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Preventing and Handling Akita Aggression
Why can Akitas be aggressive anyway?
A dog is an instinctively aggressive creature and the same is true for the Akita. In the wild, aggression came in very handy: dogs needed aggression to hunt, to defend themselves from other creatures, and to defend resources such as food, a place to sleep, and a mate.
Akitas aggressive?
The Akita is NOT more aggressive than any other dog breed.
It's just that because this is a strong and powerful dog, you need to manage it's behavior. And perhaps more so than when you own a Chihuahua.
Yes, some Akitas tend to be aggressive… but so tend to be some humans. You cannot judge an individual dog by its breed.
Selective breeding over the centuries has minimized and refined this trait significantly, but there's just no getting around it: dogs are physically capable of inflicting serious harm (just look at those teeth!) because that's how they've survived and evolved. And Mother Nature is pretty wily – it's hard to counteract the power of instinct!
But that doesn't mean that we, as dog lovers and owners, are entirely helpless when it comes to handling our dogs. There's a lot that we can do to prevent aggression from rearing its ugly head in the first place – and even if prevention hasn't been possible (for whatever reason), there are still steps that we can take to recognize and deal with it efficiently.
Relax… this is not an Akita fight. It's my Kensho and his Husky girlfriend.
Different aggression types in dogs
Different types of canine aggression exist. The two most common ones are:
Panting dogs after a friendly fight
1. Aggression towards strangers.
2. Aggression towards family members.
You may be wondering why we're bothering categorizing this stuff: after all, aggression is aggression, and we want to turf it out NOW, not waste time with the details – right?
Well… not quite.
These two different types of aggression stem from very different causes, and require different types of treatment.
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