We lost our old American Bulldog rescue a few weeks back to cancer and have decided to get straight back out there and find another deserving soul to share our home. Have been to see a stunning young male today and he is perfect in most ways. The biggest concern is that at 5 yrs old, he is yet to be neutered and is quite a heavy territorial marker in the rescue centre, as well as a prolific leg shagger. He is due to be neutered in the next few days, and the rescue place feel this will reduce, if not stop, both traits. He is located around 4 hrs away (8 hrs round trip) so regular visits for us to get to know him a little more won't be easy, but we feel that in principle, he will be worth it if the marking can be stopped. Do any of you have any personal experience with training out the marking trait? There is a lot of guidance online, but very little info on levels of success or how long the change of habit would usually take. Our main reservation is that at 5 yrs old, this behaviour may be as much routine as it is hormone driven, and the neutering may not make a lot of difference.
If you mean marking outdoors, then I'm not sure it is feasible, or fair, to try to train a dog out of it! Even a dog neutered at a young age (speaking from experience) can be an enthusiastic "marker". As long as it's not indoors, and you intervene to prevent it being done to, say, wheelie bins, sports bags, car wheels, then I don't see a problem. It's not as if it leaves a stink behind as you get with cats! As for the leg shagging, I fear that could be a habit that neutering alone won't stop, especially after 5 years of practise, but it's more of a priority to try to limit that I'd have thought.
Not bothered about heavy marking outdoors, its the fact that its an indoor thing too according to the rescue team. (walls, soft furnishings etc) His history was that he was abandoned in a house when a family moved out, and was found after several weeks of starvation, so his whole worldwas totally indoors during that time, thus soiling, marking etc indoors was his norm. He had lost over 50% bodyweight, which has taken over 5 months to gradually recover. I'm personally not phased about the leg humping, though wor lass aint keen. Its really more of trying to get some insight of how soon we could hope to turn his marking issues around if we took him on regardless. The rest of his behaviour is A1. It would be a shame to discount him because of the trait but there are many other dogs looking for homes without this extra hurdle.
My cairn will not stop barking at the mere sight of anything. And I mean anything. I’ve had his bollocks off and the little cunt still loves to scream the road down. the other day he barked solidly for 3 minutes at a rock. Bastard
I’m a big Cesar Milan fan Patience and living in the moment with animals. Your body language is as important as the dogs. You will need to see his trigger and positively snap his brain out of it. You have 5 years of behaviours that are normal to him but not to you. https://www.cesarsway.com/dog-reality/
Do you shout at him to stop, attention in any form reinforces it. Key is to stop the bark before it happens and focus him on something else spot his trigger or behaviour before it spirals. Like kids you don’t get anything good out of them when you shout
I never shout at my dog, but he hides when I shout at the kids. have not got mine done, he’s almost three now and he only marks on walks, and had his own teddy to take his frustrations out on so that stops him trying to hump.
Love this dude. Rainy days on the couch with the dogs and a pile of his shows on catch up are pretty much perfection
Our Toby has never marked, or done anything like that in the house, but does it a lot on walks and was marking everywhere in the garden and killing off large patches of grass, plants, and on our fruit trees, strawberries, Rhubarb and veg. He goes to doggy day care a couple of times a week whilst we are both at work, and the ladies that run the place are excellent and give out great advice. To limit the area in the centres garden where all the dogs pee they have a large square of Astroturf with a traffic cone in the middle. Most of the dogs use that most of the time, as it of course smells of the other dogs. The Astroturf is on concrete and by a drain, so it and the cone get hosed off several times a day. They have several cones, so on their advice we borrowed a cone after it had been hosed off and dried in the sun, It was wrapped up in several bin bags in the car. We put this in a place in the garden that was less obvious than most and Toby used it rather than anywhere else whilst it was there. When we took it back he just carried on using the same spot most of the time, and now we have very few patches of dead grass. The above is amazing considering his background, and proves any dog can be re-trained with the right help and advice. We took him on 3yrs ago, he’s one of the many rescued Romanian street dogs that have been brought into the UK in recent years by do-gooders with more compassion than common sense. He’s a German Shep/Lab Cross, and despite his passport and us being told he was @ 2yrs old at the time, we and our Vet all think he’s @8yrs old now. He’s been neutered at some stage, we don’t really know when. He’d been given up on by two owners in the UK, being handed back to the rescue centre, and been shipped around several rescue centres. We believe he was handed back because he has behavioural and stomach issues, but we, our Vet, and our son who’s a Vet nurse, have come up with a food regime that suits him and limits his stomach problems to just once every few weeks. He’s really aggressive with strangers, which has changed slightly over the last three years to being very protective of us with strangers. But as far as we are concerned he is now the most loving and wonderful dog to have around. We have never shouted at him or been aggressive with him, just calmly firm, and assertive, just like we were trained to do so by both our sets of parents. He was too timid to bark at first, but does now, not often, but actually when somebody comes down the drive etc which is good in my book. He does however ‘talk’ a lot to us, funny happy noises whilst playing or having a fuss. Nasher.
Apart from the obvious "confine him to kitchen/hard surfaces" until he's trained, it occurred to me that there is still the possibility of a dog being kept outdoors, with a kennel, and having a good life. I stayed in a holiday rental on a farm in Devon last year, and the sheepdog was living in an outbuilding; he gave the impression of being ferocious, but I think it was mainly noise - he was clearly a well-trained working dog, and very handsome. The kennel thing reminded me of this rather good piece of writing (by Thomas Mann - 100 years ago) on the subject of the relationship between a man (of course it could be a woman!) and a dog. https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/61284
