Hi all,
I need some help. My 4 year-old golden lab is the sweetest boy ever at home and with most other dogs. He greets people very politely, he loves attention and strangers, and with most other dogs, he's polite and doesn't exert himself too much.
The problem is, every so often he'll bark and snarl at other dogs in a very aggressive way. Sometimes he'll start pulling really hard on the leash when he does this, and I have to physically pull him away. Just today, he was off lead in a park, and ran over to another dog that was on a lead and aggressively began chasing it around the owner until I had to physically grab and restrain him.
I don't plan to let him off-lead again any time soon after that. What I want to know though, is does anyone have any idea why this might be happening? I looked up a lot of different causes of dog aggression, and couldn't find anything that really explained why he's so randomly aggressive towards some other dogs. It doesn't seem to be based on size, he's done this to dogs bigger and smaller than him, and it seems totally random, like he'll be fine with 4 random dogs he meets then suddenly act super aggressively towards the 5th.
As far as I can tell he doesn't seem to be trying to attack these dogs, because with the one today all he did was chase, but there was a lot of aggressive barking and snarling that alarmed both me and the other owner. Does anyone have any insight into why he might be behaving like this and what could help get him to stop?
Thanks in advance.
submitted by /u/AbbyRitter
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