Sonny the tester dog

It's been a long winter but the Spring is here and with it came renewed motivation to tackle my issues of meeting other dogs.

A few weeks back my partner and I had a tense conversation about the dog, him saying he felt we were not making progress and me saying how can I do more with him if I feel so scared?  In short stalemate.

Soul searching and lots of hynotherapy, which has revealed some interesting truths about the issues around my fearful reactions, not always immediately obvious, have had some effect.  However, the gaining exposure to other dogs and stopping the lunging behaviour was bugging the pair of us.  I recognised that feeling that I had to do nothing when another dog came along, even if Sonny reacted, left me with a load of fear and a sense of disempowerment, not a good place to be.

Idly googling as usual I came back to a website that I had visited before and a trainer that had apparently got a large pack of dogs at her disposal.  I decided to contact her really to find out if she would consider taking Sonny into her pack for a few weeks.  I was really keen to see if he could learn how to build his confidence and remember the ancient language of dog something he had never seemed to learn to speak.  She wrote back and told me that she could not take an aggressive dog into her pack but that she might be able to help, so this began a conversation about what we were doing in relation to canine encounters and her explaining a method that she used which was to teach him to avoid.  She explained that within a wolf pack certain dogs have the role of being 'testers' they apparently travel out in front and scout for danger, if this was in Sonny's DNA there was nothing that we could do to change it, but there was a way we could teach him to use alternative strategies.

The prospect of getting Sonny to stop lunging after 10 years was' as you can imagine, an attractive prospect, however I felt a strong personal dilemma as I was already working with a very good trainer and the last thing I wanted to do was to upset her, I was also worried that I was just being a butterfly again, dipping in and out of training methods without really committing to anything.  As Sally as previously told me some people just want you to put magic paint on the dog's tail to solve it's problems.  Was I one of those people after all then?

After further talks we decided to give it a go and booked a holiday near the trainer's home.  With two full days of training ahead, I was nervous the night before but actually found the method's reasonably easy to learn.  Interestingly she introduced me to a friend of hers who had several highly excited dogs over which she clearly had no control.  So Sonny was put through his paces well and truly with high, medium and low energy dogs.  The first morning he was reacting as usual but gradually he began to calm down and by the end of the two days he was.... well you'll have to wait and see.