I have a 2 year old Rottweiler (female). She has a very calm and chilled nature, she loves playing with kids and her ball. She allows the kids to take the ball out of her mouth and generally she is very gentle with the kids. We take Sheeba to a Dam a lot, she loves it and is a real waterdog., she spends most of her day chasing her ball and swimming for hours on end.
Generally we only go for a weekend but in December we went for 7 days. After day 4 I noticed that Sheeba wasn’t 100% she was lying around a lot and not swimming nearly as much. Then she tried to snap (bite) two people who wanted to pet her, very unusual behaviour as Sheeba was socialised from a very early age and has never shown any signs of aggression towards us (or anyone else). We have two cats and another dog and there have never been any issues with Sheeba.
A day or so later sheeba bit another dog, the Jack Russel had a bone and was stubborn about sharing it. So she grabbed him and the moment she ‘tasted’ his blood she dropped him and slunk towards us – she clearly knew she was in trouble. (the other dog was fine, needed some stiches but was back to running around a couple of hours later)
And since then she has been ‘normal’ again. We have kept her under stricter control (obviously) but she has me worried. Where is this sudden aggression coming from? Could it be that Sheeba was just sore and stiff from the duration of the exercise and that’s why she was grumpy or could there be other underlying reasons?
Thanks for any advice!