Tips to Stop a Dog From Fence Fighting with the Neighbor’s Dog

For this Omaha dog training session we work with 6 year-old Pitbull Thor, teaching him to move away instead of running and fence fighting with the neighbor dog.

Before we worked on stopping the fence fighting with their neighbor’s dog, we spent a considerable amount of time discussing Thor’s needs and the leader follower dynamic in the home.

If a dog doesn’t have any rules, can nudge or lean on people to tell them to give it attention and it is under exercised, its very common for a dog to get the impression its your leader or needs to protect you. Im pretty certain that is a high contributing factor here.

After suggesting some creative ways of exercising him inside, sharing rules and how to enforce them, my petting with a purpose and passive training methods, I was ready to share some tips to stop a dog from fence fighting.

I wanted to make sure the neighbor dog didn’t come out when we were working on this trick to stop fence fighting. Once a dog is aroused, they won’t hear anything you say and training is pretty much useless.

I sent Hunter, one of our Behaviorists in training over to the neighbor’s house to ask them if they could keep the dog inside as Thor’s guardians didnt have the number. Hunter said he thought the neighbor thought Thor’s guardians were being passive-aggressive about not having their dog outside. Hopefully Hunter did a good job of explaining this was my request and we didnt make any drama between the neighbors. Our only goal is some peace and tips to help a dog give up its fence fighting habit.

We headed outside so I could show the guardians how to get Thor to focus on them, come when called and train him to move away from the fence instead of running along the fence line barking at the other dog. This approach works for every breed and you don’t have to be a professional Pitbull dog trainer to do it.

Its going to be supremely important the guardians practice this exercise to prevent fence fighting a few times a day for the next few weeks; absent the presence of the other dog. It takes a lot of repetition for a dog to develop a new habit and that is crucial when asking a dog to stop engaging in behaviors while they are very aroused.

It doesn’t have to be long practice sessions, in fact, short 2-4 minute practice sessions a few times a day will do the trick.

To make sure the guardians can remember all the tips we covered in this in home dog training session, we recorded a roadmap to success video.