Two younger F dogs occasionally fighting - help

[matchboxfox]

Hi! My roommate and I have dogs. I have a 5 y/o male Pyrenees/BC mix 75lbs and a 1 y/o F aussie 30lbs. My roommate has a 10 month old Mal mix, 55 lbs. My boy is the top dog no one messes with him and he’s really relaxed and doesn’t really want to play with the girls and if he does he generally leaves and or plays by himself.

The girls play a lot. My aussie resource guards her toys and food as well as my roommates mal with her own food recently. We feed them apart in different rooms and keep new toys away from them. They play with a rope toys and chase each other and tackle each other mostly get mouthy.

However a few times they have got into a few times when my dog gets upset if my roommates doesn’t want to stop playing or when they do get mad over the tug toy. They go on walks together and give each other kisses all the time so I was wondering if this is mostly just them both resource guarding or the beginnings of same sex aggression, or them just trying to figure out where they stand in the pack grouping? We both do our best to keep high value items away and stay in a neutral area but does anyone have any extra ideas or thoughts?

Both of them are super sweet girls but are very true to their breed’s reputations.

 

[imagebeastmarkbeast]

@matchboxfox This is likely a management situation more than anything given the breeds and the behaviors. Joel Beckman has a simple philosophy that I really like for multi-dog households. It comes down to "you're the boss, and there's no fighting around the boss." The key here being that it's reasonable for your Aussie to resource guard and get sick of being pushed, and it's reasonable for the Mal to not want another dog getting in her business. What's not okay is fighting when you say they shouldn't.

Practically this means training a rock solid "leave it" for both of them, and making sure that they both see as you leadership material. This isn't an alpha/dominance thing so much as "When I say something, you can rely on me to follow through."

Practice low stakes leave-it commands to help proof it. Reward with a high-value treat that is NOT the thing you said to leave.

Work on breaking up their play while energy levels are still low. They're tussling and having a good time, you send them both to their places, and correct if they don't go. This proofs your ability to intervene.

Finally, when it does just start to escalate (before it gets nasty), mark with a "no" and then correct pretty harshly. If you're confident in your ability to safely administer something that they find quite aversive that comes with a good startle (e.g. a pet corrector, strong squirt bottle, or sharp clap and yell) you should do that.

Between this combo you should be able to manage to effectively.

Edit - one thing I should clarify. While I love the e-collar, you should be careful with it here if you're using one. You can absolutely use to enforce "leave it" and "place" commands. But I do not like the e-collar for punishing either dog aggression or resource guarding without having a trainer that knows what they're doing handling it. It can make things worse. Having the punishment very obviously come from you keeps your dogs from building superstitious negative associations with the other dog, which e-collars can do.

 

[matchboxfox]

@imagebeastmarkbeast Thank you so much that was so helpful!