10/26/2026
Inter-household aggression or fighting housemates, have to be the single most difficult cases to work through as a dog trainer. There’s so much riding on the outcome of these cases, and they’re very complex.
As a dog owner living through this, it’s absolute hell. Walking on egg shells, crating and rotating, doing separate everything.
The worst parts? Grieving the loss of the life you had before the aggression, the guilt of having to rearrange everyone’s lives, the fear of another fight, and not knowing if you’ll ever be able to restore peace. For many, difficult decisions about who stays and who may need to go.
As a dog trainer living through my own inter-household aggression issues? Layer on the shame, the “I should have known better”, the frustration of not making the progress with my own dogs that I could make with my client dogs. Simply because like most people, I also have a full time job and don’t have 8 hours a day to focus on training my dogs.
But, here we are. Progress has been made. Here’s the process so far:
1. Management - without a doubt the most immediate need. Zero incidents is the goal, and that’s pretty tough. So much can go wrong! I remember in the early days after their fight I went to go let one out and realized I had the other’s crate door open! Talk about an immediate adrenaline jolt. Good thing my dogs have a ton of skills, which many client dogs don’t have, and need to be taught before any other work can begin.
Management is so critical because…how many times is too many times before trust is simply eroded and can’t be rebuilt? No one knows the answer.
2. Decompression - Dog fights usually don’t happen between healthy, well adjusted, low-stress dogs. More often than not, one or more of the dogs are struggling with anxiety and chronic stress. Something in the household, their health status, and the relationship dynamics of everyone in the home contribute to dogs that are at the end of their rope. So before any meaningful training can be done, we need to decompress the dogs.
In my case, I focused heavily on reducing Vimy’s anxiety through time in nature (without other dogs), tug and sustained cardio such as treadmill and biking. Decompression focused not only on movement, but also on down-regulating the nervous system though settling and hand feeding. Consistently over a period of weeks, we can watch the anxiety decrease and the dogs become more settled. In Vimy’s case, this is exactly what I observed.
(5+ months of exercise restriction, multiple invasive surgeries, getting jumped by an unknown dog, and the arrival of a new puppy had Vimy at threshold).
3. Individual Skills and Mindset - Most of the time the dogs are missing the ability to be calm and coachable, as well as critical skills which will make their future coaching together possible. For my dogs this looked like re-training Vimy’s habit of sprinting down the hall, and Valor’s understanding of respect of space. Both these things contribute to arousal and pressure when the dogs are together. Any independent skills need to be addressed before bringing the dogs together. In some dogs, there’s a long laundry list of things that need to be trained or coached before we can begin parallel work.
4. Parallel Work and Socialization - This could warrant its own post, but essentially, moving together on-leash and when ready, off leash. Giving more and more freedom as the need for coaching inappropriate choices decreases. Settling / resting together. Hand feeding together. This phase takes a long time, and is driven purely on how quickly the dogs can rebuild trust between themselves and their handler. It feels like you’re languishing here forever, but eventually, it starts to get better. Many, many exercises around respect of space, coaching time and place, maintaining calm, coachable mindset, and hours of parallel walking and settling are required to work through this phase.
Our Current Phase:
5. Live Life with Guard Rails - At some point, you need to get back to living your life. This is the hardest part for people, and the place where generally our board and trains end and we pass the baton to our clients.
It’s scary AF. The potential for weeks or months of work to be undone. The idea that you can’t micromanage every interaction. To just…let the dogs make their decisions and for you to coach accordingly. Good decisions? Praise. Easy enough. Bad decisions? Punishment event. We’re not talking about correcting the side eye, or quietly redirecting the low growl. At this phase, we’re seeing primarily good choices, but eventually, the dogs must understand that “we don’t do that here”. So far in my experience, it’s very hard not to intervene at the lower levels of escalation. The tense body language, the low growl etc. We want to step in, but if we do, we aren’t allowing any learning to happen. Jesus take the wheel.
For my guys, there’s been two fairly significant moments where it was psychologically painful for me not to step in. But, to my surprise and relief, they de-escalated on their own and we went on our way.
At this phase in rehabilitating the relationship, life must go on. But we do it with muzzles and / or drag lines so we can fail safely. And one day, they’re going to forget their muzzles and drag lines, and they’re going to make a sh*tty decision that escalates. And, I’ll be ready. But until then, I’ll remain pleasantly surprised and relieved when I momentarily let my guard down, forget about the dogs and our sh*tty situation, panic, and sigh some relief when I look across the room and see they’ve made great decisions. (See Photo)
3.5 months into this ordeal, I finally feel like we’re making progress. Between all the dogs. But we have a long ways to go before total trust is restored.
So if someone suggests they can address your multiple dog aggression issue in a few private lessons or a 3-week board and train. Red flag. At best, they’ll apply a band-aid solution of suppression, and at worse, they’ll make the issue worse and erode more trust.
TBD on how this all turns out for my household. But I have no doubt we’re on the right track, and life is easing back to normalcy one good decision at a time.
