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You have to watch the entire episode. I would never, ever want a dog with food aggression as serious as this dog has. She is/was awful with the owner and they had a toddler. I think Cesar kept that dog.
You can watch the entire episode on YouTube. A snippet doesn't tell the whole story. She was super aggressive when it came to her bowl/feeding time. I would have put her to sleep.
people love to watch just enough to back up whatever point it is they want to make.
I have watched that video multiple times and I agree with DL above. That dog had a mental issue and should have been put down before someone was seriously hurt.
Some dogs have marbles that never fell into the right hole, whether it's poor breeding, a health problem or a total lack of socialization. Whatever it was... some things can never be fixed well enough to make a dog totally safe.
I owned a dog like that... with me he was fine. With others I never felt comfortable. He did bite, twice and we forgave. The third bite was the last bite. We cried like babies, but it was the right thing to do. He was mentally unstable. Sad, but true
Watched that episode before. That dog started growling and snapping near his food even when no one was close to his food. In food aggression, the dog would show these behaviours when another dog, person, or whatever it deems a threat gets within sight or sound to his source. This dog just snaps and grows at air, and if you happen to be in the way, you will get hurt. He needed a vet to check him out mentally or at least, put down. A trainer cannot fix crazy.
Regardless, whether this dog had issues other than resource guarding, acting as the aggressor and threatening them with body language, forcing them into a corner, etc. is not the correct way to address the problem.
I used to follow Cesar Millan and thought he was quite good at treating psychological issues in dogs, but finally came to the conclusion that many of his methods are outdated and harmful. Pushing a dog who is fearful into an even more fearful state can make an aggression issue much, much worse, imo. Such dogs need to be shown that there is nothing to fear rather than attempting to dominate them into submission. Positive reinforcement, guiding them with gentle methods and 'remapping' their brain to work through aggression (which is almost always fear-based) is far, far better than antagonizing the existing fears.
I have a dog who has had fear-based issues from the time he was a pup, including food guarding and fear of both dogs and people he didn't know. At first I began to follow Cesar's method with food guarding. This very quickly led to a breakdown in our trust of each other, and led to my pup's fears - and reactions - escalating. That's when I realized that what I was doing was actually threatening an already fearful dog, which didn't make sense. So I did a 180 in terms of training and used positive reinforcement; today my dog (now 4) has minimal food dish issues. He will sit and wait while I put the food in his dish, waits until I tell him it's okay to eat, and he backs up and sits if I approach the food dish.
So, even if the dog in the video did have some sort of pre-existing mental problem (which I doubt...aggression is so often wrongly termed as the dog 'being crazy' simply because the fear-based, aggressive issues were unknowingly allowed to escalate by the owner), treating the dog with dominant, aggressive methods will most likely lead to a dog who will eventually need to be euthanized.
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