Free Living With Dogs by Dr Hugh Wirth

environment.
    All this, of course, presupposes that the dog has been in a training routine since it came home as an eight-week-old puppy. If this hasn’t happened, you’ll end up with a behavioural ratbag which the owner grows to dislike more and more. Commonly 10 to 12 months is the time when people get fed up with a dog and dump it, or leave it with the RSPCA.
    The first 12–18 months will require a large input of guidance and discipline from the owner. After 18 months, if you’ve been consistent in setting the rules, the work begins to pay off. By the age of three you should have reached the stage where the dog will anticipate what will please you, and correction will only be occasional. The well-trained dog will have learned to follow the boss dog, and live by the rules.

BOSS DOGS AND BEHAVIOUR PROBLEMS
    There’s no secret why my dogs are well-behaved — because I’m the boss. Rule number one of dog ownership is that dogs must have a boss. In the wild, dogs are pack animals, and they have a leader, so in the domestic situation, the owner must become the pack leader. Dogs love to follow a leader, and they’re not meant to be ‘boss dogs’ unless they are in the wild.
    Rule number two is that the boss dog sets the parameters of behaviour. If the owner tries to run a partnership with the dog, the dog doesn’t understand that. The reason people have unruly dogs is that the dog has been allowed to become the boss dog. Owners have to keep reasserting who’s boss.
    Male dogs who have not been desexed are more likely to be boss dogs than females, but I have seen plenty of dominant bitches. About 15 per cent of the animals I see are boss dogs, and the animal’s size has little bearing on its desire for dominance. A high number of lapdogs write their own tickets. One of the most savage dogs I’ve encountered was a Chihuahua. The Rottweiler weighs at least 40 kilos and takes some stopping but, because of its smallness, the Chihuahua can at least be managed.
    The vet who had the practice before me used to say, ‘Never trust a Chow.’ They’re mercurial, highly dominant dogs. When I voiced this opinion at a dog club, a Chow breeder stood up and said it was rubbish. I replied, ‘One day you’ll see what I mean.’ The following week at a show the breeder was attacked by his own Chow in the ring. The next time I went to the dog club, the owner still had his arm swathed in bandages, and he required plastic surgery.
    The most common boss dog is the one who has its way, regardless of the owner. Everything is fine until you try to correct the dog. He will sit on your favourite chair, and if you try to move him, he’ll bite you. Dogs will also bolster their control by ‘food fadding’ — refusing to eat the food put in front of them. By not eating the food, they engender panic in the owner, who rushes out to buy different kinds of food, which produce the same response from the dog. They exercise this quite subtle control over their owner via the dinner plate.
    The owner usually says, ‘I love him, even though he’s naughty,’ and has all kinds of excuses for allowing the bad behaviour to go on. It is a simple case of the dog being allowed to exert authority. The dog is perfectly behaved as long as you never do anything to control it, but the minute it has to submit to something in the vet’s surgery, the problem shows up. Owners try to explain away the dog’s dominance by saying the dog is nervous, after being frightened by a particular experience, often with a vet. They claim the dog has never been the same since something you, or someone else, did to him. No-one ever says, ‘The dog is biting to show his dominance, and I let him get that way.’ The problem stems from the fact that the owner has never taken control.
Is your dog a boss dog?
    The mark of whether a dog is a boss dog is how it behaves outside the family. Boss dogs still want to be dominant when they are brought in to me at the surgery. When the dog