Aggressiveness toward my cat.

[yukidomari]

Originally Posted by Tigerstripe40

What does this entail? Everything I know about training dogs is apparantly wrong with Vlcaks.

My understanding is that I need to get Zaz to submit to me.

The experience I have with training dogs is to do that, I need to roll him onto his back, holding his muzzle with my hand until he stops squirming, and then reward (ie belly rub) and praise him when he submits to me.

I've been told not to do that with this breed.

So, I left this to my room mate to deal with. -He made mumblings about getting a Leerburg dominant dog collar to train Zaz with. Two have been ordered, but apparantly, neither have been the right size.
No additional training has been done.

Zaz and my cat got into an altercation tonight.

Training is a matter of teaching behaviors or a chain of behaviors you want. In this case I don't see how rolling a dog results in him not chasing or annoying your cat.

For me training involves working with the dog daily practicing behaviors and commands so that they understand and get used to working together with me. When I teach a 'leave it' I start out with low value items (dog on a leash, asking them for attention to leave alone an old toy they've always had and rewarding) and gradually work up to higher value items (food on a ground, cats).

I don't have cats but we have a lot of outdoors cats in the neighborhood and nowadays if I spy a cat beforehand, I can ask my Vlcaks to leave it when we're on walks and they generally do. We worked on this every day for a long time. Until it reaches the level you want you'll simply have to manage the situation and environment.

As far as it sounds, Zaz seems to be a typical Vlcak who likes to annoy everything and everyone else. If a 50+ something lb big dog really had it out for your cat, I really doubt your cat would still be in one piece....

But if someone really does have a Vlcak who is not safe around cats that's probably not something that can be trained out of a dog - a person can only manage the environment better. Dogs and their 'famous' rivalry with cats is not exactly novel or surprising.

[Tigerstripe40]

Originally Posted by yukidomari

As far as it sounds, Zaz seems to be a typical Vlcak who likes to annoy everything and everyone else. If a 50+ something lb big dog really had it out for your cat, I really doubt your cat would still be in one piece....

But if someone really does have a Vlcak who is not safe around cats that's probably not something that can be trained out of a dog - a person can only manage the environment better. Dogs and their 'famous' rivalry with cats is not exactly novel or surprising.

The Vlcak is my roommates -He's my best friend, and I've lived with him for about 5 years now.

With what was happening last night, I think that had I been a split second slower in separating the 2, my cat would have been torn to pieces. Zaz had the cat in his jaws and I think he was about to 'go in for the kill' when I firmly said 'ZAZ NO!' and pried his jaws off the cat (I know, this is a GREAT way to get a nasty dog bite, but I was reacting). Zaz got taken to his kennel. The cat is OK, other than some hurt dignity and some torn out fur.

[avgrunn]

Just as Yukidomari said it is really typical for a vlcak to annoy everyone else . My Urobach loves to annoy our cats. However, with time it gets better. Now it is much easier to stop him from chewing the cats, well as long as they are still and we are around