Xena finished her Graduate Puppy course with Spring Forth Dog Training (might have mentioned this already but it's worth repeating). She came out with flying colors and we are planning to enroll her in their Pre-Agility course once my season at the haunted house is done and I actually have more than five minutes a week to stop and breathe.
Entirely our fault but Xena started being a bit naughty and testing Vasco and myself. Once she graduated from her course we weren't as diligent or as regular with training and Xena took advantage. I started working with her again but didn't have all the tools/skills necessary to address all the issues including Xena's lack of focus and her tendency to ignore us when even the smallest distraction was involved. We tried treats, re-directing, everything we knew but it failed more often than not.
Knowing we needed help, I contacted Hannalore at Boston for the Dogs. I had been following her work especially with her reactive pitbull Maya (who, in my opinion, looks like a giant version of Xena) and thought she could really help get us on the right path. She came by today for an hour session and introduced us to some new plans and training tools including a StarMark collar which safely applies pressure as a means for correction. In a short time, Xena understood the collar and during a 30-40 minutes walk stayed beside me almost the entire walk and even didn't totally
ignore me when her buddy Inky the Dachshund came out of nowhere trying to play. Hannalore advised us to keep the collar on indoors with a small leash attached that we could use to do corrections inside (have a feeling it might come into play when Xena goes trash digging in the bathroom).
The harder part of our training is that for two weeks we cannot seek Xena out for attention and can only give affection when she chooses to look at us and give us attention. This should help on her focus issues and I know it will be much tougher on Vasco and I than her.
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