Veterinary Parasite

It’s your worst nightmare - you’re walking your dog out in the park, and a small child approaches him and starts to prod/poke/squeeze and generally annoy.  Being a lovely young dog, he puts up with it for a while, but eventually he growls at the irritating youngster, who runs off crying.  As you’re a responsible owner, you quickly tell your dog off for growling at a child.  Over the next couple of weeks this scene plays out a few more times, until seemingly without warning, your dog bites the child.  And it’s bye bye doggy.

This is a situation that, happily, doesn’t occur too often, but it does occur.  With a bit of understanding of canine behaviour we can make sure it never happens to you.  Dogs are pretty simple creatures really - if you let them know a certain behaviour brings positive results (a stroke, a treat, etc.), then they’ll do that behaviour more often.  If you let them know the behaviour brings negative results (a telling off, a smack, etc.), then they’ll do it less often.  This is the basis of most training techniques, but we use the same methods unconsciously with our animals every day.

Let’s look at the situation from a dog’s point of view: “I was unhappy with a situation, so I expressed my natural warning behaviour, and growled.  I was then punished.”  We can see that following our rules from before, the dog’s expression of growling behaviour is likely to reduce in frequency.  The problem is that growling in this situation is entirely appropriate behaviour for a dog.  The growl is the lowest form of aggression a dog can show, so to express it means he does not want to bite, but would still like the annoying child to go away!  If we punish the growl, then he will eventually stop growling - unfortunately, the annoying stimulus of a prodding child is still there, and the dog still does not like it.  So what does the dog do?  He takes action to get rid of the annoying stimulus - as he can’t growl, he moves up the aggression ladder, and bites.  We have inadvertently trained our dog to progress straight to biting when he wants to express his unhappiness/fear at a situation.

So what should we do?  Well, firstly, reward your dog for growling.  This promotes the behaviour, making it less likely that he will progress to the next level - biting.  Secondly, remove the annoying stimulus.  I would argue this should involve giving the little kid a smack round the head, but unfortunately we may have to resort to taking our dog away.

Bottom line: Growling is natural behaviour for a dog, and expressing it makes them less likely to bite.  Don’t stop your dog from expressing its natural behaviour.