About the reactive dog and human.
This blog is about a journey I began when I brought home an 8 week old German Shepherd in November 2006. We had the choice of two girls in the litter, and the breeder suggested “the quiet one”. When I picked her up, she noticed me, but just wanted to go back to her litter mates. The other one was more animated, and really curious about who I was.
So it was that I picked the “other one” that seemed to be a social butterfly, and named her “Amika” for the Esperanto for “friendly”. They say that you should be careful what you wish for. I wanted a dog that I could practice operant conditioning type training skills on (often called clicker training in dog circles).
I also wanted a dog that I could take anywhere. To make sure I got the right dog, I had followed two bad pieces of advice:
1. German Shepherd Dogs are confident, yada yada…
2. Take your pup to puppy socialisation.
For anyone contemplating a shepherd, be aware that while a well trained one looks confident, a large number (not all, of course) tend to be quite insecure. Most aggression issues come from anxiety too.
If you have a new pup, you can probably get away just fine with puppy class and the dog park, but there are good reasons not to do these things. I did both of these and created a major, major problem. I now know that it doesn’t matter if your pup never sees another puppy again- what they need when they are young is an older dog or two to keep them in line in a fair way. That way they learn their manners around dogs.
I owe a big debt of gratitude to the people on the ClickTrain list owned by Shirley M. Chong www.shirleychong.com, for educating me a bit and sending me in the right direction. Right now, I am a big fan of “Control Unleashed” by Leslie McDevitt www.controlunleashed.net. This blog is a chronicle of our progress.
My end goal is to be able to take Amika into the public and to doggy events and have her stay calm and focussed. Rather than going ballistic at the sight of new dogs or people, and thrashing to go greet them!
