First of all - Welcome to Pet Talk. Mixing doggie households is tricky and should be done with care. A question - is the dane male or female? Are the spats coming mostly in a small space such as doors, hallways, etc? How about their play behavior? Is one dog body slamming another? putting their chin on the others shoulder area? Are you getting any stress signals from one dog or another? There are a great many variables here that kind of make it hard to really offer any suggestions in "cyberspace".

I recently attended the Association for Pet Dog Trainers conference in Denver and had the pleasure to listen to Trish King's seminar "Living with Multiple Dogs". and she gave some general guidelines for a multi-dog household:

1. The owner must understand what motivates each dog and be prepared to give each what he or she wants.

2. Dogs must trust owner implicitly and know what to expect from the owner.

3. Dogs must respect the owner - obedience training is mandatory.

4. Structure must be solid and predictable.

She strongly recommends things like group relaxation exercises, training a cut off signal for interaction, training a zen down and individual training time with each dog.

I would strongly recommend her book "Living with Multiple Dogs", but it is out of print and might be hard to find. She has a new book called "Parenting Your Dog" that also has a section on multi-dog households. Another good resource is Patricia McConnells "Feeling Outnumbered? How to Manage and Enjoy Your Multi-Dog Household". You can get most of these books from: http://www.dogwise.com. You can also purchase videos of seminars from http://www.tawzerdogvideos.com I am a very visual person and like to have the videos as well as the books.

Good luck - it will take some effort and time, but it can be successful if you are both willing to work on it.

Clara