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Let me start off by saying that Porkchop has NEVER exhibited any signs of agression/fearfulness in the past. He's 9 months old now and we left him with a pet sitter for the first time this weekend, for 4 days. When we got back last night, I went to pet him, and he cowered, then tried to bite me!! He has NEVER done that in the past. I figured he was mad that we left him for so long, so I didn't think anything of it.
Today, I took him for a walk, and we ran into our neighbor, who PC adores and runs to every time he sees him. Well today, he barked, growled, and tried to bite him! He then tried to run from him and continued barking until said neighbor walked away. I have never seen him act like this and don't want my dog being one of those agressive dogs that everyone in the neighborhood hates. What can we do? We just noticed this last night, and more today, so it's all new to us. Any advice is greatly appreciated.
I will advise you to check out his health first. I left my GSD for a week last year. She stayed with a friend that she knew. As far as I can tell, they love each other. However, my GSD suffered an eposide of immunosystem depression during the stay. This time, she became kind of aggressive. Stupid as I was, I decided to send her back to her favorite doggie daycare to socialize her further. In order to comply with the daycare's rule, I took her to a vet to get her vaccinated. I mentioned to her vet that I worry about her immunosystem. The vet told me that it was not a big deal. Later, we found that she had a bad infection and felt pain in her bone. This vaccination further excerbated her problem. This was the reason she become kind of aggressive and doesn't want anyone to touch her except me. Once you ruled out the health reason, you can decide whether PC was hit by someone when you were away. If he was hit by someone, you will need to work with him to restore his trust.
i ask b/c i had a situation once where barnaby, my shih tzu, suddenly became afraid of women with long blonde hair after a particular groomer with long fair hair groomed him. he would try to bite women, even women he loved, if they wore their long blonde hair down and leaned over him.
i can't be certain, but i think that groomer hurt him...and it didn't help that i heard later from other sources that she had a problem with alcohol (and this was a woman who came with good references!).
maybe something happened with the pet sitter, possibly even something inadvertent where maybe they just handled pork chop wrong or maybe scared him without meaning to?
did you have a chance to actually observe him with the sitter when you came home? if so, did he seem okay in the sitter's presence? i know you said he cowered and tried to bite you...
i hope you figure this out, and it turns out to be something easily explainable!
edited to add: oh, and the only thing i did with barnaby to ease him back into being able to deal with long-haired blondes...i started wearing my own hair down around him. and i had a friend of ours that he loved wear her hair down and gradually get closer and closer to him physically. basic socialization, and it took awhile.
i think you would be doing the equivalent of re-socializing pork chop to everything/everyone if you're not able to figure out what scared him in the first place...but, i'm no trainer, so maybe somebody else will know better! good luck!
I'm more thinking the same way barndog is: SOMETHING must have happened with the dog sitter.
Was the dog living with the sitter or did the sitter live in your home? If the dog was with the sitter, what other dogs and other pets does he/she have? Did he/she bring any of those animals to YOUR house?
Sadly, your sitter will NEVER admit to anything that happened while you were away, but I think some tincture of time will certainly help. I can't help but think that something very scary happened to your baby while you were gone. Check with the neighbors, if the sitter was staying at your house. They might know something.
Sounds like something happend to the dog.
When I went away for one night my father in law came and let him out of the house and he was fine. When he came back Dakota ran away and cowered and as a result is a fence chaser and barks at everyone. He was out in my yard barking at my neighbor and they did not see me in the garage at the fence and she was stabbing at him over the fence, which explains his cowarding and "aggressive" fence chasing. They may not have originally beat him but they did at least once since then.
The pet sitter stayed at our place with her 2 dogs (much larger than PC) and one of her dogs does not like PC and growled at him when they first met. She came highly recommended from someone we trust, so we had no issues leaving him with her. We find that many dogs react that way to him for some reason, even though he's the sweetest and most playful little thing ever.
Several of our friends/neighbors said they did see her out with PC at the dog park across the street and he was playing with their dogs. I know that PC gets very excited any time a dog comes over and wants to play the entire time (happened when we had a foster) so she had to lock him in the kitchen, which is completely understandable.
I have a feeling he was stressed by having a growling dog in his own house for 4 days. When I found a stray and kept it overnight, the stray would growl at PC, causing him to cower and eventually pee in the house, something he only does when really sick/scared. I just hope he doesn't actually bite someone and I will keep him close to me until he is fine with people again!
Yeah, no matter HOW good a pet sitter's recs, I would never allow their dogs to come with them. That's way too much stress on your dog and esp. since one growled at poor PC. Give him time and don't lean over him. Get down to his level and approach slowly so he can see you aren't going to do anything bad to him. It's also possible the pet sitter mistreated him. Any change like that, sudden, after a time with someone new, is almost surely an indication of a bad experience.
Poor Porkchop! You've given him a good foundation of trust, so I would not expect this occurrence to be harmful in the long term. He was probably stressed and now that you are home he'll undoubtedly bounce back to his old self soon.
I guess we just can't travel! He's such a mama's boy and I doubt he will ever outgrow it! He cries if I leave the house without him, even if my husband stays behind.
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