How Your Energy Can Make Your Dog Aggressive?

You have probably heard this over and over but, dogs can sense your energy. They can tell when you are excited, nervous, or scared, so it’s important to control your thoughts and emotions when you are raising a puppy or adult dog.

Dogs and people share some similar behavior traits when it comes to non-verbal communication skills, like reading body language.
The difference is that dogs exceed our visual powers as a primary factor in understanding their surroundings. They also use additional powerful tools such as the sense of smell and hearing to understand and analyze their environment to the fullest extent.

Dogs are extremely watchful of what we do on a daily basis; they quickly pick up on our life patterns and learn about every individual around the household. They can tell who is anxious, confident, and who can they push limits around and how much. This may be why your dog is behaving differently around each family member.

As a dog trainer in Orange County, most of my aggression cases come from overly-humanized dogs. These dogs come from families who have over-catered to their dog and have replaced their dog needs with humans needs. These families often think that this is the most humane way of treating a dog, but they fail to understand that a dog is not a human.

A dog can quickly become unbalanced when they grow up with a family who does not understand, or refuses to identify, that a dog is in fact a different species, complete with their own unique needs and lifestyle.

Dogs require discipline, affection, and stable human contact to grow into confident adults. Dogs play rough, discipline each other in their pack, and have very predictable social behaviors; they do not understand complicated human emotions.

The Emotional Human:

If you are the type that tenses up when coming into contact with another dog, you can not blame your dog for behaving aggressively. This kind of human fear can grow into a big problem. Often, this person has experiencing a vicious dog and is still carrying the burden of fear from the incident. This anxiety causes your dog to misread the presence of dogs or people and registers these things as the reason for your fear. This leads to their desire to protect you.

Dogs hear vast frequencies, even those that are inaudible to us, and have a sense of smell 10000000 times stronger humans. Dogs can smell fear: it’s a fact. When experience fear, your heart rate and breathing increases, you begin to sweat (even if you don’t notice), and your body releases both adrenaline and cortisol, which is known as the stress hormone. All of this happens to prepare your body to run away from the source of fear or to stay and fight it, also known as “fight or flight”.

As humans, we have more control over how we react to the given situation and we can even disguise it from others. However, a dog only has the capability to respond in the fight or flight manner. Therefore, you might see your dog act aggressively in response to your source of the fear.

A fearful human will raise a skittish or aggressive dog, depending on the personality of their dog. An emotionally stable person will raise a confident, well-trained dog, regardless of the dog’s personality.

The Over Catering Human:

Like I said before, a dog cannot understand complex human emotions. Trust me, your dog will be O.K. if he accidentally bumps his head on the wall. There is no need to freak out and run to nurture him – they are strong creatures. Dogs will go crazy when they are put in an overly-sensitive environment and, eventually, they will become mentally unstable. It is essential for a human leader to practice calm energy around their dog and become aware of their emotions in order to change their dog’s temperament.

People with overly anxious and excessive catering personalities are not logical dog owners; this is why the dog bite rate is increasing every year. A dog with weak leaders will see the need to overreact because they do not think that their human leader is capable of protecting them. This is due to the fact that they have only experienced love from their owner and no discipline.

Positive reinforcement dog trainers in Orange County have fooled people into false happiness theories.
A positive reinforcement-only dog trainer will tell you that any form of correction is wrong, which can cause long term damage to a dog. They deny dominance as a factor in the social pecking order and label any aggression as either fear or mental instability. Most of the time, these dog trainers have never rehabilitated an aggressive dog.

I never thought the day would come when people consider discipline crueler than taking a dog’s life at a vet’s office or forcing a social animal to live in isolation. But, unfortunately, this is the life we live in because humans have developed unreasonable expectations of a happy dog. You can see how people and their emotions can become selfish and hypocritical.

One day, I hope that all humans will recognize dogs as a highly intelligent species that require care from responsible, disciplinary owners.