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I have a wonderful 8 month old red female that is the brightest most loving dog I have ever owned. She is very well behaved minus her server hyperness. The only problem I have with her is that she has 4 males dogs she is kept with most of the time ranging in breeds and size. She plays really rough with the boys but they tend to ignore her puppy eagerness most of the time seeing as how they are much older then she is. Usually when any member of the house walks out the front door and heads towards the horse barn the dogs in the back yard tend to bark. Lately, if one of the males (usually the aussie) barks at a member of the family she gets very offended. It starts with her barking as lound as she can in their ear and biteing at the ear and then on more then one occasion it has turned into a fight when the male is no longer willing to tolerate hre biteing and barking at them. She never does any damage to them and she has not yet been hurt either but we have had problems in the past with dog on dog aggression with different breeds and I am concerned that if this is not corrected then she will progressively get more violent with her attacks. I do, however, feel bad about punishing her for this because I feel as if she is trying to protect the family from these barking male dogs. What can I do?

If there are no injuries, this is not actually fighting. Be very careful about paying attention to it. You can make it much, much worse by doing that.

It sounds like you have five dogs, and that gets to the problem stage. But opposite sex dogs usually don't harm each other. It's the same-sex dogs we need to worry most about. You may need to start separating dogs more. It can get very complicated as you acquire more dogs.

There are reasons a male and female might actually fight. Two main ones are if they have to share food (feed them separately) or highly desirable toys. Those things they need to have only when they are separated from each other.

Rather than punishing the female after a fight has started, look at the predicting events of an argument between the dogs, and take positive control there. It may mean rearranging schedules, facililies, or handling how you let the dogs out. You can also teach her a solid come-when-called (using positive methods) and call her to you before she can start anything with a male.

You may need a behavior specialist to come out and observe the dogs and advise you. But stop punishing. It won't work. It will create more problems.
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Kathy Diamond Davis, author, "Therapy Dogs: Training Your Dog to Reach Others," 2nd edition, and the free Canine Behavior Series articles at http://www.veterinarypartner.com/Content.plx?P=SRC&S=1&SourceID=47

Thank you so much for your reply. Usually the female only spends "play time" with the males. She sleeps seperatly and because of her extreme diet needs (she is diabetic) she eats seperatly as well. There are never any toys in the picture when a fight does start, like I said it seems to just be the male getting tired of her biting him. We have never punished her for this behavior I am just trying to make sure that this will not lead to the problems we had with a female Great Pyr 2 years ago when she attacked 2 of the male dogs that we currently have. This was actually what I was most concerned with. Since both male dogs had been attacked by a female dog recently I was afraid that they would feel like Lilly was attacking them the way the Pyr did which actually resulted in surgery for both male dogs. She knows the basic "come" command and it is never hard to break up the fight since her heart is really not in it, but the males take it much more seriously then she does. They do not seem to realize that even though she is bigger then they are she is still just a playful 8 month old puppy.