All In the Family: Managing the Multi-Dog Household - a podcast by Ty Brown

Today, I’ve been hanging out with two of my dogs as well as a few of my clients’ dogs. Watching all of them together got me thinking about multi-dog households. Many of my clients struggle with having moe than one dog in their home. Their dogs get into fights, become destructive, or simply feed off each others’ misbehavior. When someone rings the doorbell, they have two or three dogs barking up the walls rather than just one. That’s enough to drive anyone crazy!

Multi-dog households present unique challenges. I frequently see two dogs from the same household begin to fight. This can happen to dogs who’ve been living together for months or even years. They coexist and seem to be getting along, but one day they suddenly get into a fight. A week or so later they fight again, and then in no time they’re at each others’ throats every day.

This situation occurs because the dogs were only “getting along” under the banner of a lack of control. Their owners weren’t giving much leadership or structure to the dogs, so the only thing that kept the dogs from fighting was the fact that they are friendly animals. There was no strong foundation—so when something in the environment changed, they did not have anything to fall back on. A problem like this requires a lot of difficult work to fix, so I’m not going to focus on that process here. Instead, I’d like to share some of the things you can do to prevent multi-dog issues before they present themselves.

One of the main steps you can take is to implement obedience training for all of your dogs. I know that sounds obvious, but very few people train even one of their dogs—much less the three or four that are living under their roof! Obedience training is very important because dogs need to have that structure to fall back on. If they don’t, they will follow patterns that they choose for themselves. Some dogs are naturally well-behaved, but plenty of others will begin to have issues.

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