I need help with fences
We walk around the neighborhood and end up in our culdesac, where Opal freaks out. There is a house with 4 boxers and 2 poodles, and all 6 dogs jump against the fences and bark like crazed lunatics. They dig furiously, and soon the smaller ones will be able to get out. Opal goes nuts barking and lunging. We have to pass this house since its 2 doors down from ours. My dog is misbehaving terribly on leash. She does whatever she can to make eye contact with the Psychotic 6. She engages them whenever she walks past that house. It doesn't matter if its early morning before they are out, she's tensed and ready to take them on. Its her behavior that I need to change, but I'm not sure how. Can you give me tips on what I need to do with her? |
|
|
| Sometimes I look at my posts, and these two dogs, and really hope that in the end I'll have some great dogs. It seems like a constant struggle to get each dog under control and behaving appropriately. Someday, I hope to be able to tell these two to do things and they'll obey like well-mannered ladies. |
| Take her out alone and sit in front of the house. Reward her when she is calm and her attention is on you. Start small short intervals and use high reward treats. Even if it takes 5 mins for her to calm down and turn her attention toward you and you only get one reward in. It's progress. |
| Ok. That's a good plan. I'll start that this afternoon. |
| Definitely one dog (of yours) at a time. They feed off the group frenzy thing, so control what you have in your power. Also, it may be tough with it being a cul-de-sac, but to start you need to be at a point when she is sub-threshhold, meaning before the point she goes bonkers and loses her ability to focus and think. So geographically, you need to start at a place where she still listens and reacts with you. Experiment a bit, walk closer and see at what point it all goes out the window. Then back up until you have her mind back with you. Reinforce the good behavior. How close are they to your house?- can you start at your house and have her still focus? Because truly, you don't want to walk past them until you work through this. Every time you walk past, and they all go crazy, it reinforces and ingrains the habit. It becomes a default behavior. A bad and undesired default behavior. With dogs - they try something once (through accident, or curiosity). And they absorb what the response was to it. If they liked it, they will try it a second time. And by that SECOND time, it's already becoming a habit. I bet you have walked past those dogs, with this response, WAY more than 2 times. So you see how ingrained this is. What should have been done (in a perfect world, or with a more experienced handler) is nip this in the bud the very 1st time they tried reacting to these out of control neighbor dogs. But it didn't happen, so now you have a habit, a default behavior that you get every time.  I'm not going to lie, this will not be easy or fast. They like it, and thrive on the energy that comes from the whole thing. One dog at a time. Never go past them unless they have the control to focus and behave. Hard with your street layout, maybe you can befriend a neighbor for an alternate route through a yard or something? Good luck.  |
| Tonks and Luna can be reactive to other dogs on walks. I sometimes walk them separately, and sometimes together- I want them to be able to walk together, but I also know we can work on any bad behaviors more successfully alone. Sometimes I will do a morning walk (when there are less neighborhood dogs out) together, and an afternoon one (when I am more likely to encounter other dogs) individually. I like to practice avoidance. My girls will be doing fine, and if another dog leash-lunges and barks, my girls will sometimes respond. (Tonks almost always, Luna less so). My first tool in my arsenal is "leave it". When I see dogs coming, I start with "Leave It" because I know they see them too, and I let them know that I don't want them to engage. If I can feel them tensing for a confrontation, I begin to use "Watch". This is a command where I get them to look at me; I hold a treat up to my nose, and get them to look at my eyes. They look away, a light tug on the leash and a firm "Watch". Once they learn Watch (you can practice this in the house with treats, getting them to watch longer and longer times before treating them) I find it a great tool to break their focus on things I don't want them to do. We have other reactive dogs in the neighborhood, and when I see them coming I know these commands aren't likely to help us. So I will walk the girls down a driveway, make them sit with their backs to the oncoming dogs, Watch, Leave It, Down, Stay... whatever I can do to get them to focus on me, focus on the commands, and try and ignore the other dogs. I know this isn't an option as you have to walk by these 6, but maybe something similar; some sort of re-directing her attention exercises? Have you tried talking to the neighbor that has the 6 dogs? Maybe a combined training effort would be something you could discuss? I'm sure they don't want their dogs digging out any more than you do. We did something similar with our neighbor; they adopted a barmy, bossy little dog. I offered to go walking with their son, and teach him things like how to heel, sit, stay, etc, while getting our dogs familiar with the new dog. I really wanted to avoid a reactive situation with the dog next door. It worked at first; but their son is 10 and he lost interest and no one else was willing to keep it up.  A shame really, because it was working, and would have been really nice to not have our girls barking out windows every time their dog starts barking and goes nuts on walks. |
