Just shy of 60kg, his behaviour changed and it resulted in someone telling me it would be better to put him to sleep.
He lunged on the lead, chased livestock, snapped at and would have bitten people, fought with other dogs and often left me hanging on for dear life to prevent him succeeding in his aggressive ways.
So, what did I do?
I was new to dog behaviour back then and I stupidly followed the advice of people who quite frankly were trying to help but didn’t have a damn clue what to do.
Basically they told me to fight fire with fire and use punishment to stop him doing the dangerous reactions to anything he encountered.
Let me tell you something, when you try to punish a dog of this size who has an ability to not only bite but take you down and inflict some serious damage to you, you’re hesitant to do so.
But I needed a solution. One day he would bite someone, one day he would have killed a sheep, one day it could have been a child!
I tried it but I wasn’t proud nor was I comfortable doing so.
I kicked him with my foot in the side of his stomach, just like Cesar Milan tells people to do whilst making that stupid ‘chhh’ noise.
Titon froze and turned around at me, staring with a look that I could see he was not happy with.
I never did that again.
Instead I learned more about how to use, practice and get better results with reward based training and before his days were over, I could walk Titon around the local village on a nice loose lead and pass anything that we encountered.
Here, it’s not the best quality of video but see for yourself..