Social aggression is almost non-existent in most modern day working dogs. If it did exist, the dogs would not be good for dogsport or competition. Most people involved with dogs today would have never in their entire life, seen a dog with social aggression as it is defined by people like Konrad Lorenz and Ferdinand Brunner.
The recent trend in breeding has been to breed dogs that do not have social aggression. And that may be what many people want. A socially aggressive dog is not tolerated in modern society. The point I would like to make is that social aggression is nothing that should be made out to be something evil. It is a valuable trait in dogs that are in the right hands. Such dogs do demand a high degree of responsibility and vigilance on the part of the handler. Socially aggressive dogs that are also dominant are difficult to handle and to train and should be in the hands of experts.
Both Armin Winkler and Helmut Raiser don’t even believe in an independent, natural fighting drive, as according to them, if a dog does fight, it is composed of a package of traits. And even then,
most dogs have one or two traits in the package –
- Prey drive,
- defense drive ,
- active defense reaction ,
- Passive defense reaction,
- Frustration aggression,
- Social aggression,
- Dominance behaviour and
- Rage.
Out of all the above traits, most dogs only possess one or two. If a dog has all these that’s a dog one cannot easily forget. Read More→
