Despite the intimidating name, this type of aggression is actually much more common than most people realize. In simple terms, a dog learns to use aggression as a tool to influence the behavior of the people around him. He discovers that growling, snapping, or biting can be effective ways to get what he wants. Sometimes it’s possession of a favorite toy. Sometimes it’s access to a preferred spot on the sofa. Sometimes it’s food. Sometimes it’s simply getting someone to move away. Like a spoiled child who learns that tantrums work, the behavior becomes reinforced because it achieves a desired outcome.
The encouraging news is that control-related aggression often has one of the best prognoses of any aggression diagnosis when treated properly. Cases like these are usually fairly straightforward. But this case wasn’t. I understood Buddy, but I didn’t really understand Tim, and that bothered me.
The treatment exercises I was giving Tim weren’t especially complicated. Yet despite his intelligence, he didn’t seem to understand what Buddy was communicating during the exercises. Tim wasn’t being resistant, stubborn, or unwilling to follow instructions. Quite the opposite. He was trying hard to do exactly what I was asking him to do.
But it was almost as though he and Buddy were participating in two completely different conversations. The more I watched them interact, the more convinced I became that I was missing something important.
[This article is original content created by USA Dog Behavior (https://www.USADogBehavior.com) and is intended for our readers.]
Then one day, Tim’s wife quietly told me something she had never mentioned before. I’ll never forget it.
“My husband has Asperger’s Syndrome.”
Suddenly, a hundred little observations I’d made over the previous weeks began to rearrange themselves in my mind.
For those of you who may not be familiar with Asperger’s Syndrome, it’s a condition that’s generally considered part of the autism spectrum. Many people with it are highly intelligent and exceptionally capable, but they may have difficulty interpreting subtle social cues and body language in humans…
…and canines.
Suddenly, the entire case made sense. For weeks, I had been trying to understand Buddy. Now I realized I needed to understand Tim.
Dogs communicate primarily through body language. A hard stare, a stiff posture, a freeze, a lip lift, or a growl aren’t random behaviors. They’re communication. And Buddy had been communicating all along.
The bites weren’t appearing out of nowhere. They were happening at the end of a communication process that Tim couldn’t see, and for the first time, I understood why the treatment exercises weren’t working.
Control-related aggression is often one of the more straightforward forms of aggression to treat. Once we identify the problem, the path forward is usually fairly clear. But Tim wasn’t missing motivation, intelligence, or effort. He was missing information. More specifically, he was missing the ability to consistently recognize the subtle body language signals Buddy was using to communicate.
The mystery was no longer why Buddy was biting. The mystery was why Tim couldn’t see the warnings. And now, for the first time, I finally had the answer. Tim loved Buddy, and Buddy loved Tim. The problem was that Tim couldn’t understand what Buddy was trying to tell him.