Protecting your dog
Before I adopted my dog, I wondered how I would react if my dog were ever in a dog fight. I've had my dog for just over a month, and now I know (read the harrowing story): I pulled my dog by the leash; I screamed for help; I screamed at the offending dog; I kicked the offending dog; I got as much of my body around my dog's body as I could. I can only honestly recommend screaming, which served to get someone else to get the offending dog off my dog. Twenty-four hours later, I torment myself by thinking: If I had been able to prevent the other dog from attacking my dog, I would not have had to react to the dog fight. If I had heard the other dog running up behind us and seen it making a beeline for my dog, I could have debilitated it with a swift kick before it jumped on my dog.
On second thought, getting in front of a charging aggressive dog is probably not a good plan. It proved to be possible to incapacitate the particular dog that attacked my dog with a kick, but it wasn't, in fact, my kick that ended the fight, it was the well-placed kick of a neighborhood businessman. As much as I wish I could prevent my dog from ever being attacked, I know that I may very well have to react again to an aggressive dog attacking my dog.
While waiting for the opportunity to adopt a dog, I read a few dog books. A couple of the books that I read touched on the subject of aggression. But these books were all about adopting and training a dog. The aggression with which they were concerned, whether human-oriented or canine-oriented, occured in the context of responsible humans. Bruce Fogle identifies eight types of aggression and suggests methods for both treating and preventing each of them in The Dog's Mind (New York: Macmillan [Howell Book House], 1990). Reviewing his categories--Dominance Aggression, Possessive Aggression, Fear Aggression, Protective Aggression, Inter-Male Aggression, Predatory Aggression, Ideopathic Aggression, and Learned Aggression--I find that none of his suggestions for treatment or prevention could have prepared me for my dog's being attacked from behind by an unleashed dog on a city sidewalk.
Like Fogel, Jean Donaldson is interested in what makes dogs dogs, but the goal of her Culture Clash (Berkeley: James and Shattuck, 1996), is to help human owners understand their canine companions. Her chapter on "Socialization, Conflict Resolution, Fear & Aggression" addresses important issues including the responsibility of dog owners to socialize their dogs, ways to promote a "soft bite," and ways to reduce resource guarding behavior. Again, no help for me when my dog was attacked by an unleashed dog whose owner failed to take responsibility for its behavior.
In Successful Dog Adoption (Indiana: Wiley [Howell Book House], 2003), one of the first books I read as a prospective adopter, Sue Sternberg devotes a chapter to "Adding Another Dog." Her advice for stopping and preventing dog fights is directed to families who introduce another dog to the family dog(s). She focuses, not surprisingly on the ways that humans inadvertently fuel dog fights by interrupting and interfering with the outcome of early stages of the contest: in a family conflicts either run their course, or someone leaves (or is kicked out) of the family.
Under "How to Break Up a Dog Fight, Sternberg discounts the common recommendation of spraying the dogs with water from a hose. As Sternberg predicts, my dog was attacked no where near a hose. She also makes the important point that "the most common way for a human to get bitten by a dog is while breaking up a dog fight" (220). If you have to separate two fighting dogs, she recommends shoving a solid object between the dogs faces or "throwing a blanket over one dog and trying to work it down between them" (221). Needless to say, I didn't have access to a solid object or blanket on the streets of Somerville, which are suddenly looking a lot meaner.
Sternberg also advocates the use of citronella oil for breaking up a dogfight:
The best tool for breaking up a dog fight is a spray can of citronella oil. The product is called Direct Stop, and is sold in portable and convenient small canisters that shoot a long, direct stream of harmless but intrusive citronella oil (221).I ordered two canisters from an internet retailer today.