Don't tell my dog that I'm a mess

We're taking care of the family dog, Oliver, for a couple of weeks. It's been lovely because I grew up with Oliver, raised him, and appreciate being able to spend some good time with him now that he's a ten year old. Oliver is an example of a dog that thrives under positive reinforcement training and will never need corrections. He was well socialized as a young dog and has a great genetic disposition. Any minor tension on Oliver's leash is met with an immediate response, typically of moving towards the handler. His only little thing that I have to manage while he's here is that he gets SO excited when he meets new dogs, so much so that he often tries to mount them; this is because in his adulthood, socializing with other dogs isn't a part of his routine. Oliver and Pierre are vastly different in terms of energy levels due to their age and breed difference. Pierre is a pretty high energy dog who needs a lot of exercise and mental stimulation whereas Oliver is ex...

A wonderful pal expressed that they appreciate my Pierre posts, and it was just so surprising and uplifting to hear. Here I am attempting to stream-line and organize my constant, ever-changing theories, observations and often straight mindless chattering. To hear that people* find it interesting and even helpful is just, the most heart-warming and validating thing. Overall, Pierre is doing great. I'm still often a questionable leader, and he knows it, but we've made a significant amount of progress. I intend to write a post about our journey in navigating leash reactivity eventually but I've decided to focus on our "obedience" practice at the moment. If you could even call it that. General Obedience  I have been practicing his “ sit ”, “ down ” and “ don’t move ” (stay) in public places more readily. Not consistently but I figure every little bit helps. " Heel " is something I barely work on, but let's ignore that for now, I will work on ...

The Ruffwear front-range that I bought I had been contemplating getting a good harness to take Pierre on longer hikes, which I want to do more of. I don't know why but I just felt like it was a thing you get for hikes. I bought one that I had been looking at for a while. One that has two clip options, including the front clip to "prevent pulling".  There were a ton of great reviews. People who "tried everything to stop pulling and this one was magical". Great marketing. I'm all in. I picked it up yesterday and put it on for our afternoon walk to the nearby school field, to test it out, even though my plan was to only use it on hikes. My partner, Tim, who is in a constant state of eye-rolling in regards to my dog musings, poked fun at me for buying a harness that was so similar to the ones I frequently complain about. [As we know, Pierre's last adopters tried using an easy-walk harness on him and his reactivity was a nightmare.]  Tim asked why I ...

Training is a long and arduous process for both of us but it's nice to see the improvement and how quickly he bounces back into normal after a routine switch up. For example, he's now really good with his "on your spot" and I can get him to stay there a lot longer. A few days ago, I had him go on his spot and then I filled up his bowl (on the other side of the room) and put it down and he didn't move a muscle until I released him, it was awesome! Though I have always known that it's important to make paying attention to me fun and rewarding, I have gone through phases this year of being lazy and not working hard enough to make sure that there's more rewards for behaving than confusing resistance on the leash or active corrections. I got a new treat pouch a couple months ago and I've been prioritizing having a few tasty treats on every walk instead of brushing it off as a minor part of training. I've learned that having exciting rewards isn'...

It's been a busy year and apart from genuinely not having any extra capacity to process any new things about dog behaviour, hilariously, the more I learn about dog training and dog reactivity, the more insecure and inconsistent I have become as a dog handler. I regularly google weird dog-training questions, about prong collar use especially, because I find it extremely hard to stick to my personal choices and training goals while there are alternative ideas and opinions circling around me or even directed at me. I have stopped using the prong collar, for brief periods of time, probably 3 or 4 times this past year. I contemplated getting a no-pull harness probably 100 times before coming to the exact same conclusion that it is definitely not a suitable option for Pierre (it's been tried before). I've read sensational, questionable "articles" about how all dog collars irreversibly damage dog tracheas, etc, etc. Wading through information spewed by breed snobs, ...

Many of my posts, including the most recent one, are riddled with anxiety and pessimism.  It kind of skews things when all I track/worry about are his problem behaviours (which are honestly quite minimal) as well as the things that I'm struggling with in dog training. A couple general positive updates about Pierre: I've found off-leash trails to be a great space for him to meet other dogs as he seems most at ease when we're walking on a path and not just standing around and staring at him. He seems to be most uncomfortable being trapped in areas (i.e., fenced in dog parks) with too many dogs. He's unbelievably friendly and most of his pulling on the leash is now out of genuine excitement about people and other dogs and very rarely due to frustration/anger.  His relationship with our cat is going great; he responds really well to "leave it" if we can see that she's stressed  He's going to be visiting the long-term care facility where I work at th...

"this is an exhausting read" I've had to adjust some unrealistic goals. Actively working on training has been put a bit on the back-burner because Pierre isn't much of a risk to other dogs anymore, my job takes up so much of my time and energy, therapy dog work isn't  realistic at this point for a variety of reasons, and my co-dog-parenting partner and I are not always going to be on the same page (nor can I expect him to have the same intensity or obsession with this that I tend to have). I always envisioned a dog that would have a high toy drive when I dreamed about adopting and Pierre does not have this kind of drive. His main motivators are his people and being outside, and then to a lesser degree food and toys. I've read about working to create a motivational toy which we could do, but we aren't planning on competing so this has been a fairly passive process. I use games of tug and other kinds of play as a motivator for little bursts of regular ...

I recently re-read the entry that I had written hastily about this concept of balance. I noticed that only a few months later, I already disagreed with most of the observations I had made. Just by nature of being fairly new to reading in depth about dog behaviour and training, I'm constantly re-visiting and honing my own skills. This means, I'm constantly addressing my own misconceptions, faux-confidence, and mistakes. The theme of that post was around the idea of figuring out what a balanced approach to dog training looked like in regards to Pierre. Balanced dog training, is a phrase that generally means that it is neither compulsion* or positive-only training, but an appropriate combination of the two, that ideally prioritizes reward-based training, but allows for the space for appropriately timed corrections. This is very individualized based on the dog, like all training truly should be. For example, Pierre bit his last adopter when overwhelmed on a walk. According to w...

The last month or so has been really challenging. I started really long work hours to add to the lack of dog-park time. Pierre's had a hard time adapting to this weird new routine that has been leaving me exhausted, without the time and energy to dedicate to adventures with him or training, and where he doesn't get much, if any, play time with other dogs. Some new rebellious behaviours came up but have since been resolved, and some things we are still working on. Can't blame him for acting out though. For one, he had a weird bout of fearfulness, during which he was fearful of me at certain times of the day. Seemingly because there was a stretch of days where my time at home with him was solely doing things like cutting his nails and cleaning salt out from between his toes in the bath. So, if I called him over, he would look nervous and run right past me to jump on the couch as if to say, "no, don't make me do the thing". He was scared of our bathroom for ...