I'm about 70% confident in what I'm currently doing, but wanted to check with you lovely ladies as I've seen a few informative posts about fear aggression here in the past.
I've got a new puppy. 4 month old medium-sized cross breed, looks collie-ish. He's lovely, and he's doing all the normal puppy things when greeting other dogs - bouncing about and licking faces and generally being a little bit obnoxious. I'm happy to let him loose with a couple of the family dogs (my mum has two who are happy to growl at him when he's pushing his luck, and my dad has one who is equally tolerant of his behaviour.)
The issue is my Dad's second dog. He's a 5 year old staffie/whippet cross and he's always had quite severe fear aggression. Dad's in control of this when walking; he uses a head collar and provides yummy treat-like distraction whenever other dogs are near; reinforcing the positiveness of ignoring those scary other dogs.
I visit Dad once a week and always used to bring my old dog before I lost her. His dogs were fine with her. In fact the f/a dog has generally been fine with any family dog I've had with me simply because he knows me. So I took the puppy round there and almost immediately the f/a dog reacted - not violently, but by turning his head away and flat out refusing to look at the puppy.
To me, this is him saying he's very uncomfortable with the little one. I'm trying to combat this by taking puppy round for short visits; giving plenty of fuss to f/a dog without puppy being too close, and have always been between/beside puppy and dog but in as calm and reassuring a way as I can. I've also attempted kikopup's calming signals. The two almost played last time I was there - ears up and tails up and wagging, but f/a dog went back to looking uncomfortable after the moment had passed. That's promising, right?
I'm hoping that continuing to introduce them in small chunks, with plenty of reassurance will convince dog that puppy isn't a threat. (And am also thinking that once puppy is castrated, dog might be a little less reactive, as I think he's usually more reactive around entire males, even if they're a third of his size and attempting to display submissive/play behaviour)
Has anyone else intro'd a puppy to a fear aggressive dog? Am I on the right lines, or should I be doing something different?
In thanks for any advice given, I've put a pic of puppy up on my profile (along with various other critters) because thanks should always come in puppy form, right?