Interesting post Nick. I always wondered how some of the aggressive dogs that are not as far gone as the one you described would do if raised in the right hands from puppies. I find that unprovoked aggression and fear/avoidance behavior are sometimes based on the same basic twisted perception the dog has of its environment. With some of the more deeply ingrained dogs the only way to change their perception is through careful socialization from the start if they will go along with the program. With others whose actions are more conscious corrections and control are the way to go. Based on some of your posts on my thread about the boerboel I understood you like a soft approach. Did you correct this dog hard for some of his aggressive actions right from the start? I'm not saying that it would have fixed him but at least you'd know if his behavior was completely reactionary in nature or if he could've controlled his behavior after having experienced the consequences. If you did correct him how would he take it from you, did he ever try to take you on? It's very frustrating to see behavior like this in a pup and see it getting gradually worse instead of better in spite of your best efforts. I make progress with a dog that's getting worse by changing its environment and making myself its center. I isolate it in a kennel and don't allow it any contact with another dog or another family member. I'd take the dog out twice a day and work on socializing it. Before this taking it out of the home environment made it apprehensive. It had no reason to want to be with me and that made it concentrate on all the things it was having a problem with. Once it was isolated the dog is very happy to see me, this elevates his pack drive and gives it reason to follow me around. This allows it to disregard and desensitize to some of the things that were a problem before. This method works very well except you don't really know how bad the dog was or would've become because you solved the problem. I'm sure that in some extreme cases no progress can be made.[quote=Xamen13]:lol: Interesting. Thank you for lowering everybody's I.Q. with that gem of knowledge.[/quote] hmm.. IQ (intelligence quotient) is a measure of a person's innate intelligence, I didn't think it could be that easily lowered.. I will however admit the possibility in your case.[quote=Igmuska]How can you prove someone or something is "born that way."[/quote] You can never prove it because these dogs are rare, when they're found they're already set in their way, and to my knowledge there is not enough interest to study this issue scientifically. But when you're exposed to enough dogs you see it. As a professional trainer these dogs will come your way because they're out there and the owners just don't know what to do with them. You can then fairly easily judge by the way the person behaves, you learn to read people too working with dogs, the kind of upbringing the dog had. Usually nothing that would be conducive to making the dog the way it is. It's simple comparison. Dogs owned by what we consider normal people are raised in an environment with similar stimuli and need to make similar adjustments starting off from an average kind of temperament. Some dogs that are away from the average in one way or another make bigger adjustments. The one's Nick and I are talking about are very far away from normal and incapable of making the adjustment. It's obvious when you see it by comparison to other dogs.