Josie hangs her head and looks sad because you are not giving her the happy signals - she does not connect it to barking, not barking, going for a poo or not going for a poo. She has no idea why sometimes you are happy that she is coming in and sometimes you are really cross, agressive and violent.

Dog language is such that it is so easy for us to humanise it - the major challenge for training a dog is to understand that the dog is telling you things as though you were a dog, not as if it was a human or as if it was talking to a human.

Your dog understands that sometimes it is ready to come in and you are pleased to see it and welcoming - it can see this as soon as it looks at you out of the corner of it's eye (you will not know when the dog has seen your reaction in it's periphial vision) - it also knows that it needs to come in even if you are cross and are going to attack it physically.....it does not know what makes the difference between the reception it gets.

This is why you have to accept the dog behaving as it does until you have the real time to spend explaining, in the dog's language, that it really doesn't have to.

Please, please, stop giving, what you see as an innocent swat to the but. Your dog sees it as a physical attack by a weak leader and that forces it to defend the territory ever more seriously because it believes you are not fit for the job.

Take a weekend to watch and understand what the dog is actually saying to you.

Good luck, let us know how it goes.