Yes, that's exactly what you think it is: a pink leather muzzle.
After observing her over the past few months, it's becoming clear that when out on walks Mimi is getting more aggressive and that her targets of choice are the other two dogs. Harry and Azza don't have to be doing anything in particular, although if Azza gets excited about something, that will usually trigger a bite from Mimi. Mimi has even bitten me when she can't get to the other dogs.
A lot of this is accelerated when Azza is present. When I was looking after Skeeter and walking just Harry and Mimi together, Mimi wasn't nearly as reactive.
Mimi doesn't behave this way at agility trials or classes. She moderates her biting at home (well, except for the recent crate incident but that was quite out of the ordinary). Last night, she and Azza were chasing one of the grass snakes that live in the back yard and I didn't see her doing anything to Azza (I made sure the snake escaped). When the doorbell rings, the dogs go ballistic but Mimi hasn't gone for Azza in that setting yet (Azza is usually diving for her crate anyway).
So the situation that seems to be causing the problems is having the three dogs on lead away from home, a situation that we find ourselves in 6 to 7 days a week!
It isn't realistic to continue to walk the dogs separately. I simply don't have that much free time.
I believe in training and I believe this can be fixed with training. However, I realized that I needed to break the cycle of the biting first. So I got Mimi a muzzle. And I figured that as long as I was going to go down that path, I needed to go all the way. So I got her a pink one.
She'd been wearing it for about five days before we had our first test of the thing. A man out for his morning walk passed us, said good morning. Azza got all wiggly and made some sort of noise. Any change in Azza's demeanor can set Mimi off and sure enough, Mimi launched herself at Azza's neck. I could hear her teeth clicking together as she tried to bite. The muzzle did its job. But it was kind of sad to see Azza flinch when she got poked from Mimi's leather-clad snout.
The next step is to work out a training program to replace Mimi's desire to bite with something a little more benign.
1 comment:
Poor Mimi is suffering from 'middle child' syndrome, perhaps? Not the elder and not the young attention-demanding PITA (as she clearly sees Azza). Oh, sure, Azza *used to be* cute back when she was novel, but now that she's learning tricks and all and doesn't seem to be leaving . . ..
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