might want to consider is potentially quicker training. That's an option. The other thing that I talked to mom about was getting a basket muzzle. So this is a basket muzzle. And when we put this on, what you'll notice is there's a little hole right here. And so we can actually go ahead and we can give Misty treats when she has the muzzle on. And so what this will allow is for us to go ahead and put this on and safely have Misty in the situation to see what triggers her to go ahead and, you know, become or start acting the way that she's acted in the past without worrying about her doing any damage to anybody or without anybody getting scared of her and potentially doing damage to her now. As you can see, in this particular situation, Misty is pretty much fine with me. And so that leads me to believe that most likely this is more of a territoriality issue. Now, whenever we do have a patient that does have some sort of behavioral issue, you typically are going to want to do some blood work, make sure that there are no issues going on. Behaviorists, veterinary behaviorists, will say you need to rule out the metabolic stuff before we automatically assume it is a behavioral issue. If you guys found this video helpful, please give us a thumbs up. Subscribe and share. Thanks for watching and have a great day.