Playing with Your Dog - Avoiding possessive/aggressive Behavior

Playing with your dog is a good way to bond as owner and pet. When you play with your puppy or adult dog, however, you can easily play too rough. In time, this could produce a very dominating or aggressive dog. Problems like food guarding, biting, nipping, and many other problems can be a result of playing with your dog too harshly.

Children need to learn not to play rough with dogs, pulling on body parts of the dog or hitting the dog. Try to desensitize the dog to minor child behavior such as poking and screaming around the dog.

If you play too rough with a submissive dog, the dog may become fearful of you.

Set Rules

A safety measure is to teach the dog or pup to let go its toy with a selected release command. The dog must remain off the toy until given a command to go after the toy again, and then another command for the dog to release its toy. You can let the dog have the toy sometimes, but if you let the dog have the toy all the time he or she will think they have control over you since you gave in and stopped the fight by letting him or her have it.

Do not pull the toy out of a dog's mouth because this teaches the dog to fight with you when you want him to simply open his mouth so you can have the toy. You do need to be careful with a pup due to teething. Try not to pull very hard, as you may pull out some of your pup's teeth when they're not exactly ready to come out.

The different commands you can use for commanding a dog to release are "Let go!," "Give!," "Out!" or in German "Aus!" The "out" and "aus" are used the most in protection dog training. This is important if you wish to have your dog trained to become a protection dog. It may be wise to check your local or nearest Schutzhund and National Personal Protection Dog Trials to find out the commands they accept in their trials, if you feel you may be interested in competing with your dog.

Other commands, such as "drop it," are fine to use too (especially if you are not interested in competition). If you need help on how to teach your dog to perform a behavior on command, our Clicker Training Guide offers an easy, quick, and effective method for this.

Unconfident and Fearful Dogs

Doing the tug-of-war to a fearful and unconfident dog is very good to do. Adding a release command just tells the dog you are the boss and will not have any effect on building up your dog's confidence. For these dogs, you can allow them to take the item more frequently during tug-of-war, as long as you have your dog release it by command a few times.

There are many people who pull an item away from the dog while the dog is still holding onto it by its mouth or paws (when they’re not trying to play tug-of-war). This causes the dog to fight with the human and will also cause the dog to become possessive and then later become dominating toward the human. This can then lead to aggression problems.

Fearful dogs have low to moderate confidence. With a fearful and unconfident dog you probably don't have any aggression or dominating problems now, but you will after a year or more of playing tug-of-war without the release command. You will eventually develop your dog into a high confidence dog. Tug-of-war is also used in training a pup and adult dog to become confident for the training in Schutzhund and Protection dog training.

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practice, practice, practice!