Aggression towards intact males

Hi Corgi Experts,

I wanted to get some ideas/thoughts on approaches to work on this... Our approx 2 year old male Pembroke (Chewey) seems to have serious issues with other intact males. He's a rescue that we adopted about a year ago but we don't know any of his history, other then he wasn't neutered when he was first picked up.

He definitely has some on-leash aggression issues towards other dogs, although we've worked a lot on that in the past year and he's hugely improved. Off-leash he's always been reasonable, he'll snark at a dog occasionally but nothing too serious... unless the other dog happens to be an intact male. For whatever reason he seems to go after them fairly aggressively. It doesn't seem to matter what size or breed the other dog is, he just will single them out. Once in great while it will be a female or neutered male, but 9 times out of 10 it's an intact male.

Needless to say if I happen to notice the dog I'll immediately put him on leash until we are past and out of range.. but nuts aren't always the first thing I'm looking for when we're on the beach with 20+ dogs running loose ;->

In any case, just wondering what other people's experiences are with this and if anyone had particular approaches that worked for improving this behavior?

Thanks in advance,

Diane (& Chewey)

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Permalink Reply by justine moeller on December 10, 2011 at 1:40am

Hi Diane,

We went through what we believed to be a major intolerance to intact males as well. Like you, ocasionally they (2 of them, making it a little pack!) would pick out a female or nuetered dog but 95% of the time it was intact males. They would also pick out certain intact males that they fell totally in LOVE with. They were around 2 when this happened. There was not much in regards to solutions that we figured out. BUT...and hopefully this will give you some confidence - they have bothed stopped that. They will sometimes still behave like in smaller, enclosed space and in large free spaces, but only with dogs that are being what they consider (not all the owners consider it to be though) rude behaviour. Pawing, jumping on, etc....Keep up the exercise and play sessions like you are doing.

Also, when you say aggressive behaviour, is he literally attacking? Drawing blood? Does he search them out and then go after them? Or are these dogs entering his space and then he is reacting this way?

Good Luck!

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Permalink Reply by Diane on December 11, 2011 at 6:18pm

That's good to know... He's probably around two now so it will be interesting to see if it gets better. He hasn't attacked and don't _think_ he actually would (but I don't really want to test that out, needless to say), but he fairly aggressively harasses them... Almost like he's herding (e.g. running around them provoking/nipping them) only he is a lot more snarky about it then he would be normally and he is definitely the one instigating it.

Interestingly enough yesterday I got caught off guard when he did that to a smaller mixed breed (that I didn't notice wasn't fixed until after he went after him), and yet a little while later they were playing and running around chasing each other. So dunno if it's just a tough guy act or what... I just know he's been lucky that so far the dogs that he's done it too have been fairly mellow and/or I've caught him in time.

Thanks! Hopefully it's just a teenage phase he's going through and if I continue working with him on it it will improve.