| Opal is reacting as soon as we hit our driveway. But the 6 react as soon as they hear children's voices. (I'm guessing they are the reason the new neighbors who bought the house in between, have the house up for sale after living here 3 months.) We're locked in for how to get to and from our house. Three doors to the left are the 2 baying bassets, which aren't always out. When the husband is home they don't make a peep. When he's gone they are the most vocal dogs ever. The Psychotic 6 are 2 doors to the right. Everyone has the same HOA required fence. So my best bet is probably down the middle of the street for that last approach. Not too close to either house. But its not ideal. I don't think that the 6's owners will do anything. They aren't very... neighborly. I might try to let them know their dogs are close to escaping, but I don't know that they'll do anything about it. I know they've had the cops called on them for their dogs' behavior in the past (the school crosswalk is in front of their fence on one side and those dogs were scaring the kids going to school). I always blamed a lot of Opal's problems on her previous life. She had never worn a collar or walked on a leash. She had only ever been in a small backyard, never walked or taken out. But, we've had her long enough we should have this under better control. It wasn't a big deal until we realized that some pulling was turning into lunging. She managed to get away from Naomi, the 11-year-old, one day and its been bad ever since then. So we'll definitely work on this. It looks like we need to start at the front door of our own house. |
| Call the cops again. I know some HOA have a dog limit. My bro and sis in laws had like 5 poms. Their HOA limit was 3 dogs. Call the HOA, they can be real big bitches for you. |
| City regulation is no more than 4 dogs without a kennel license. We did have the dogs out front today just to hang out in the yard while we did some work. Naomi kept Opal in a down-stay or sit-stay and then walked her on the basset side of the culdesac. She did ok with some carrying on. I worked with Naomi at redirecting Opal's attention. With just our kids out and working, there wasn't the excitement of many kids playing. There was one point where the Psycho 6 got worked up, and I had Naomi bring Opal back to the front porch. Overall, we did ok. |
| That is good progress! |
| This is definitely a slow-going process. I thought that Collies were supposed to be tractable and easy to train... I bet Lassie wouldn't look for confrontation at the neighbor's fence. |
bekalm wrote: This is definitely a slow-going process. I thought that Collies were supposed to be tractable and easy to train... I bet Lassie wouldn't look for confrontation at the neighbor's fence.Lassie would unlatch the gate and herd all the dogs to a meadow, saving them from getting run over by a huge truck on the way, where they would all frolic together until they were tired. Then they would go home and be buddies forever and she would come and let them out every day while making sure they always got home before their owners.  Why is your collie not dealing with this issue in the aforementioned manner?  |
lassie made it to upsidedownland by merchant ship, sailboat, raft and a hotair balloon??!?   |
| My lassie-dog would shove Timmy down the well and eat his sandwich, then she'd saunter off to lick herself in an embarrassing manner. |
| Bethany, thats one badass lassie dog!  |
 I thought Lassie walked on water to get here. A badass Lassie dog indeed. |
| OR just a bad, ass of a collie... My oldest told me that she didn't want to read the Lassie book because she didn't want to see how badly Opal was failing. I said it should be a challenge instead. |
Collies are big barkers and quite a distinctive bark too, so you do have that genetic tendancy to deal with.  Interestingly, I have 2 littermate puppies in my current class, male and female. They are collie/lab or golden retriever mixes. Very obvious pointy collie noses too. It's a very interesting combo for sure, will be fun seeing them grow up while in class and see what traits surface in each. The brother already has the collie bark though....lucky them! |
| They need to get the barking under control early! Like I can talk, other than I know from experience that training a loud barker when it is, and is not ok to bark, needs to be done early. We've really had to work on Opal on when its not ok to bark, and barking is her first action in a lot of situations. She's made progress from when we brought her home, but she has a long way to go. Interestingly enough, Naomi got a dog whistle yesterday that she has started using when Opal barks out back. A quick whistle, followed by a command to either "come" or "hush", and Opal is a little less noisy. She wants to use it on her walks with Opal. I can't see why she couldn't. |
Didn't find exactly what you're looking for? Search again here:
Custom Search
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|