by Biting is natural to dogs. It’s normal. It’s how their canine ancestors caught prey and defended themselves. Dog aggression on the other hand, is an evolutionary tool, and today’s dogs bite for pretty much the same reasons.
While many books and websites offer dozens of sub varieties of aggression, we can boil them down to two main types of aggression:
- Prey Driven Aggression
- Defensive (Stress) Aggression
Prey Driven Aggression
Prey driven aggression is an interesting phenomenon. In wolves, it’s an essential component of living. If wolves were not aggressive in the presence of prey, they’d starve. In many of today’s dog breeds however, prey driven has been eliminated, interrupted, or redirected.
Herding dogs are a great example, they need to have extinguished their prey drive or they would routinely eat their sheep their guarding. Their prey drive has been interrupted, so they are able to guide the sheep and not kill them.
A breed with a redirected prey drive is the Greyhound, who chases mechanical lures around a racecourse.
Trouble comes about when the average dog with a lively prey drive encounters running cats, kids, joggers, and cars, which they may attack with varying degrees of success.
Some dogs are stimulated by only one or two triggers, perhaps cats but not kids, or vice versa. Some breeds are genetically programmed only too stop and round up the prey, while some will go for the kill.
Unfortunately, there is not a lot you can do to extinguish prey drive in an individual dog. A dog who views cats as prey can never be trusted around them, and they must be permanently separated one way or another.
Defensive (Stress) Aggression
Defensive aggression accounts for all other kinds of aggression, with the possible exception of certain neurological disorders, such as rabies.
Some of what we term unprovoked aggression is really rather natural behavior in dogs. Mother dogs may bite if they feel their puppies are being threatened.
Dogs will bite if they are in physical pain. Many dogs will bite if they feel that their food, possessions, or territory is in danger. And almost any dog will bite if they are stressed, teased, abused, or frightened enough.
So dogs feel defensive about their puppies, their food, their possessions including their human owners, and their territory. If they perceive themselves as threatened, they get stressed.
If they get stressed enough, they will bite. Any dog with teeth is capable of biting, though this does not mean that every stressed dog will bite.
We all know about the fight or flight response, and most dogs prefer flight over fight. If for certain physical or psychological reasons they cannot flee, they will fight.
There’s nothing particularly weird or strange about any of this. It does not take a scientist to figure it out. Yet people continue to be bitten, over and over again, because they continue to unwittingly stress their dogs.
Conclusion
That doesn’t mean biting is excusable, because it’s not OK for dogs to bite people or other animals. As a dog owner, it’s our responsibility to understand the types of dog aggression in order for us to avoid any bad situations.
