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Originally Posted by br549  We've had Koda, an 18 week Morkie for about 2 weeks now. On one hand he has been wonderful - he is very good with everyone in our family. He is great with strangers. He rolls over on his back for us, lets us rub his belly, etc. Potty training is even going pretty well.
The problem is inconsistency when he has something in his mouth. Tonight for example, he had 3 different occasions of having something we didn't want him to chew (a leaf, piece of trash, or whatever). Each time I was able to stick my finger in his mouth and fairly easily take the object away. However, the 4th time he found a used lollipop stick. When I tried to take it out of his mouth he growled at me fairly fiercely and tried to bite me. This has happened several times. It is scary. We have 3 children, and I'm worried that he's going to snap on them at some point and really do some damage.
Is this normal? It sure doesn't seem so. What can we do to stop it? I've tried teaching him "leave it", but we're pretty early in the process. How do you know when he's just being a terrier and when there really is something wrong that is putting our family in danger?
thanks!  |
You are right to be concerned. In the training forum, this is located below the General Discussion Forum there are many threads which talk about food aggression, and or aggression. There is at the top of the forum some articles with respect to the behaviour you are seeing.
First though I'd teach the command drop it. This is for when your dog has something in their mouth you don't want them to have. You teach this by trading say a toy in their mouth for the food in your hand. You say drop it to ur boy, and immediately feed the treat to him. It won't take long for your dog to learn that drop it means goodies are coming.
You will see some threads that talk about using hand feeding to help train your dog to not be food aggressive.
GL with your training