I'd like to take a pulse on whether there are folks out there that have more than one dog that live in the house with them.
Do you separate the dogs 100%, or do they get supervised time together (in and out of the house), do you always stick with oppositte sex - male/female?
Reason I ask is that I have a GSD female. She's a lovely dog - about 2 - not working lines. At some point in the future I will get a working dog and I am considering a Malinois seriously. However, from watching them work and for what I am looking for (IPO sport) I feel that I would prefer a female. Certainly not all males are the same but it seems in general that females are less dominant etc. and since I am doing this only for sport I perfer this.
I have always been told to have a dog of the opositte sex if you are planning to live with them together - so I'm wondering if this is possible or not. Or whether I will have to decide to separate them upfront.
One way or the other the dogs are not going to spend all of their time together. They will each have turns in the house. It would just be nice if I can let them have a run in the park together and perhaps in the house sometime.
I have had 2 dogs in the house at one time. A malinois and a pit mix both males. My pit mix is 10 years old and runs free in the house. My Mal is 3yrs old and is crated in the day then let out when I get home from work. At night the pit mix goes in the kids room and my Mal gets free reign of the house however usually sleeps in my room. The Mal was brought up as a pup with my pit mix so it made it easy to have them tolerate each other. Also haveing a 10 year old dog makes it a little easier. However I never let them together unsupervised and of course one day they had a fight where my Mal took a tiny chunk out of the pit mix. Luckly it was not that bad. It is easy to have opposite sex untill on goes into heat. I think as long you have them both crate trained and keep them seperate you will be ok. At one point I had one gated upstairs and the other gated downstairs. That worked out great too. They never really tried to get a t each other, in fact the pit mix kinda kept to himself. It was may Mal wanting to play and sniff at the pit mix. Hope that helps.
hi canoetpr! My parents have two bitches in the house, a 12 year old nova scotian retriever and a 7 year old malinois. They are always together, also when noone is home. Earlier they sometimes got into small fights about food but it was not serious.
I have a two year old malinoisbitch who I take with me to my parents place when I visit them. The two malinois get along really well, of course the older one gets annoyed sometimes of the younger... They can be left together alone in the house. But since my younger malinois and the nova scotian retriever has had some fights over food and the old dog is too old to fight those two are never left alone together, for just in case... But they get along when we're at home and no food is around. If we go somewhere, the malinoises are left together in the entrence of the house and the old dog in the kitchen.
So there should be no problems with having two dogs of the same sex, aspecially if there is some years between them. The 7-year old malinois was 9 months when she came and wasnt even a puppy but the other dog accepted her because there was a difference in age between them.
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