Hello all, me and my girlfriend have a 20 month old working line female intact German Shepherd. We have had her for five months and in that time she has settled well in the house and we have undergone lots of training with her. She is very well behaved not reactive and fairly well socialised her only issues are slight separation anxiety which we have been working on and occasionally she can be overprotective for instance she may Bark when a member of our extended family hugs us, I will now refer to her as S.
We have wanted to get her a doggy friend for awhile as we thought she would enjoy having someone to socialise and play with, we settled on a five month old Akita/GSD cross we will refer to him as B.
Outside the house, S gets along with B and they have both shown an indication of wanting to play, i.e. Play bows, loose open body language. We have kept them both on lead for now while they build up their relationship.
However inside the house, inside the car, and around people which S considers to be high value S is showing aggressive or distressed behaviour towards B such as barking, growling and thrashing around. This behaviour is most notable when S is in her crate and B is free. We have tried to avoid this as much as possible to create a level playing field however sometimes taking B to the toilet means that we have to cross past the crates which S is in.
We have kept them on lead in the house when they’re not in their crates and generally they ignore each other and relax, this is also the case at bedtime each one sleeps on a different side of our bed.
We have contacted a trainer however due to the time of year we most likely won’t have a face-to-face appointment for a couple of weeks, the advice so far has been to keep them in their crates however as we are finding S to be more reactive in her crate we are not sure whether in this case that’s the best way to move forward.
What should we do? Any advice would be much appreciated – thanks in advance.
submitted by /u/ihavenoplace
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