Someone asked for the best non-wsava pet food, I said “you won’t get an answer here since this sub is a wsava circlejerk”
Why are their egos so fragile? Lol
I started working with a private Agility trainer and she has me working on marks with my dog as fundamentals. She wants my dog to be able to run between marks at home without me next to her- so put her paws on one and lay down, and then do it to the other one.
I’ve been working on this with her a few times per day- usually she will get flustered and do the first mark, I click, then have her go to the second, she will start barking as if complaining that she has to do so much work lol. But I hold strong and don’t reward with jackpot now until she has done 2-3 marks.
Anyway just wondering if yall think this sounds like the right approach, or should I break it down even smaller if she is barking with frustration? Or is she on the right path? Thanks for any advice :)
(edit: for the record I did start with just 1 mark and reward and then once she understood moved on to 2-3 marks when next to them, now am standing further away. 2 yo Sheltie who generally is obedient)
I’m pregnant right now and am hoping I can keep up with the dog sports once the baby is here. Just seeing who else is managing or has managed to do it!
We do rally and agility mainly at the moment.
My 2 yo dog is a notorious barky breed but she’s really not bad about barking. However I have boarded some dog guests at my place that are not used to an apartment who I think rubbed off bad habits on her.
Now she randomly will bark once or twice at God knows what but it’s often when I’m deeply focusing and startles me. Is there a way to get her to stop doing this? She does it like 5x per day sometimes while I’m working (WFH) so it’s a bit of a problem.
Note she does get like 3 hrs of activity per day and very much knows what “quiet” means.
Just wondering if y'all would recommend a bark collar (and if so what brand?) or a different approach to help her suppress her borks- as a puppy I trained her not to bark by giving her treats when she was quiet when loud things went by which was effective but now the barks are often at subtle things I can’t hear now!
For background my 2 yo Sheltie is a naturally shy/timid type, she used to be scared of everything and didn’t like dogs barking but over time she’s made a lot of progress.
Anyway we’ve been doing agility for 11 months, the first few months she was spooked af but eventually got over it and was on fire.
One day we were blazing thru a course and someone’s psychotic shepherd (this person has 2 psycho dogs that spend all class barking their heads off, trying to fight each other and fixate hard on other dogs) ran into the ring and chased down my dog, scaring the ever loving fuck out of her, and chased her into the fence and she got tangled in it and was terrified.
Ever since then, it’s been 2 months and she’s spooked and spacey in the ring esp in the area she got attacked in, and I will have to repeat commands multiple times to her and work hard to get her attention because she’ll become a space cadet and keep trotting around nervously, it makes me angry tbh. I have to put her on leash a lot now to get her to listen to me and do the courses.
Those dogs are still in the class and bark like crazy all class too and it triggers her a lot, I’ve started experimenting with picking her up to comfort her.
Anyway advice on helping her overcome her fears esp with those dogs still freaking her out?
Hi there, I have a reactive Sheltie who I have trained to be 99% better but like 70% that is management, I’m good at catching her now before she starts reacting.
Example we are walking down the street- dog on the other side- she whips her head to stare- I immediately pull her head back with the leash and say leave it- she starts looking back again- I do a corrective sound and usually pull her head back again- rinse and repeat a few times until she stops trying to look, when I usually tell her good.
It’s like this at home with the cats as well who I’ve been teaching her to stop herding.
Any advice for enforcing the no stare so I don’t have to correct her multiple times? She is usually on a martingale collar with 6 ft lead.
Edit:
I’m not looking for distraction techniques, I already know how to do those and overall her arousal level is very manageable compared to how it used to be
She is already very obedient and does 3 dog sports and gets to herd 1 hr per day at least
We don’t even walk a lot, I only walk to get her to poop in the morning. she walks like 15 mins per day at the most and all other exercise is via park trips and classes. occasionally we walk for an hour if no other exercise happened that day
I have a sheltie who is pretty great and at this point we are just working on 2 annoying behaviors, 1 of which is a pathological squirrel obsession.
She learned this from another dog we walked with once. I thought it was funny so I let her do it for a while but feel I should stop it.
So basically while walking she is normal but occasionally will either see a squirrel or catch scent of one, I can tell because she starts sniffing like crazy and will start jumping up on trees and acting crazy. If she sees the squirrel she’ll start yipping with excitement, pulling, running in circles, acting crazy for a few mins.
Note that YouTube squirrels have the same effect!
My usual response is to cross the street with her away from the squirrel trigger and stand still and hold her on a short leash until she calms down, then proceed.
What would yall do?
I saw AKC sent out an email about it recently and it sounds like there’s a bunch of stuff in there that could impact dog sports.
Opinions? Tbh I haven’t read through it yet but will later, perhaps after work.