Skip to main content

Where are we at?

"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 trick performance but that's about it and it only works inside.

A big problem I have to address is letting go of the concept of perfection and letting go of these make believe deadlines that I created in my own head. Raising and training my own dog is challenging all these micromanaging tendencies that I didn't really realize I had as well as my emotional, quick-to-frustrate nature.
"I don't know why you're always so dramatic everything is great"

Our main goal right now is to slowly re-introduce Pierre to using the subway. I did this successfully, somehow, when we first got him, and he was doing fantastic. Unfortunately, when P and I were visiting pals in Eastern Ontario in February, we went under a CN rail track just as a train went by overhead. It really traumatized him and he has generalized this new fear to any kind of train sounds. I made the mistake of trying to just push through it after a couple weeks.

 As if you can rationalize with a sad baby dog.
"Oh look we're just going on the subway and now we're at High Park can't you see that we're at one of the best places and the subway was necessary to take us there??"

It's been a hard couple of months for me with scheduling and being a human in general so I have put this aside to deal with later. I know I have to implement a slow, progressive plan to ween this guy back into TTC land. I bought hotdogs during my last grocery trip and today we did a fun series of training that culminated to going to the subway station, in the first set of doors and getting a bunch of hotdog pieces and then leaving. He was really stressed about being in the station itself, and I think I lingered there too long for him, so we have to start a bit further away next time and try again.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Front Clip / Easy-walk Harnesses

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

confidence or something

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, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Shame and Learning

As I say every year, it's been a weird year.  Personally, I'm trying to navigate an ever-present, deep pit of shame. I've been working with a therapist, for over a month now, to push through the discomfort and identify behavioural patterns and self-talk; it's very challenging work. Blah blah blah. At the beginning of September, I attended an incredible, paradigm-shifting 2.5 day seminar about dog behaviour and training with a trainer named Blake Rodriguez. It really soldified a number of concepts of dog training I thought I understood (but it turns out I only knew them on a theoretical level, not the practical application). He communicates very colloquially, unlike me who is using a lot of huge words for no reason. He explains dog training by breaking it down and through making a ton of comparisons. He values accessible dog behaviour education and you can tell that he works hard to make sure he can get through to people and help them understand. It has been o...
Post a Comment
Read more