Mitzi and I met my NorCal mentor and her foster, Liukin, today at the park to see if we could work on Mitzi's social skills.
Ha!
She is just a wild child that does not do well when she first meets new dogs. I mean, we know that she is capable of getting along with other dogs---she plays nonstop with my lab, Hamilton and my pug, Otis.
She gets fixated and starts pulling so hard on her leash to get to the new dog. She makes this terribly strange pig sound that makes it seem as if she is coughing up a lung. She usually pukes a few times. She acts as if she wants to either hug the other dog or attack him.....and it's really too risky to let the situation play out to see which is the case.
We tried several "walk by's" and even some parallel walking, but after about 45 minutes of working, we gave up.
*sigh*
I fear this dog will never find her forever home.
2 comments:
Have you tried to do this further away? It may sound really weird, but if you work a bit with clicker training her and at the same time figure out how close she needs to be before starting the pulling craziness, you may be able to work her through it.
Every dog has a threshold. When we first started working with my retriever, his was over a block away! This means that if the dog was 1.5 blocks away, he would look at them, but wouldn't lunge and go crazy (barking, snarling, snapping, etc).
So, we started with that. If he could be good that far away and Heel, and Sit when asked, than he got cookies and clicks. Ultimately, you work them closer and closer until the threshold is about 5/6 ft.
"Click to Calm" by Emma Parsons is an awesome book for this sort of thing. You may want to check it out. It's helped me with a few things that I was unsure of how to deal with.
DogsDeserveFreedom
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