My Dogs Daisey and Bender

My wife and I have two Australian Cattle Dogs, Daisey and Bender they are siblings. Unfortunately they also fight like siblings do as well. We've been told by a trainer that Daisey has the perfect personality for a herding dog. She is very prey and food motivated and also a very Alpha, dominant dog. Bender knows Daisey is the Alpha but he still sometimes wants to challenge this and it causes problems.

Now I'm not saying that all they do is fight because they don't. 90% of the time they tolerate each other very well.

We have had the two dogs since they were about 4 months old and if there was something I would do different that is I would have socialized then with other dogs at an earlier age. We read that this breed had a tendency to be aggressive to people so we did a great job of socializing them with people, we just didn't pay enough attention to other dogs so they are a bit dog aggressive.

I posted a video of them in the Dog Gallery if you want to take a look.

Welcome to the forum!

How old are they? Just like human children, dogs will compete with siblings for higher status in your family. If you want Daisey to be the alpha dog in the dog pack, you can encourage this by always feeding her first, giving her attention first, etc. This might seem mean, but when you really think about it, its just natural, (in the dogs mind), for the higher status dog to get thngs first. Obviously, you and your wife should by the alpha dogs in the family unit. ACD's are def very high, pray driven dogs. Have you done any obedience with them? Dogs like them need an outlet mentally as well as physically.

They are both 5 years old now. We went through two different trainers and about $1200 working on their aggressive behavior. We spent about $600 on the first trainer and after about 6 weeks we still weren't doing anything about their aggression. The second trainer we liked and he really knew a lot about dogs but he was very unreliable, he would always be late to appointments and never followed through when he would tell us he would bring us some reading material. We started with the aggressive training right off the bat with him and we actually saw some improvement. After six weeks the trainer told us he was moving to California, he told us he would give us the name of another trainer before he left but never did and after spending that much money we gave up.

We took them through basic obedience when they were six months old. That is when we saw they were aggressive to other dogs. I really think Bender would have been OK with other dogs had it not been for Daisey showing him the aggressive behavior because at first he wanted to play with the other dogs, when he saw Daisey try to go after the other dogs Bender copied that. Although they were aggressive to the other dogs our dogs learned healing, sitting, stay etc much faster than the other dogs. (but then I think my wife an I were the only people that worked with their dogs at home). We were the only two people left in the class on the last day because every one else dropped out.