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My dog escaped four times this weekend while I was gone. He’s crazy and super anxious but we love him.
Has anybody had success just drugging their dog into less anxiety? What do you recommend?
This is going to sound terrible. But that is a defective dog. If you get a different easier dog you will love it just as much, and you can do that. Your life will be much better for it, so will everyone's life that has had to deal with your bad dog.
I think this perspective discounts the transformative power of dog training. There are a lot of changes that can be made by a skilled trainer. Here is some information about what happened to dogs rescued from Michael Vick's fighting ring: https://bestfriends.org/sanctuary/about-sanctuary/animal-areas/dogtown/vicktory-dogs/champions-film/stories-about-dogs
It may be worth paying a trainer to help your dog learn less anxious behavior if you don’t have the time/skill. Also, it is worth considering how to adapt the environment to make the dog less anxious. Maybe put the dog in doggy daycare, or hire a pet sitter, if you are going to be for extended periods.
I have seen someone that had success drugging their dog, but I don’t recall the drug. The outcome was that they gave it to the dog when they had guests and the dog would become sleepy. I don’t think the dog had any other issues, it just got excited in friendly ways when new people entered its environment.
The best ways to avoid dog behavior problems is to adopt one slightly past the puppy stage that has all the behaviors you want already trained into it. Or do extensive training when the dog is a puppy and seek external help if you can’t train the desired behaviors yourself. Once a dog gets past the ~puppy stage it takes a lot more effort to change its behavior.
The vast majority of his dogs went to a sanctuary. They say “adopted” and that is technically correct- but they went to the dog equivalent of a zoo. They also removed the teeth from some of them and Mr. Vick paid almost a million dollars for their rehab and future care. Most were never integrated into homes and lived out their days in a very nice kennel.
The fallout from all of this has been 15 years of pro-pitbull propaganda and an incredible increase in dog bite attacks, disfigurements, and deaths. We have plenty of dogs, put the bad ones down.
The point of the link I shared was that his dogs went to the sanctuary, received rehabilitation, and then most were then able to pass the Good Canine Citizen test and be adopted by individual families into their homes.
The crux of this issue is determining if the increase in dog bites is caused by bad dogs or bad training. I think the evidence points to bad training being the cause in more cases than not. Pit bulls were a popular breed of dog in the 1900s and earlier. It doesn't make sense that they would be popular if they were an inherently bad breed. Generally, pit bulls are intelligent and loyal which makes it easier to train aggressive behaviors into them. Some people wanted a dog trained with this behavior (people living in dangerous situations that wanted a protective companion) and just happened to choose pit bulls because they are one of the easiest to train to do this. There are certain characteristics that are specific to the breed, but others like biting are more influenced by how humans train/raise them.
Seems hard to find the actual stats on their site besides that they received 22 dogs out of the ones seized.
Pitbulls were bred for fighting. In 2020 they accounted for 72% of dog attack deaths while making up about 6.2% of the total U.S. dog population. They are also the most likely to bite, period. The findings showed that dogs with short, wide heads who weighed between 66 and 100 pounds were the most likely to bite.
Pit bulls were responsible for the highest percentage of reported bites across all the studies (22.5%), followed by pit/mixed breeds (21.2%), and German shepherds (17.8%).
Pit bulls were found to have the highest relative risk of biting, as well as the highest average damage per bite.
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