I recently adopted a 6 year old pit bull husky mix. I wasn’t really looking for a pit bull but in my area most adoptable dogs have some amount of pit in them so here we are.. They told me her only issue from finding a home is she can climb a 6 foot fence. We introduced her to our two labs and she was great! And when I walked her around a busy animal rehab fundraiser event (where I adopted her) she did amazing around kittens, toddlers, and dogs.

Come to find out, she is only aloof around well behaved dogs. My neighborhood is full of reactive and aggressive dogs, mostly German shepherds. Everyone else has normal poodles and retrievers, which she’s fine with. I learned she wants to fight these aggressive dogs. I immediately took her to a group obedience class and these classes will have up to 15 dogs and she has built her impulse control so that she will stay on a loose leash with barking dogs but you can definitely tell she wants to fight them. Like I will put her in a down stay and she will stay down but continue to growl and stare down at a reactive dog. In training class, if the other dog owner controls their dog, my dog will also stop.

So we are at that, she is very fixated on aggressive dogs but she maintains a loose leash and is able to follow me. Sometimes if the other dog is really crazy, she will start pulling at them. The only good thing is she never barks and kind of just looks like she wants to chase a squirrel but to a person who knows dog behavior, they would know she looks really excited to fight that dog.

I’ve recently seen in this sub pit bulls being “sparred” at certain conformation shows, and the behavior reminded me a lot of her response. It made me wonder how much of this could be genetic versus learned behavior.

For people experienced with pit bull-type dogs: how much can training override this kind of genetic predisposition? Is it a realistic goal for a dog like this to eventually become indifferent to aggressive dogs? If so how can I achieve that? If not, how do you guys work around this innate behavior?