We recently passed the one month mark with our larger 4 legged furry charge and are bearing witness to a marvelous transformation of canine behavior. When he first strode through our doors he was a handful. He needed to smell everything inside and out jump around, and be where we were every second of the day. We knew part of it was his adolescence and part of it was being in a new surrounding, but none of that made it easy. Since then we've been attending dog school with the incredible Judy Moore of Canine Behavior Counseling.
Before we started her class we explained some of the things we were seeing in his behavior. She said she has a couple different classes for basic obedience and an Outdoor Adventures class for dogs that need some work on socializing with other dogs before they can effectively learn anything. To ensure he landed in the right class she came out to our house with one of her dogs as a distraction dog, to get a feel for him and recommend the right class. We are now 4 weeks into 6 weeks of the Outdoor Adventure class and we're flat out thrilled with the results. The class consists of a variety of dogs all of them fearful or anxious around other dogs or better yet people, and most of them are bigger than our little Mr. Cecil. There have been a couple rows between 2 of the other dogs in the class that occurred nowhere near Mr. Cecil but completely freaked him out all the same. Other than being exposed and shaken by those incidents, he relaxes a little more with each class and has even made some friends! Sure he still gets ancy being around other dogs but it's less frequent and certainly subdued. There are even times when there are other dogs that are barking or growling and he just lets it go and pays attention to us. In the honor of full disclosure he doesn't arbitrarily look up at us, we tell him to 'watch me' (look at me and we'll give you a treat) before he'll do it.
One of the best 'watch me' instances happened this morning on our morning walk. We were walking down a nice quiet residential street when another dog owner was out with her 2 collies walking up the street toward us. We did the 'watch me' command a few times before they got close, and once they got close one of the 2 collies went over threshold with excitement at the sight of Mr. Cecil. Mr. Cecil for his part looked at the dog for a couple seconds while I told him to 'watch me'. After saying it only twice he looked AWAY from the over threshold larger than he is Collie and stared right at me quietly waiting for his treat! He got his well deserved treat and we kept walking while he kept looking at me, waiting for the vending machine to spit out more doggy deliciousness. Oh that's not all. Nay nay. We have trained him to 'leave it' when we drop a treat on the floor in front of him, and we have him sit and calmly stay while we pour his food into his dish and put it down on the floor. We are amazed at how far he and we have come in the short window we've had him, and we're super excited to include him in all sorts of adventures knowing that he's going to be a balanced well behaved little guy.
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