Sasha being protective?

[steeltheshow]

I just got a 8 month old husky female which has grew up with her last owners son, and i have a son who's 10 and a 4yr old girl but sasha ( husky ) is very protective of my son i think he has took over the role of her last owners son but when my little girl try's to stroke sasha she will turn and not bite but like warn my little girl is there anythink i can do to stop this i get my son to stroke sasha at the same time has he's sister so sasha can see she means her no harm.

also she won't listen to me when i give her a command how can i make her listen.

thanks.

[Zion]

Sounds like alpha problems. But i'll let the more experienced husky owners answer this one.

[Mazz]

Not listening is typical. How long have you had the Husky? Sounds like you're going to have to do some training. If you do have an alpha, which is possible, it's going to be fairly tough to deal with. You might want to look into training classes. It may be the dog needs to be socialized a bit. There's a member here who lives in Australia. Her name is Bec. Hopefully, she'll chime in. Otherwise, you may want to PM her. She's done a lot of training and understands issues from the dog's perspective better than most of us do.

[Sarah]

I would deffo consider going to training classes - it's not so much training the dog but training the human lol I learned so much when I took my boys to a training course, I learnt about how my body language was interpreted by the dog, it's fascinating

[Bec]

Wow thanks for the mention, Dave! Definitely feel free to PM me if a thread pops up anyone would like my input in (not that I can promise my input is worth anything ), I am a bit flat out at the moment and might miss training threads when I quickly browse through the forum.

Very difficult to say what is going on without seeing the dog but it's definitely not protectiveness of your son. It could be resource guarding, it could be the dog was startled by your daughter patting him, it could be that he is not used to smaller kids etc etc etc.

What exactly happened when he 'warned' your daughter? Where was your son? What was he doing? Where was the dog? where was your daughter and what was she doing?

[SarahNukka&Shadow]

As Bec said its difficult to tell through a post what your dog is doing... but if it is an alpha problem I'd surgest you google NILIF (nothing in life is free) this method gets you to show the dog who is in charge by very simple and none punishing ways, things like having the dog sit and wait nicely while you put their food down and wait for the release command to eat, sitting and waiting for an invite to go through doors before a walk etc, I would also look at what privilages she has, does she sit on the sofa with you? does she sleep in your room? these things can signal to the dog that you are a soft leader and they will then fill the role instead... I have used this method very succesfully with my first husky and combined it with obedience training and shes now a good girl (most of the time!)

Hope thats helped.