Well at last... He's shown he IS a true Mastino after all!
It's a little later than usual for a Mastino but today Belly (formerly Vincent) charged one of the other dogs in a definite dominance showing.
I'd observed over the last 24 hours that he was getting a little more 'clingy' than before - not wanting to settle in his half of the house at night, wanting to stay by my side at all times during the day, following me about etc. and assumed that this was just the normal bonding process for a new dog, but especially a Mastino, who form very strong emotional bonds with their chosen human if allowed to.
Yesterday I was in a very lucky position to be able to record him jumping towards another dog on the TV! See here:
Again this gave me a clue that he was 'getting his paws under the table' and becoming more confident. Watching his body posture but in particular his tail carriage, this wasn't 100% play either... It has to balanced by the fact that the dog on the TV wasn't behaving in a balanced way however and I would expect most dogs to react the way Belly did in the presence of such an unbalanced dog! What I was pleased about was the way he very quickly came back to me on command. (Watch the vid a few times to catch all the important points!).
Then this morning... Aha!
My 17yr daughter, Rachael, was sitting on the floor next to Bailey, our 10.5yr Great Dane. Bailey was doing 'the Dane thing' of sitting with her bottom on the sofa and her front feet on the floor, getting some attention from Rachael. Belly was sitting on the other side of Rachael. The two dogs were facing each other and about 3ft apart.
Suddenly Belly lunged across Rachael and pinned Bailey to the floor with lots of noise and bluster.
I quickly and calmly got up from across the room, took Belly's collar and pulled him away from Bailey. There was very little resistance from him, no redirected aggression, no frustration. He immediately deferred and I took him out into the kitchen and put him behind the gate. I was very careful not be angry or upset with him and just treated it as a completely normal act.
We checked Bailey over and - this is important - there wasn't a mark on her. Not even a drop of slobber demonstrating that this was a gesture; a show of bluster and dominance from Belly because he wasn't happy that Bailey (for once) hadn't deferred and moved away from him in appeasement - something she always does normally.
The analysis of this between my daughter (herself an accomplished dog and horse handler) and myself was that the catalyst was her sitting on the floor between the two dogs. Because she was stroking Bailey, she had distracted her from her normal behaviour of appeasement and moving away from Belly to keep him calm.
In fact, in Belly's eyes, Bailey was probably being exceptionally rude and almost challenging him in not giving him the space he's come to expect from her.
We are actually extremely pleased that we've seen this behaviour in him because it fills a missing piece of the jigsaw for me, i.e. why this Mastino apeared so benign and unchallenging! The massively important aspect of this for me was that - although we would never have set this up deliberately - we know that he does not use his teeth to make his point. Bailey was completely unmarked and unmouthed.
N.B. A very important point to make is that we immediately went into 'happy mode' with Bailey, smiling at her, patting her cheerfully as if nothing had happened, to help her to 're-balance' again. The temptation was to go into 'oh you poor thing...' mode as humans but DOGS DON'T DO THAT and dont understand our behaviour when we do it! By being completely normal, cheerful, matter-of-fact with her for the next 10 minutes, she bounced back to being completely herself again...
Now we go back to square one. As all of the dogs will have had a surge of adrenaline and may therefore be a little more reactive and 'on-edge' for a while, we'll have a couple of days of Belly being kept separate for things to calm down and more importantly, for senior dog Bailey - who is also deaf - to be able to relax in her own home.
Then we'll return to keeping him onlead in the living room again, making sure that we respect the hierarchy that THE DOGS have chosen, i.e. helping Bailey to give Belly the space that a typical Mastino demands and needs and ensuring that he doesn't slip into bullying or intimidating behaviour towards her.
It may be that we can never allow them unsupervised access together. That's just a fact of life and we'll deal with it without 'belly-aching'!
We cannot enforce dog hierarchy. We must help and support them while they are sorting it out and ensure and encourage that it is done as peacefully as possible and ensuring that no dogs actually get hurt (emotionally as well as physically). While that must always mean that we are still in charge, no matter how many dogs, no matter how they organise themselves, it's important to understand that if we try and interfere too much, we actually put more pressure on them.
As an example, if we had punished Belly by alpha-rolling him, pinning him to the floor and insisting that he defer to Bailey - our oldest dog - it would have not only caused him utter confusion but would have caused Bailey stress that she doesn't want in that she is HAPPY to defer to him; she doesn't want us to make her top dog! In the past she has been very passively dominant, but as she's got older she has been very happy to defer for a peaceful life. Painful as it is for us to watch - our beloved dog who has been with us for years slipping down the ranks - it's the way dogs (and many other social animals) do things.
It was absolutely spot-on for a Mastino that he didn't give any warning signals like staring, growling, freezing, stiffening, standing up etc before losing his cool. This is why they do not make ideal pet dogs for the unexperienced dog owner.
I feel that Belly has never had to deal with a dog like Bailey before and doesn't quite know how to deal with her. He lived with a fairly passive male Basset Hound in his first home. Bailey is bigger, is female, and, on this occasion didn't move away (which was totally our fault of course for letting OUR guard down). He IS a typical Mastino after all...
Lastly, and very interestingly, only a few seconds before Belly lunged, Sticky calmly moved himself off the floor and up onto a sofa away from everything.
Concidence or did he sense Belly was getting agitated?... Food for thought...
