Fixing Problem Areas
If there are no underlying health issues that might be contributing to your boxer's bad behavior, then you have let training slide and/ or you have overlooked clues that your boxer has decided to work his way up the alpha dog ladder.
Once you know what has gone wrong, you are ready to begin retraining if that is what you want to do. Your entire family must be committed to training and changing their behaviors that have lead to the bad behavior on your boxer's part. If your entire family is not in agreement and committed to do the work that will result in a positive change in your boxer's behavior, it won't work. If training requires patient persistence to have a good boxer, retraining requires almost ten times the effort because you have to work to get rid of habits and self-rewarding behaviors that reinforce the bad behavior.
First, you must determine what you want to change. If it's barking, you know you need to work on training a “No bark” and “Leave it” command. If it's biting, you must carefully look at the circumstances around any biting that occurred and see what you missed and what you need to do differently. If you need help retraining your boxer, by all means hire an in-house trainer or a behaviorist. And you may need the humane muzzle. If your boxer has bitten another male in a fight, neutering him may be the best thing to do. Some dogs handle their hormones better than others. But don't neuter him thinking that that will solve all of his behavioral problems — it usually doesn't. However, in combination with dedicated retraining, it can have a good effect.
In the meantime, your boxer can learn to live with a muzzle on, which is in itself a dominance-reducing tool.
Muzzles seem so cruel. Is it really okay to use them?
Leaving an untrained dog free to harm someone is much crueler than using a protective muzzle until training is reinforced. Just one inappropriate application of teeth can be catastrophic. If your dog bites your neighbor's child, for example, the neighbor might take legal action and insist that your dog be put to sleep. Don't risk it!
Once you have the situation under control, you need to find a way to teach your boxer acceptable behavior. Training any and all behaviors competes with aggressive behavior. The more positive behaviors you can put on command in places where your boxer might like to be aggressive, the more you reduce his tendency to be an aggressive dog.
The more you fade the rewards of negative self-rewarding or self-perpetuating behavior and replace them with good behaviors, the better off you and your boxer will be. Your boxer will now have a whole resume of good behaviors that will earn him praise. This goes a long way to eliminate the inclination to want to do the bad behaviors.
