hankdog

And a yay for Jake, had a good walk yesterday confidently walked towards 2 on leash dogs. I decided to go to st Ives pens this morning. The pens were full, agility class and some big dogs playing but I must have had my big girl pants on and decided we would train on the little field next to the pens. We start walking up and down, Jake seems to slot into training mode well and I realise there's a retriever tied to the railings. Jake is so focused on the agility dogs I don't think he noticed on our first pass so next time past I walk straight towards it. I see him notice and get the BI in quick. Turn back, still no reaction. "You want to have a go Jake?" "Nope. Want to check out agility dogs." "really we're within 3meters you sure you don't want a bark or perhaps a lunge". "Nope just really want to go see agility". So we trained amongst all the dog noise until we ran out of food and now I know the thing to distract Jake from dogs is a pen full of agility dogs. Not entirely sure how that's going to be useful knowledge.

Happy gotcha Zig.... sounds like mums going to gotcha a friend????????

Staffyluv you read the whole thread.... nothing wrong with your focus, well done. Panzer I feel for you , I forgive Jake all his problems because he is such a lovely cuddler. Such a shame that you have so much to give but maybe he will come round. Hopefully meds will help, interesting that a doggie companion helps him since doggie companions also help many people who suffer from disorders that cause them interpersonal difficulties.

We have had some major milestones. From another thread I found out about some"pens" at st Ives show ground. There are 3 adjacent fenced pens that you can let your dog off leash. I've taken the tubster there a few times now, I've had lovely understanding neighbours each time. I keep him on leash and the first time had to run him around quite hard to stop him doing the wild thing but by the third time there were 5 large dogs in the immediately adjacent pen and he focused quite quickly, would take treats and could walk in their direction without losing it. Then this week we went bush walking and ended up at a local park, headed to the bathroom to get him a drink, he had his head under the tap when 2 large dogs came running barking into the park. I blocked the doorway and yelled. Yep owner had simply strolled out her front door and herded her dogs and kids to the park, didn't actually have a leash so had to grab her aggro dogs and hang onto their collars. I let Jake out the bathroom he gave one lunge and then just "clicked" it was as if something in his head fell into place. He pulled up next to me and we started walking up and down , the best heeling he's ever done, paying huge attention to me. All the while the two dogs were only about 10m away and the only time he did anything was one bark when their owner dragged them away. I'm really encouraged by this because Steve thought that a lot of his problems are because a lack of experience means he doesn't have a script for how to handle situations so just resorts to going nuts but it seems that after just a few goes at the pens he was able to transfer his learnt behavior from that situation to this new park, it is a pretty similar fenced area so I think that helped cue his behavior.

I see a lot of similarities with "jakes bored" can I ask more about frozen kongs, you mean the red rubber ones, do you just put mince inside and freeze. Jake really enjoys his morning walks but if I have to delay he starts mouthing on the house. Literally just start having a disinterested light taste of chair, table or whatever he's next to.

Yes Panzer I had always been lucky enough to have "good" dogs as well. Jake temp tested badly in the pound but I thought a few weeks of being walked and exposed to dogs and then obedience school and we'll be all sorted. You certainly need to live with a difficult dog before you really get to understand the level of micromanagement that is required. I would certainly ask that everyone who has a difficult dog please post about what has worked for you. I avidly read every bit of advice and experience shared and am very grateful for it.

I am definitely if the opinion that dogs have personalities and also can suffer from disorders thereof. Much the same as in humans the personality is disordered only if it makes them unfit for living in their circumstances. I once had a lecturer put forward the view that being a drug addict was not necessarily dysfunctional if it was part of a multimillion dollar rock star lifestyle. So I suppose if a dog needs 8 hours of excercise a day and lives on a farm as a working dog that's not a problem, same dog living in an apartment now it's dysfunctional. Personally I've always found the more I excercise the more I need to, same holds for couch potatodom.

