(Help) My Pitbull mix severely injured my neighbors dog (Planning Pregnancy and don't know what to do about my dog)
Hello, we have a 6.5 yr old Pitbull Husky Mix (Male) named Sage. Yesterday my husband was in our backyard cooking and Sage was chilling out there with him. Our next-door neighbors small chihuahua (mixed with terrier i think) is often roaming around freely without a leash in their front yard. Their dog squeezed in a gap through our chain link fence into our backyard and Sage immediately attacked him and my husband tried so hard to get Sage off of him, he put his thumb up his bum and was pulling him up until Sage finally let go of the small dog. The dog was severely injured, it was traumatizing. Our neighbors took their dog to the vet, we are unsure if their dog made it or not... We don't feel comfortable asking them because they are angry and trying to press charges. I feel so terrible our dog did that to their dog and that's a whole different story. He has bitten other dogs before, but this is the first time he has actually SEVERLY injured a dog. He has killed rodents a handful of times..
My main concerns though, we have been planning to start a family this year. We have talked about how we will keep Sage away from our baby and if we have Sage around our baby it will be under extreme close supervision. We would figure it out as we go and work on it. I have hopes he will be good with our baby since it will be ours.. but maybe I'm wishful thinking? When my baby nephew is around though, I don't ever let Sage near him because I genuinely don't know if i cant trust my dog around him. My family is fairly small and I didn't have opportunities to have my dog around children/babies while he was a puppy, my sister had a baby 1.5 yrs ago and this is the first baby in the family. So I just don't know how he would do with them. He is great with adults but he barks at children in the neighborhood..
Some backstory: Sage is very loving, happy, and playful. I got him as a puppy. He doesn't tear anything up in the house. He's good with our house cats aside from lunging at them every now and then, he never touches or bites them (he was raised with one cat as a puppy, that cat passed away and we since then gotten a few more). He listens to commands for the most part, though he is a little stingy sometimes.
He was in training classes as a puppy and was great around other dogs at first, until one day he was in boarding where they have some of the dogs play together, he got in a fight with a female pit. He snapped at one of the workers while they were breaking up the fight, and they banned him. Ever since he has been extremely aggressive towards any stranger dog. After that, he was still good with a few of our family dogs that he has known since he was a puppy, unless they snapped at him. He has fought and bitten my parents senior puggle a few times. I no longer take him around our families dogs because of those situations. There have been some other fights but nothing we couldn't break up before it possibly got bad.
After this happened yesterday, I'm more worried about having him around when we have a baby. Our house is small, we have a decent sized backyard. I don't know if we should consider rehoming him or what we should do. I don't like the idea of him being an "outside dog" I just don't think I could do that to him. It really pains me to think about all of this.
Any advice, input, or similar experiences and what you did is much appreciated. Thank you for taking the time to read this.