Do sheepies ever calm down around children
Alot of families and there little ones. I am getting leave it to work with other dogs, but with kids it's almost impossible. He gets so excited. Then of course kids want to pet him. I grab his harness but he jumps and talks and goes crazy. Scares most children away. I'm a 100 percent sure he doesn't want to bite them, they just make him go wild. Now I understand all of the rescue posts about not adopting to a household with young children. Any ideas? Lisa and Frankie |
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| I don't think its a Sheepdog thing. Tonks and Luna have never been spastic nuts about children. In fact, its always been just the opposite with them. All the kids want to pet the Shaggy dogs, and my girls will automatically sit down for little kids, and always have. I didn't train them to do it; they've just always been amazingly patient and clam around children. I'm tremendously grateful for it. |
| Tiggy's kind of half and half. She gets excited about meeting anyone but seems to kind of understand she needs to sit down especially for little kids but sometimes she has trouble resisting and sort of half jumps at them and then sits again. If the kids run though............well that's a whole different story  They need herding then. |
It's not a problem at our house (or in public) either. I would say Chewie is pretty calm, but who's to say that if I had not raised him to be calm and respectful of people, that he wouldn't have reverted to crazy man??  I suppose it comes back to the fact that I never accepted that behavior with any of the dogs. Like I teach right off the bat in my classes, you sit to get petted. Maybe a wiggle or kiss will come out....but NEVER any kind of wild behavior is ever OK. Jumping or barking - not acceptable. Has he been to classes? - and if so - wasn't that stressed?? Once they do it, they love to sit and soak up all the attention. Even the rescue and foster dogs do it with very little effort on our part, I suppose because they see it and adopt it because they want attention too. Todd may have his training issues (table snacks....) but we both have the same behavior expectations for the dogs. And they are really happy dogs too! If you want to change the out of control behavior, you certainly can. You need consistancy formost. If you need help, find a good trainer to give you some help and support.  |
| Yes thats the one thing we work on all the time. When Frankie goes to daycare the trainer makes him sit at the front door and calmly greet everyone, but she has noticed the kids are the hardest for him to control himself with. It's a work in progress thats for sure. Lisa |
| Before my nieces moved to Hawaii they would make Edgar go crazy. They are the out of control wild screaming type of nieces. Edgar's herding instincts go into over drive and they would end up getting knocked over. So when the girls would come over he would get put away. He just couldn't handle it (I barely could lol). |
| Sunny used to knock kids over when she was younger, she would just go over to them and not stop walking/jogging when she got close, and boom, down they'd go. But at about 8 months old she all of a sudden got a clue about it. While jumping of a friends deck (it was short), she almost collided with a 3 year old, but did this amazing air zig zag thing and avoided her. We were all awestruck, since she'd developed the nick name "Rammy". Ever since then, it's like she just knew that kids are more fragile. Good timing with our daughter learning to walk shortly afterwards. When she was still "Rammy", we would make her lay down and hold her collar down when kids wanted to pet her. We graduated to making her sit, and we'd crouch beside her and hold her collar. After a while of that, once she'd greeted the kid and wasn't lunging, we would let go of her collar without her noticing. (being very careful of course!) Then after a bit we'd take hold of her collar again, making it obvious so that she knew she had been free. Something about us trusting her, has always made her better behaved. Also, when greeting someone, if she misbehaved (lunges, jumps up), she IMMEDIATELY lost the privilege of greeting that person. She eventually figured it out that when she was good, she got to say hi. |
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