Gracie is a 10 month old German Wirehaired Pointer who was never even close to being properly socialized with people or other dogs. The people aspect is getting much better, and we have a good handle on how to introduce her to new people effectively, but we are having some pretty substantial problems with other dogs.
She lives with Winston and they get along absolutely great . . . best friends once they worked out the pecking order which only took a couple days. In her foster home, she lived with two other dogs that she also got along with.
Well, we have lots of friends who have dogs and in the past it was common for us to get together, dogs included. Well, we tried that once and it didn't go well . . . lots of growling, snarling, snapping, etc. so we stopped and reassessed our approach.
We started over (on a different day) by taking all the dogs on a walk together in the neighborhood, had some good sniffing and normal dog greeting behavior. Fine, we stopped there to end on a good note.
Then we try again . . . start with the walk, all goes well, bring them into OUR yard and things are fine for a few minutes, but then all hell breaks loose once the other dog gets in gracies face and we have an all out fight on our hands. We get the dogs separated almost immediately and that was the end of the meeting. Both dogs were fine thankfully . . .
I've been doing a lot of research online about socializing an older dog but I'm leery of a lot of the info I read . . . I'd really like to get my hands on a good book. Is there one that you can recommend in particular that you think will help us?
I'd like to read a few books so I can better understand canine psychology and behavior, and we also have her enrolled in some obedience classes (which I'm also nervous about considering how she reacted today).
Thanks!