Personal Dog Training Is Paying Off

Dakota Doesn’t Come When Called Once She Gets “Free”

The main reason we called a dog trainer was because when my dog Dakota gets out of the backyard, she just takes off and does not stop until she gets where she is going.  One afternoon, she got out of the backyard, hit the green belt, ran across the bridge, through a school parking lot and into the school playground where she found her favorite thing in the world —– kids!  She was in heaven and I was irritated and out of breath from chasing her in flip-flops through the woods!  Kids were screaming in joy as she was running up and down the playground as fast as her puppy legs could carry her, which was much faster than my legs would carry me.  Finally, she visited a man on the playground and he grabbed her dog collar for me.  The trip to the playground, through the green belt, had unfortunately been her last romp in the playground.  I had to carry her all the way home since I had no leash and she was too short to guide her by the dog collar.  After carrying her so far, she began to get REALLY heavy, which added to my irritation for my “little run” through the woods.

Chasing dogs everywhere is not my idea of being a dog owner.  We have to get this stopped.  The dog is growing a little everyday and is getting faster and smarter at escaping!  We found K-9 Obey through our local veterinarian and decided to give them a try.  He makes a personal visit to your home and works with all your family members on a one-on-one basis for an hour.  Basically, he is training my family how to train our dog.  This is great, because we can continue the training when he is not around.  The weekly training sessions are fun and the kids look forward to them every week.  We paid for a 4 week training session, but it has taken us longer to complete due to extremely busy weekends.  K-9 Obey was completely understanding and works with us as needed to fit the lessons into our schedules.

K-9 Obey Third Dog Training Lessons

Before Our First Lesson Did You Get A Christmas Puppy

Session #1  K9 Obey Introduces My Family To Dog Training

Post By K9 Obey  The Importance Of Dog Training:  Written by the Wife of the Woodlands Whisperer Dog Trainer, Bob Holmes

Session #2  Mom Blog:  Does Dakota Catch Her Leash

Third Dog Training Session

We had our third dog training lesson with Bob Holmes from K-9 Obey on Saturday.  He brought his dog to use as a distraction while he worked with our dog.  While my dog, Dakota, was working on previously learned commands, his dog Trooper, was running up and down the street catching tennis balls.  We took the lesson back to the green belt, which was much harder for Dakota, since she can’t wait to be released back there so she can run!  This was the perfect place to train her, K-9 Obey’s Trooper loved the green belt, chased balls and even jumped the creek and went swimming.  My dog wanted to be free.  It took a few hard tugs on her leash, along with us commanding “Come,” for her to realize who was in charge.  Once she knew what was expected of her, she sat by my side and watched Trooper play, instead of trying to pull me across the green belt.  This was our best lesson ever, since this is my number one concern with my dog.  Since we have many kids that come over to play, our back gate is constantly being opened and shut which gives Dakota WAY too many chances to escape!  She needs to know not to dart out of the gate every time it is opened.

Next time the dog trainer is bringing another one of his dogs with him.  In the meantime, my family is supposed to practice what we just learned on Saturday until our next lesson.  Our dog has come a long way and will now do basic commands when instructed by any one of our family members.

Dog Training Gear

We now know how to use a leash, choker chain, dog collar and a long cotton lead to train our puppy.  Now, shopping from the dog store means more to me than just purchasing a cute dog collar.  Through our lessons, we learned that a choker chain must be the right fit in order to work effectively.  The trainer told us that Dakota would need a choker chain, so I picked one up at Wal-Mart.  Once we started our lesson, the trainer pointed out that our collar was WAY too long and that we needed to purchase a choker chain from a specialized store in order to find the correct fit.  We only needed a few loose inches of extra chain and our chain hung around our dog’s shoulders and not her neck!  My dog has a micro chip, but I also feel that I need to get a dog identification tag for her dog collar with my cell phone number on it since she likes to roam.

If you have a dog like Dakota, it would be in your best benefit to track down a local trainer.  The personal trainer’s prices were less than half the price of sending your dog to stay with a trainer and be trained away from home.  I like the personal trainer idea, since we learn how to correct the problem and the whole family participates.  I am afraid that we were to send our dog away to be trained, that she would come home and we wouldn’t know how to fix any problems she may have if she started to forget what she had learned while staying with the trainer.