People aggression

[oakash]

So my sister's dog has apparently become more and more aggressive towards people lately. He's staying at my house for a couple of weeks so I was hoping I could try and work through his problems. He will try and nip at people reaching their hand through the fence, and we have little kids in the yard behind us so he's banned from the back yard entirely. We're pretty much hoping that no one is dumb enough to try and pet him through our front fence, which is unlikely because he barks at people extremely aggressively and he looks pretty darn scary while doing so.

Now my question is, what is the best way to go about reducing his aggression? Would playing the look at that game be best? Where I reward him for looking at people, and then up the ante to where he has to look at them with no aggressive reaction?

 

[milos_mommy]

Are his only displays of aggression at the fence? (Or a fence/crate/doors kind of thing?) Fence reactivity is pretty common. Look at that could definitely help, with lots of desensitization. Rewarding him for sitting calmly while someone stands still near the fence, walks parallel along the fence, steps towards the fence, lifts their hand, talks to him through the fence, reaches towards the fence, etc while keeping him under threshold will help.

If he's showing other aggression, what triggers it?

 

[oakash]

He'll go with hackles raised and bark at random people at the dog park too. At first it was just anyone holding a stick or a leash, but now it seems as though he picks random people. So he doesn't go there anymore unless there is no one else there because we don't want it to escalate any further.

He also started off just hating people on bikes/motorcycles while in the car, but that turned into hating anyone walking near the car.

I'm going to take him to the isolated fenced off part of the dog park and reward him for calm behaviors.