I also feel like I know Justice and look forward to hearing his achievements , you're just an inspiration and I love his dogapillar outfit. Maybe he shouldn't wear it on play dates though, wouldn't want other dogs to be jealous and riph it off him! My feelings from a few months of huge learning curve are that any approach needs to consider not just the dog and the causes or triggers but the whole situation, especially the handler. The first behaviorist I saw ignored all the background info I had sent, sat down and read through some Internet articles, when she saw jake in action she just said PTS or never walk. So then I was recommended to go to K9pro. Yes it's expensive, sort of. By the time I got there Steve had read my background info and started at an appropriate level. My dog is smart and strong and has 5 years of behavior to unlearn and I am a novice at this. So his approach was tailored to take that into account. We can all read all the methods but why you need an expert is the experience they have will allow them to give you a set of excercises that you can do and that will be helpful for your dog. Anyone who says method X is the go, without knowing anything about you, your experience and physical ability, time available to train, your other family members living with the dog and all the other variables that the dog brings to the situation probably is not going to be helpful unless by happy coincidence that method is right for you. Jake has a prong collar, not something I love and not something he would have needed with a more experienced and stronger handler, however Jake got me and it's the right tool to allow him to be managed by me. A good behaviorist doesn't end there though, I have a daily write up that gets mailed to Steve every week and he gives me advice and guidance and this is so so very important. As your dog learns you need to change what you do, without that update you can't progress. So every week poor Steve gets to wade through my day to day and helps me keep on track and sane. So I reckon by now I've probably used up about 6 hours of his time which when you do the maths suddenly the cost of the consult doesn't look so big. I hope I'm not coming across as an ad for Steve (although I would recommend him if you can get there)I just want people to know what to look for when they go shopping for help. I think this also applies to medicating a dog, some dogs will definitely need meds just as some people will and for some it will be situational. So yes in some situations the dog may be able to be managed without but in others it will need meds. You can wish you had more skill, time, larger yard whatever but practically we need to manage our dogs with what we have and not beat ourselves up over our limitations, and definitely learn to ignore those who may try to beat us up about our dogs. I heard a lady who had two off leashers running barking in a park this week say "oh god that dogs here" and I quietly said "yes,yes he is and he is on leash appropriately restrained and being trained so @$&$ @?" and continued to train.

I don't know if you can book, I just turned up if it had been busy or unsuitable for us I would have gone for a walk around the belrose office park. A nice no dog environment for us. if your dogs aren't reactive though there looked like some nice areas for walking around the Showgrounds.

Yay , just made an amazing discovery from reading a different thread, there are fenced dog pens at the st Ives Showgrounds!! Also from reading another thread I think Megan mentioned that some owners are not very exciting for their dogs. Made me realise that I'm as boring as bat dung for Jake, pretty much just boss him around and feed him. So I've been trying to teach him zoomies and most of his food now gets thrown around. So I headed off to these dog pens today, there were three dogs having a ball game in one so I spoke to the owner and explained about Jake and she was very understanding and her dogs all looked really stable so we went into a pen, took about 5 minutes of running around for him to settle but he did eventually and then we were able to do some training. The other dogs were having a lovely game and he would occasionally look over and give off a bark but I just kept going, using the BI if he really started losing it but otherwise just keeping him moving. Once the other dogs left I took him off leash and he ran straight to the fence to look for them so he knew they were there but was able to mostly overcome the urge to lose it. Anyway I hyped him up with running around and throwing treats and he seemed to enjoy himself. I rarely see him from a distance but his breeding has succeeded in creating an athletic bulldog and when I see him running around I am struck by the fact that he could acquit himself well against a bull????. I will also say that the hand feeding has created a really good recall in him, I've never trained recall but wherever he is the garden I can call him to me instantly and today off leash he recalled really quickly. So happy.

Yay took my very reactive dog there today, live half an hour away and did not know about this. Just brilliant, I warned the lady in the other pen and she was very understanding. Managed to get him running around, still on leash and once he settled he ignored the other dogs. Thankyou for this thread, hi to any dol-ers if you see my noisy bulldog please give us a huge area if space. I will always leave if he can't settle but this is great training for him as he can learn to ignore other dogs while he is safe behind a fence.

Well it's great that Stella is calming down, I don't think that we should feel guilty about medicating dogs. Many people can only live a normal life medicated and I'm sure that's the same for dogs. Snook my Jake finds a dog walking towards him the worst thing in the world, maybe in the hierarchy of dog scariness this is the final frontier. But going on a group walk is a massive achievement so well done Justice. A little laugh at Jakes expense, we play a game where I throw chicken pieces around and I normally do this in the driveway so he can see the chicken. He took a while to get the game and it took a bit if help from the thieving magpies before he really understood to run out and fetch the chicken. So I thought we could extend the game and throw his dentastick onto the lawn. I got him all excited, well as much as you get a bulldog excited, told him to fetch and threw the dentastick. Yay Jake totally got it, turned opposite direction and ran to the driveway and started sniffing around for his treats. Clearly he missed out on gravity training as well as socialization.

