Why (and how) you should intervene if your dog picks on others.

By Pat Miller

You can find them everywhere – at dog parks and doggie daycare centers, in dog training classes, in your neighbor’s yards ... perhaps even in your own home. “They” are canine bullies – dogs who overwhelm their potential playmates with overly assertive and inappropriate behaviors, like the out-of-control human bully on the school playground.

Four shots of the same playground bully, taken over a 20-minute period at a dog park. In the first photo, the Boxer-mix bully has blindsided a dog who just entered the park. In the next three, she focuses her attention on the same victim, a young Lab-mix. She clearly enjoys holding him down as a variety of other dogs come over to investigate.

Jasper is a nine-month-old Labradoodle from a puppy mill, currently enrolled in one of my Peaceable Paws Good Manners classes. He was kept in a wire cage on a Pennsylvania farm until he was four months old, when his new owners purchased him. Katy Malcolm, the class instructor, asked me to sit in on the…

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