We adopted what we were told was a purebred Great Dane (we had a Dane/Lab mix that died at 12.5 last year that we loved beyond words) but found upon a DNA test that she's 1/3 Dane, 1/3 Doberman, 1/3 Pitbull. We don't care about the mix, we just want to be able to train her to be a well-adjusted dog (we call her our NanoDane b/c she looks like a Dane shrunk to 1/3 normal size: she's 45 lbs at 9 months old).

She's mostly really calm, sweet, and generally trainable with treats. *However*, if she gets excited by another dog, bird, or other animals, or feels like I'm not paying attention to her (usually if I stop to chat with another person), she starts jumping and biting the arms of the person walking her. Not just nips, she bites really hard and latches on. It's like she completely loses control of herself and the things that normally work to get her attention don't. This lasts maybe a minute or two at the outside. It's very hard to stick to positive re-enforcement when her sharp Doberman-style teeth are digging into one's arm.

Once she calms down, it's like nothing happened and she returns to her sweet, trainable self. Has anyone had an experience with a dog like this? Any suggestions on how to use positive reinforcement when she's 95% trainable and only goes on tilt like this occasionally. We just need some ideas on how to handle this because sometimes a substantial swat on the nose is the only thing that will get her attention and pull her out of her "tilt" mode and we don't want to use those kinds of corrections. We're committed to using non-aversive training modalities but this is a tough situation because we not only want her to stop in the moment, but we want to train her out of this behavior whilst she is still a puppy.