Or is it human training?
When Minnie and Ghost were puppies we tried to take them out with us fairly frequently in the hopes of having well-socialized dogs that we could take out and about with us. It worked okay when they were little, but we eventually gave up because their behavior got worse as they got older and we weren’t sure what to do about it. I tried to remember the dog training I did with my pit bull Tank when he was a puppy, but I only half remembered what we did, and what I remembered wasn’t really working for either Ghost or Minnie.
When we were prepping to move to Germany in 2019 and 2020 we were pretty consistently stressed out about getting the dogs on the plane and dealing with their behavior in a city and apartment setting. But, with everything else we had to do for that move, dog training fell below the threshold for us to worry about and we figured we would suck it up and figure it out when we got to Germany. Then of course 2020, COVID, and cancer and dog training didn’t make the list at all anymore.
Sometime in 2021 I started trying to work with Ghost again, but whatever I was doing wasn’t working, so I eventually found a dog trainer who was less than a mile from our house. The trainer had good reviews, so we paid for their training plan and in-person sessions and started working with them. Unfortunately, their training was not well-matched for what we and our dogs needed. It was all choke chains, waiting them out, and turning suddenly while walking to get them to pay attention to you instead of the world around them. The result was a lot of frustration for all involved, because it turned out that Ghost would happily scream at the open door for an hour or more and we were lucky that she didn’t hurt herself hitting the end of a choke chain at full speed. We kept trying their techniques for a couple of months, but we didn’t make it past the second or third lesson before we gave up.
Throughout 2022 and most of 2023 we kept walking Ghost in the morning and with a little practice and a lot of patience we got to the point we could walk her without it being a complete disaster. However, we couldn’t walk both dogs together because they would start attacking each other out of displaced emotions and even when we walked them separately, a lot of their behavior was still obnoxious, since Ghost would scream at other dogs and Minnie would bark and lunge.
Then a coworker recommended I check out another trainer in Columbia. I got an appointment for a zoom call consultation and over 3 hours she talked us through her techniques, which featured lots of treats and praise and no punishment whatsoever. I started trying her methods with Ghost on our daily walk and almost immediately saw results, because most of Ghost’s bad behavior on walks was directly related to her favorite game “is it food?,” which required tasting everything she could get her mouth on. We had the consultation at the beginning of January and just three months later walking Ghost by herself isn’t a problem at all because she knows that there is a never-ending source of treats at the other end of the leash and she is more than willing to make a lot of intense eye contact waiting for treats to come her way. We also don’t have many problems on our walk when other people or dogs are out and about because if she starts pulling, I just stop and wait and she realizes she will get a treat if she turns around and looks at me.
There are still a lot of behaviors we need to work on with Ghost in particular. Getting out of the house if the garage door is open is still a disaster and she still loses her mind when people are at the house or when we go to the vet because she just loves new humans so damned much — but we’re working on it, and at least now I have the techniques to use with her.
And then there is Minnie. Unlike Ghost, Minnie is not really food motivated. She is generally more easy going than Ghost and walks nicely on a leash if she’s by herself, but she still barks and lunges at other dogs and she will start attacking Ghost out of excitement if we try to walk together, even if Ghost is focused on me and treats and is completely ignoring Minnie. We’ve been taking Minnie to an actual training class on Saturdays and have slowly been working with her as well. She has to hide behind the wall of shame so she can’t see the other dogs in class, and we have to make sure she doesn’t get a lot of food in the morning before training so she’s nice and hungry, but we’ve been making slow progress with her.
I think the next step is to set-up some individual training sessions with both dogs so the trainers can give us techniques we can use to get them walking together as soon as possible, but with only 6 weeks until the move, it will almost certainly still be a work in progress when we arrive in Germany.