I can't choose , they're all lovely. Love Apollo.

Well I have a black thumbnail from trying to put treats in a reactive dogs mouth while he was barking ..., hardly seems to count, but the best I've got. I love these threads, you think you're way out on the fringe and then you find no, you're quite normal.

I adopted a dog in March who has a lot of anxiety issues. Luckily with 3 people working from home he has only had to be home alone about 3 times but for the first 3 months if I left he was inconsolable, he would sit with my husband or son and whine and howl, chew a bone or take treats but continue howling. really quite pathetic. After 3 months he did start to calm down and the obedience work I'm doing with him seems to be helping. If you read other posts you'll see a lot of pound adoptees seem to go through a period of escalating bad behavior before they settle. Obedience work I think creates a dialog with the dog and let's him understand you and vice versa. It does sound like he's a supreme champion destructo dog maybe people could give you their experience on what helps with that. I've found this forum invaluable for filing in my experience gaps. Good luck I'm sure your jogging buddy will give you years of pleasure once you've sorted this out.

So sorry I do hope he recovers and doesn't have any social issues.

K9Pro run by Steve Courtney is over in Kurrajong Heights , he's been useful to many including myself. Go to his website and for free you'll find instructions on training the behavioral interrupter. Proof of the pudding so to speak if you follow this you will have one very useful tool and will cost you a lot less than trying all the different harnesses etc. It takes a while to get an appointment so don't delay in booking if that's the way you decide to go. A reactive dog is a lot of work but you'll find stories on this website of people who have successfully rehabilitated their dogs so it can be done. Edited to say great analogy Corvus about the spiders and chocolate... also illustrates the role of the value of the treat, I haven't stopped thinking about how much I want a chocolate????

Woa that many pages, I think I might have done a fair bit!! So little jake has been doing his homework and reading about how to be a properly reactive dog and the other day I managed to get him past a dog with throwing treats on the floor. I'm really happy but now I've decided that I want to try spray cheese as a distractor. I'm hoping that the noise of the spray and the fuss of having to lick cheese plus it's not something he would regularly get will make it really exciting but I looked at the supermarket and the closest I could find was spray cream. Has anyone bought spray cheese, where did you get it and what was it called please?

Did you take before photos? Later on it will be so satisfying to compare. I cannot find the grey ?!! I love the last picture.

My boy is a "cosmopolitan bulldog ". Cross between British, French and other stuff. Looks and snorts a bit like a pig and totally eats like one. Here have a tablet, no problem got another one. Gave him a bone in a porcelain bowl the other day, flat face couldn't get bone out of bowl. Luckily I was nearby so went to investigate the grating noise. Yep, he was starting to chew on the bowl. When he's finished a meal he puts his paw on the bowl so he can hold it down and lick out every last crumb and then flips it over and checks underneath.

I also adopted a reactive dog and best advice is get a good behaviorist. You get what you pay for and not all dog trainers will necessarily have experience with reactive dogs, the first one I saw advised me to either PTA or not walk him. If you give an indication of where you live people will give you names of behaviorists in your area.

What's your finger count Snook. Steve did warn me I might lose some skin but Jake normally takes very gently . He's not the most animated dog but some how this really got him excited.

if you go at roughly the same time you may find a group of regulars. I've been lucky enough to live near two dog parks and my last big dog loved to run with his pack. They get to know each other as do the owners and a pecking order is established, I do miss my 5 o'clock ball game.

I can't make a loud enough kiss sound plus I feel a bit self conscious wandering around puckering up... someone might get the wrong idea????. I make a clicking sound sort of in the side of my cheek it can be anything but something you don't normally use in conversation.

As a teenager my mutt dog and I tagged along with my neighbour to a dog obedience club. My little bitzer did really well and soon got to class 3 with all the big dogs. There was also a little peke in the class. Lots of rotties, dobes and German shepards doing scent and jumps and then a peke and little bitzer that was somewhere between spaniel and Pom. It was great.