Smacking Aggressive Dog, What Does The Dog Think?

[m-sass]

if the dog gets hit while it's lashing out at another dog it will associate other dogs with being hit and it will only increase the dog's aggression toward other dogs in future.

That's true in very rare circumstances with extemely hard dogs, but it's not the norm with the average pet, most dogs will shut down with aversion and stop the aggressive behaviour fairly quickly, but smacking the dog is not the most effective way for implememting punishment based behaviour modification.

I would think "extremely hard dogs" would be the least likely to respond to being hit when in a high level of arousal.

Even "the average pet" would have a raised pain threshold when experiencing a high level of arousal which makes correcting them at that point useless.

I wasn't talking hardness of nerve, I was talking hard in active aggression where aversion elevates aggression or creates redirected aggression, hitting or giving out hard corrections with dogs like this during an aggressive episode does make the situation worse, but there are not many dogs around like this IME is quite rare. Many assume that correcting all dogs showing aggression will make things worse, with most dogs it doesn't only the odd few.