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Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Don’t Let This Face Fool You….



My 11 week old puppy Kona’s little furry sweet face stops people in their tracks to coo. I mean, shoot, take a look at that pic!

And she is a good dog quite a bit.

Okay, she’s a good dog sometimes.

All right, she’s naughty. There.

So, bring in Tacoma’s Positive Approach Dog Training. I mean, we’ve been working HARD on training. We follow Cesar Milan and Victoria Stilwell. We read the books and the blogs; heck, we watch everything on Animal Planet.

We WERE having nice success (potty training and kennel training was a breeze, some commands learned, scheduled followed). These elements are still good, but playtime, turned into controlling behavior, nipping, irritating time. Hence, Positive Approach; and yes, we sprung for for the private lesson. It was worth all that and more.

A lovely, confident, knowledgeable, dog whisperer named Numia came to our home ready to go. She got down on the floor with my little bundle of fluff. Kona was wonderful at first; then they played. Numia politely acknowledged that our little pup was very stubborn, easily frustrated, and controlling (really a perfect fit for the Thompson clan).

We knew what we were getting into with a border collie puppy. There are risks with the herding breed, but with hard work, and being an active family, we knew that this was the right dog and she would be just wonderful.

Numia reinforced this and gave us excellent tips and tricks to help her self-calm and for us to gain back control as the pack leader(s). It was very informative and it is WORKING. Kona is doing much better with play time. We even got her out for a little walk today with her leash and harness.

We signed up for their Puppy Workshop. We can’t wait and Kona will love meeting the other doggies, too.

More “tails” from the front to come!

4 comments:

Lorraine Hart said...

Yup...I think we really want to go for this and move Rani forward towards being a full service dog.

With the calm assertive energy...I've found an old lesson from Grey Wolf very helpful. That is, to project a 'thought picture' of what you want to communicate to the pup...visualizing the correct results.

Will look forward to all 'tails' that come! xo

Kim Thompson said...

Oh, I like that advice!

Jaynie Jones said...

This was a great read, Kim. I think you're on the way to writing a regular "Marley & Me"-type of column. Thanks for sharing your journey with Kona with each of us.

JosephMcG said...

Stubborn... controlling... good strengths for human beings and other living creatures...

woof! woof!