Can Your Pet Have Anger Management Problems?

While in pets, it is most often referred to as being overly aggressive, many people and some animal behavioral experts are citing indications that some animals may suffer from anger management issues. Certain breeds of dogs, for example, have been bred for generations to appear mean and aggressive, while other breeds may appear to take the high road in confrontations with a more aggressive animal.

Coping with a pet exhibiting signs of anger management problems may be as simple as developing a means of distracting the pet when an aggressive behavior seems apparent. Perhaps your animal is overly territorial and will attack anything or anyone that happens to enter the animal’s forbidden zone. Distracting it with a toy or offering an optional behavior is possibly the best method to thwart the attack, and offering a treat with an acceptable behavior is exhibited will lead the animal to act differently.

Not all aggression is in-bred into animals, as it may be a learned behavior due to lack of training, lack of social interaction with people or other animals or as a self-preservation mode if another animal within the same household is more aggressive than the newer animal. It is typical of some animals that were taken from their mother too early or weaned from its nursing mother too early.

A look at the behavior of kittens shows that failing to socially interact with other kittens can lead to animal aggression, sometimes misinterpreted as anger management. When a kitten is playing with other kittens and gets too rough by scratching too hard or biting too hard, the other kittens will often correct the behavior by swatting or biting to let the offender know their actions are not welcome or accepted. If they bite the nursing mother cat too hard, the mother will probably give them a good swat to teach them the correct pressure to apply.

Growing up in an environment void of other animals, the anger management of your pet may be more apparent as it is growing without the corrective measures being set down by other animals. Usually when people play with a cat and it scratches or bites too hard, the human may make some loud mention of the circumstance but will not normally swat or bite back. This may make the kitten believe their actions are accepted, and even welcome because they think they won that round, and they may possibly become even rougher on subsequent times of play.

While pets cannot tell you what is bothering them, regardless of how many times you might ask, is it difficult to understand their feelings. Interpreting an animals reaction to certain environmental occurrences is difficult without knowing the history of the breed and not just a single animal as well as how the animal is treated on a daily basis. If a human is constantly mean to an animal it may develop a mean streak of its own as a defense mechanism.

To retrain an animal to subdue its aggressive nature may take time and patience. As far as animal anger management, certain behavior training techniques seem to offer successful results.