Two dogs who have shared your house for years suddenly go at each other in the kitchen doorway. Or the young one has grown up and the older one will not tolerate it any more. Or the fights only happen when you are home.
The instinct is to manage the fights, separate them, shout, break it up faster next time.
The productive move is to work out what they are fighting over, because household fights are far more specific than they look.
They are fighting over something
Not over rank, in most cases. Over a resource, in a place, at a moment.
The classic list:
- Doorways and narrow corridors, two dogs, one gap, no room to defer
- Your attention, particularly when you come home or sit down
- Food, chews, bowls, including near where food is prepared
- Resting spots, especially raised ones: sofa, bed, the cool corner
- Arousal spillover, the doorbell, the gate, a dog outside. Both dogs get worked up about something external and it lands on each other
- Toys
Write down every incident for two weeks. Where, when, what happened in the ten seconds before, who was present. The pattern is almost always obvious within a page, and it is usually far narrower than "they don't get on".
Most households discover they have three fights: the doorway, the sofa when the owner sits down, and the doorbell. Those are three solvable problems, not a broken relationship.
Why "let them sort it out" is bad advice
Free-living dogs resolve most conflict with distance. One walks away. The dispute ends.
Dogs in a house cannot walk away. They share a corridor, a kitchen, a person and a set of rooms. The mechanism that resolves conflict naturally has been removed.
So allowing them to sort it out means allowing them to escalate, with rehearsal. Each fight makes the next more likely and lowers the threshold for it. A single bad fight can permanently change how two dogs perceive each other.
Find the medical cause first
Sudden conflict between dogs that previously lived well together is a change, and changes have causes.
Pain is the one most often missed. A dog with arthritis, an ear infection, a bad tooth or a back problem has a shorter fuse, gives less warning, and reacts to being bumped in a corridor. Fixing that pain sometimes ends the fighting entirely.
Get both dogs examined, not just the one that started it. And note that the dog "starting" the fights is often the one that is unwell.
Other real causes:
- Social maturity, arriving between roughly one and three years, which is when a young dog stops being treated as a puppy by the older one
- Declining vision or hearing in an older dog, startled dogs react badly
- An illness that changes how a dog smells or moves
- Household change, a new person, a new baby, someone leaving, a move
What to change
Manage first, train second. Management works today; training takes weeks.
Separate the resources:
- Feed in different rooms, behind closed doors. Not in the same room at a distance, different rooms
- Chews only when separated, and collected up afterwards
- Multiple beds and water bowls, in different places
- Block the doorways that cause trouble, or widen the traffic pattern with baby gates so nobody has to squeeze past
Manage attention:
- Greet calmly, and greet both, arrival excitement is a common flashpoint
- If fights happen when you sit down, that is a resource dispute over you. Manage the seating
Lower the general arousal:
- Reduce what sets both dogs off. Block the view of the gate, mask the outside noise
- More sniffing and mental work, less high-arousal play between them
Rotate if you need to. Two dogs on a rota, one in the garden, one inside, swapping, is a legitimate way to run a household while you work on the problem. It is not a failure, and it prevents rehearsal.
Breaking up a fight without getting bitten
Decide this before you need it.
Do not reach in with your hands. Do not grab collars. The majority of serious bites to owners happen exactly this way, and they are usually redirected, the dog is not attacking you, it is biting what is in its mouth-space during a fight.
What to do:
- A barrier, a board, a chair, a bin lid pushed between them
- Water, a bucket, or a hose if outside
- A loud sudden noise may break the moment in a lower-intensity spat
- The wheelbarrow method, with two people: each takes the hind legs of one dog and walks backwards, keeping moving so neither can turn
Afterwards:
- Separate completely. Do not allow them to re-approach and "make up", arousal stays high for a long time after
- Check both dogs properly for puncture wounds, which close over and abscess. Dog bites frequently need veterinary attention even when they look minor
- Write it down. Trigger, location, who, what preceded it
When to get help
- Any fight causing injury
- Escalating frequency or intensity
- Fighting over a person
- Children in the household
- You are afraid to intervene. That fear is reasonable, and it changes how you move around the dogs, which they read
Find someone who works on management, triggers and gradual change. Be sceptical of anyone who frames it as a dominance dispute and proposes supporting one dog over the other, feeding one first, or physically correcting the "instigator". That approach commonly raises tension and worsens the conflict.
The honest part
Most pairs can be helped, particularly once the trigger is identified and the medical causes are ruled out.
Some cannot. Same-sex pairs, two females especially, can be harder to resolve, and there are households where the right decision is that one dog goes to a home where it can be an only dog.
That is not a failure. Two dogs living in permanent tension, separated by gates, both stressed, is not a kindness to either of them. It is worth saying because owners carry enormous guilt about it, and often for years longer than they should.
The bottom line
Log the fights for two weeks and find the pattern. It will be narrower than you think.
Get both dogs checked for pain, especially if this is new. Remove the contested resources rather than supervising the disputes over them. And never let them sort it out.
Decide now how you would break up a fight, so that when it happens you do not reach in with your hands.
A dog that stiffens and freezes over food, beds or doorways is resource guarding, the same mechanism, aimed at a housemate rather than a person.