My husband and I recently put down our 9 year old herding dog mix for aggression. It manifested this past year, at first slowly, and then rapidly in the last 2 months.
We had him for 6 years without issue before this, and the environment didn’t change.
The triggers were also truly, random. We had several behaviorists and trainers come to our home to assess him. Without figuring out a pattern to the behavior, there was no clear way to train him.
He was very well crate trained and muzzle trained so we thought we could mitigate the developing risks. But then he began to destroy the crate he never had issues with, to try and attack his sibling dog he used to adore, even if we were gone from the house for less than 15 minutes. He did this to the point of cracking teeth and bleeding. He began to yank and pull at his muzzle, and freak out with it on. He began stalking and trying to attack the cat. He snarled and growled at me for calling for him in the yard. He bit me for petting him while he was laying by the couch. He stopped cozying up to me while I worked in my study, and began to stare vacantly at me from across the room, hackles raised. It didn’t even look like he recognized me or my husband anymore. He used to adore us, and by the end he just had a blank and feral stare. He was snarling at me, my husband, and sister for the most random interactions. Everyone became scared to interact with him, it was like handling a fire cracker.
We put him on Prozac at the vet’s recommendation. His fear and anxieties stopped, he used to eat food at a quick panicked pace. He stopped that after being on Prozac for only a few days. However his aggression progressed even faster which was a risk the vet neglected to warn us about. Fear based aggression can be very successfully treated with Prozac, but territorial aggression can be made worse. I actually regret using Prozac and postponing the euthanasia because of the trauma he caused our GSD…
After a certain point he was muzzled. But this is not sustainable. He had to eat. He had to have his muzzle removed to enter his crate. There was no room for error, and he had stopped listening to commands he had down to a perfect level before… One day while he was eating he heard the cat (thankfully in a closed room) and the mix ran off looking for her, and my husband had to run and grab him.
We ran a number of tests before this point, but he seemed apparently quite healthy. But it was clear that he wasn’t healthy mentally.
We made the awful decision to have him behaviorally euthanized.
My husband and I agree, we just could not make him safe. It wasn’t worth the risk of permanent damage or trauma to me, my sister, the cat, or the other dog. And god forbid, if someone came over or he escaped our property and hurt a different person or pet. He couldn’t be crated. He was actually starting to gouge at the metal back and front doors, breaking his claws and bleeding. We were scared, and we didn’t feel safe. We couldn’t rehome him, or put him in a shelter with the danger he posed. He was far too unstable. And besides, he was our dog and it was inevitable that putting him in the shelter system or similar meant he was going to be put down. We wanted to be there for him, so he wasn’t alone.
I only wish I knew what had happened to him mentally. He became an entirely different dog, I didn’t even recognize him anymore. At the end 2 different vets at this clinic looked at his case and just said it was simply a late manifestation of aggression.