Teaching a Jealous Older Dog to Stop Trying to Dominate the Puppy

For this Omaha dog and puppy training session we share a few free dog training videos to help 8 year-old Peruvian Inca Orchid Andrea get along with 3 month-old Burmese Mountain Dog Luna.

I knew Luna very well as she has been taking our puppy socialization classes the last few months. But I was pleasantly surprised to see that her energy had dropped a bit. She was also amazing with Andrea most of the time. Despite Andrea trying to hump, nip and bark at her, Luna mostly ignored her.

While its great that Luna hadn’t been reacting to Andrea’s aggressive behavior, she recently started to disagree back. Due to the size difference, its obviously important to stop the older dog from acting aggressively to the puppy. I also made sure to point out that the guardians need to disagree immediately when Andrea try to hump or dominate the puppy. Failure to do so can easily be interpreted as approval of Andrea’s actions.

Basically, I think Andrea is a little insecure, confused about her position in the home and trying to dominate the every larger growing Luna. Getting these dogs to get along will be a little abstract and mostly on Andrea’s side of the street. I share some tips to help a jealous adult dog learn to like an excited puppy in the free dog training video below.

Later in the session we came up with another way to stop the adult dog from trying to dominate or assert itself over another dog. This is the first time I have filmed this tip to stop a dog from trying to dominate a puppy.

This is about as easy as it gets when you are trying to teach an older dog to be nice to a puppy, but will only work if the human is very observant and stops petting the offender dog right away. This is a wonderful operant conditioning exercise.

We went over a number of other dog and puppy behavior tips in this in home dog and puppy training session. To help the guardians remember all of them, we recorded a roadmap to success video below.