The dog behaviorist came over today. Very unfortunately it began to thunder soon after she arrived and she was unable to perform the temperament test. Elvis was too worked up to react to the tests and had she done them, she would not have got an accurate baseline.
From what she did see and how we answered her questions, she surmises that Elvis has a combination problem - fear and dominance. The bad news is that it's one of the most difficult problems to solve. The good news is that Elvis is not severe and that she's "cured" dogs who have been much worse.
Fear Dominance is when a dog has no self confidence but because of his age and breed he has been allowed to get away with lots of things so he perceives himself to be more dominant than he actually is. This means that when he is confronted with a new situation his first reaction is to be fearful of it and back away, but then he thinks to himself, "hey, I'm the boss here, I have to take control of this situation" and does something inappropriate and unpredictable, like a bite.
The behaviorist gave us some things to look for and to disallow. She also suggested that we stop going to our group class as we are probably making it worse because we don't know how to handle him yet. She is going to first show us deference drills - drills that will first tell Elvis that he is not more dominant than us, but we are not more dominant than him. Then we will move on to drills that establish us as dominant. Then we will be able to do desensitization drills and socialization drills to get him to become more comfortable with life.
The behaviorist says we are looking at probably 6 months of hard work. For Elvis? No problem, so long as we are encouraged by progress. And he will progress because deep down in there somewhere is a good, good boy (sorry Riff).

For Zoe and Sham and K - this behaviorist works with....RATTIES! She has helped rats overcome obsessive compulsive issues - she helped one ratty to stop chewing its tail.

She hasn't been able to really show us anything yet, because of the weather, but she's already tops in my book. She used to have two litter-trained uncaged rats as pets who ran to the door to greet guests and then promptly rolled on their backs to get belly rubs from them. Watch out Riff's Minions, if your humans find out about this, you may be getting some unwanted training.

The behaviorist is coming again on Wednesday to finish up our session and then we will join her small class where she will show us how to use group classes to our benefit. I am very hopeful.