Snappy 22month old spaniel-lurcher, please help

My 22month old splurcher Meg has often growled when disturbed from sleep, but she has now began snapping & has bitten me. She is her usual self when walked, full of energy & shows no sign of injury. She's eating well & drinking well. Please can someone advise.

Is it only when she has been asleep or at other times. How do you waken her when she is asleep?
The usually advice when a change of behaviour occurs is to have your dog vet checked in case she is in pain or ill.

What does usually happen after she is disturbed while sleeping (by humans, presumably), and growls?
How do humans react to her growling?

Dibbythedog said:

Is it only when she has been asleep or at other times. How do you waken her when she is asleep?
The usually advice when a change of behaviour occurs is to have your dog vet checked in case she is in pain or ill.

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Sometimes it's just by subtle movement next to her. I will take her to the vet next week but she is showing no other signs of illness or injury

Ari_RR said:

What does usually happen after she is disturbed while sleeping (by humans, presumably), and growls?
How do humans react to her growling?

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It is humans, I have tried calmly reassuring her as her previous owner had another dog who kept attacking her & I thought this may have been the stem of it. I have tried stern voice & sending her onto her bed area also, none of which is working as a prevention & it is happen g more often now

Dibbythedog said:

Is it only when she has been asleep or at other times. How do you waken her when she is asleep?
The usually advice when a change of behaviour occurs is to have your dog vet checked in case she is in pain or ill.

Click to expand...

It is sometimes when she is restful but not asleep

My dog can do this. I agree that a vet check is sensible to rule out anything medical.

What we do is talk to him first, so he is properly awake and aware of what is happening. If it happens when she is close to you, you could try to get her to move, not by being stern (which will only increase whatever anxiety she's feeling) but by asking her to go to her bed, to the kitchen wherever (work on training these and make them really well rewarded), or simply throwing a treat away from you.

My dog also has a good 'wait' so I'll often raise a finger, ask him fairly firmly to wait, and then move. Then he gets a treat.

If this is only when she's asleep or very relaxed, then it's common in greyhounds & lurchers ('sleep aggression') and is best addressed by management. If when awake, and the approaches suggested aren't successful, you might want to get a behaviourist in to see if they can spot any generalised stress issues. Avoid anyone who suggests that it's a hierarchy issue.

ok, so my 2 cents here is this:
- In general - growling is a very valuable way of communication between the dog and humans. It means - "I am uncomfortable, I don't like it, stop". There are very few channels of communication, and this is one of them.
- If humans chose to ignore what the dog is saying, or (worse) to reprimand her for communicating - this channel becomes ineffective for the dog, and she has no choice but to resort to the last available channel - biting the person who is causing distress.
- Humans need to listen to the dog. If she says "I am uncomfortable when you wake me up" - first thing to do is to step back and pause. In my opinion - also to reward the dog for growling, for being a good girl and trying to communicate nicely.
- After the dog is back to her comfort zone, next thing to do is to figure our what causes the discomfort. In this case, it appears that waking her up is an unpleasant experience. Is there really a need to wake her up? If not - I would just let her sleep, what's the harm in that? If there is - then I would start looking for different ways of waking her up. For example in our case - it's necessary to wake up our dog, we need to go our early in the morning. The most efficient way to wake him up is shake a little cup of his food.... then he wakes up, stretches, comes over looking for the food - give it to him (can't lie to your dog), and then he is up.

So I would suggest either not waking her up when she is asleep, or finding a different way, but in any case never to reprimand for growling. This would be in effect encouraging biting and other very undesired behaviors.

As @JudyN says , it's not uncommon for lurchers + sighthounds to behave like this. A couple of mine have been like this in the past, come to think of it,im a grumpy sod sometimes when I get woken up. Anyway I used to just whistle them which woke them up but I let them come around before doing anything with them. Anyone who's had running dogs know how good they are at going into a deep sleep. So if my lurcher was fast asleep on the sofa I'd whistle,when he'd woken up and got his bearings it would be "Come on let's be have ya,it's my turn"

Thanks for this, she is very grumpy when resting even if someone moves, I am trying some of the advice given on other replies