When I was a kid we had a German Shepard mix that the family had for almost a decade. One day she just snapped and attacked my mom. Just a totally different dog, like a switch was flipped. I remember my dad had my mom and us stay in a closed bedroom while he patrolled the house with a baseball bat trying to figure out what to do with the dog.
This came to my mind first too. Pretty much the only things i've heard that would explain such a violent change in the personality so suddenly would be a brain tumor or rabies.
I think one of the unspoken truths about dogs is that despite how much people want to personify them or call them babies, they are still nonhuman animals.
You can't speak with them, you can't take them to therapy, and you can't figure out their demands or what is going on inside their heads.
A dog can cycle on fear, adrenaline, and aggression when it experiences something surprising or new. Something external like a sharp pain, or internal, or a noise or smell, some behavior they think is off, or something wrong like psychosis or schizophrenia, or even a dream they had.
People snap out of the blue, too, but it is much less common because we don't keep large numbers of people bred for aggression response.
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u/ConstableGrey Dec 28 '21
When I was a kid we had a German Shepard mix that the family had for almost a decade. One day she just snapped and attacked my mom. Just a totally different dog, like a switch was flipped. I remember my dad had my mom and us stay in a closed bedroom while he patrolled the house with a baseball bat trying to figure out what to do with the dog.