Hello, my 2 babies had an altercation about 3 weeks ago. They are 22 month old liter mates (1 female, 1 male, both fixed) While outside playing in the snow, they became entangled in each others harnesses. the end result was mutiple puncture wounds to each other as they struggled to get free. They spent 4 nights in the hospital with drains and on antibiotics/pain meds. They came home and were restricted in activity and interaction for the past 2 weeks. They have just been 'freed' the past 3 days, where they are no longer in cones, and can play together again. The problem is, now their dynamic has completely changed!

Previously they played roughly, but never aggressively. I never had to worry about them, they would spend hours outside in our fenced yard wrestling and chasing each other....Now, their play seems to change quickly and frequently to more than play....they become aggressive, and have to be frequently seperated. The changes seem to follow them inside as well. There has been noticable resource gaurding, and a general intolerance of each other. This is not continuous, which makes it more unpredictable and worrisome.

We have been over vigilant in supervising them...they are never left alone together.

I am worried that one or both will get hurt again. I am not sure if this is temporary, as they adjust to playing together again. If there is some residual discomfort from their injuries, or if this will be a permanent change in their relationship.

It would break my heart to have to give one of them up, but do not want to live in continuous fear/worry that either could get hurt.

Hoping someone has some wise words, or has been through this before. I do have a call out to a trainer...

I had similar to this, Im going to give you the basis of what i learn from my searches, you can take it how ever you want but it seemed to work for us.

For a little while make sure there are no toys, bones etc out. you want to remove all things that can trigger a fight.

From here on out, when ever they get into a fight or can see its about to happen, stay calm. learn to keep your self at ease, immediately stop the fight, do not yell scream or any of that just stop it calmly. from there do not separate the dogs, let them calm down in the presence of one another. Do not punish one or the other for fighting. dogs have a way of working things out and if you separate them it can lead to unresolved anger. so just allow them to calm down with each other. after they calm let them go, most the time they will go right back up to each other but will act like nothing happened (make sure you remove what ever caused the fight ...toy food etc)

do separate play times for each of them, or a separate walk, something where its just bonding between you and the dog.

Make sure both dogs know "leave it" and "drop it" and are good at it, practice with high valued treats

Now, you want them to get back to the understanding that the presence of the other one is a good thing. I only had myself so it was done a little differently, but i put one dog in the kennel and would give them treats one at a time, but only when they paid attention to me, and stopped paying attention to the other dog or any thing else. when the girlfriend was able to help, she would sit with one dog i would sit with the other, and once the dog stopped paying attention to the other dog, and paid attention to you treat. after a while they start to notice that their presence is okay.

At that point we started bringing toys out nothing new just their old ones, gave em both a toy, if one would get upset we would do the treat thing again while one got the toy the other one got treats if they would pay attention to us instead. after a while they became desensitized to that. now we are working on new toys and still high valued treats but that is what seemed to work wonders for us. we went from a couple fights a day and sepereating them all most all day , to they can free roam all day with each other now. it took about a month, for us to get to this point... hope it helps

While the outcome wasn't as severe, we've had a couple of instances where Demon and Dakota got entangled in their collars. The last time it happened (last summer), Dakota managed to puncture Demon near his eye.

There weren't any long-term behavioral changes, but in the short term they tiptoed around each other a bit. We became hypervigilant for a while but after some time, realized that nothing had changed. We also stopped putting collars on them when they were home playing to avoid any future similar situations.

I would say that the advice Jesse provided is pretty sound and with luck will help you out. It's almost like they need to rediscover each other after 2 weeks of isolation and no play. There's a lot of pent up energy itching to be released.

Good luck and keep us posted!

We have definitley stopped putting their harnesses on :-)