How to Stop An Older Dog From Being Aggressive to A Puppy

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Dr. Greg McDonald. I'm a Veterinarian in Southern California. I own McDonald Animal Hospital in Santa Barbara. I want to talk a little bit about introducing a, a puppy into your house if you have a very aggressive dog. Obviously it can be very very important for your new dog, bring them in. If a, if a dog is territorial and very aggressive; two large dogs are probably not going to hurt each other too badly; but if you're bringing a puppy and the, and the adult dog is really aggressive, you could actually wind up killing up the little one if you're not paying attention. A big dog who is very aggressive could pick up a small Chihuahua; shake them once and that will be all over. And so I think it's very important to be aware of your dog's personality. The things that dogs fight over the most are owner's attention, food and toys. And so while you're introducing a new dog into an aggressive dog you want to eliminate all of those things as, if possible. So you pick up all the dog toys; you don't feed them together and then you try and show equal amounts of love to each one of the animals when you're, and trying to be impartial as you can so they don't argue over you. And so I think it's really really important that you think this out; you have separate rooms that you're going to work with dogs that are territorial and try to get to neutral spaces, introduce them outside first and them bring them inside and also have certain rooms that they can be in together and certain rooms that they can't. I, I think also that there's , there can be quite a lot of stress to the aggressive dog with the new puppy coming in; so you want to minimize the stress as much as possible. You can do that by confining the puppy into a canal when you're not around and paying a close attention to it and then take the puppy out for walks on its own so the other dog can be on its own and also take the adult dog for its own walks until you can really integrate them and be sure that they're safe together. I also recommend that you might have to get a professional trainer if things are getting very aggressive and you're worried about your big dog hurting your little dog or your new puppy. It would be very wise for you to have a professional dog trainer come in and observe them and see if there's some other things that you could do."