Free Tips to Help a Dog Stop Being Aggressive Towards Guests

For this Omaha dog training session I worked with Piper, a two-and-a-half year old Treeing Walker Coonhound Mix. Piper actually lives just a few blocks away from where I grew up.

Her guardians reached out to us to learn how to help a dog stop being aggressive towards guests, listen better and stop being an anxious dog.

I called and spoke to Piper’s guardians before knocking on the door to make sure the greeting went well. Anytime you have a dog with human aggression issues, you want to do everything you can to help the dog feel relaxed and calm.

Easy Way to Help a Dog Stop Being Aggressive Towards Guests

I used a few dog behaviorist tricks as soon as I passed through the door. You can see how well they worked by watching the video below.

I didn’t get much of a sense of aggression from Piper during the greeting. After reflecting back on the session, I didn’t see any signs of her being an aggressive dog.

Now that’s not to say that Piper doesn’t have some dog behavior issues. Since her guardians did not set many rules, Piper felt she had to take care of her family’s safety. The problem is that she didn’t receive training to do so, so she didn’t know who was okay and who wasn’t.

This feeling of responsibility was absolutely contributing to her stress and anxiety.

Understanding How Dogs Interact with People

I started things off by showing the guardians how they can add in rules and boundaries and how to enforce them consistently.

By adding this structure, Piper will start seeing her guardians as authority figures each time they enforce them. It’s important for a dog to watch humans do various things. This helps the dog relax and let the humans take over.

Adding rules and boundaries will help reduce Piper’s feelings of responsibility and lower her stress. However, a few other factors were causing her unwanted dog behavior.

Early in the dog behavior session, I noticed something. Whenever Piper got too close to her guardian, they quickly paid attention to her. Whenever you pet a dog, whatever they are doing at the time is why the dog thinks you are rewarding them.

In these situations, Piper’s guardians were actually teaching her to behave in the opposite way they wanted.

To help Piper’s guardians reward her for good behaviors, I explained my petting with a purpose method. You can get this incredibly easy yet powerful effective positive dog training tip in the video below.

Petting with a purpose and passive training are great ways to reward your dog for desired behaviors. This type of positive dog training results in dogs that people often find “polite” or to have good manners.

Teaching a Dog to Listen to Their Guardian

An extra benefit is that the dog is learning to be more willing to listen. Also changing how dogs interact with people in their life. This is going to go a long way towards helping Piper stop thinking it’s her place to guard the house, yard or humans.

While positive reinforcement is by far the preferred way to train a dog, sometimes you need to just say no. I find it’s most effective to disagree before a dog breaks a rule or boundary.

Now that I gave Piper’s guardians the tools to communicate, disagree, and reward her, I was ready. I would teach them a simple exercise to help redirect her attention. I call this a focus exercise and demonstrate how to teach a dog to do so on command in the video below.

The focus exercise is easy to do. It is a great way to help your dog pay attention to you instead of distractions. It takes a lot of short practice sessions to build up this skill set.

If the guardians do the focus exercise in the video, they will gain a strong tool. This tool will help them stop Piper from reacting when she sees another dog, the trash truck, or people walking by.

Piper’s guardians can also use the focus exercise to help her listen better on walks.

Anyone who knows me knows I ABHOR pinch and prong collars. I never use these archaic tools because they cause dogs to obey out of a fear of pain. It’s one of the main reasons they are banned in most countries.

Instead, I pulled out a Martingale collar and showed the guardians how to apply the special twist of the leash to stop her pulling and give them more control.

Check out the free dog training video below for a good example of what a structured walk should look like.

By the end of the session, Piper was already starting to follow the new rules we introduced. Not only that, her guardians became accustomed to using the focus exercise and reading her body language.

Knowing what to look for, shifting the leader-follower dynamic and having the right tools in place to redirect her should enable her guardians to put a stop to Piper’s unwanted dog behavior issues.

We wrapped up the session by filming a Roadmap to success video to go over all the dog training tips and dog behavior secrets I shared with Piper’s guardians.