This is a page to share with you all what we are going through right now; what we are learning, and what we are struggling through, in hopes that we can inspire some of you to research new ways to work through the issues in your own lives.  

Much Improvement

Posted by Amanda Beasley on Friday, July 29, 2011 Under: Reactivity Training
So, it has been a little over a month since I was out of my mind with frustration over Kenzie's reactivity to other dogs. Once we got to our house in Oregon (shortly after the last post) we had a very hard time getting her to sleep through the night. It took 7 days of loud music playing all night and all day to get our first "stress session" free night. I was so excited, I woke up thinking "I slept through the WHOLE NIGHT!!!!". Since then we still sleep with a fan running for some background noise, but that is all. There are a lot of dogs in our neighborhood, so that is fine with me. Once she was sleeping fairly well and not jumping at every small noise, I took that as a sign as her being ready for a training session. The way it ended up working for us was: 7 days lock-down. Training session, then full day of rest, training session, then full day of rest, training session, then full day of rest, training session, stressed in the evening, but then slept well that night, so we had another training session the following day. I was able to work with her every day on something from then on, unless she started being jumpy again, then she would get a day off of training. We have not gotten to the place where we can go to the dog park and she is not very interested in the dogs there as long as we keep some distance between her and the fence. We have even gone in the dog park with other dogs once, when the dogs were really  nice and she seemed okay with them after a while of chasing her ball at a comfortable distance. We let them meet on opposite sides of the fence, Kenzie looked relaxed and friendly, so we went inside! I was pretty nervous, but it was great, I just threw her ball and she chased after it, while letting the dogs sniff her when they came over. She was a little possessive of THEIR toy, but that is a whole other kettle of fish!

In : Reactivity Training 



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