Well, all in all Gina's training progress has been pretty steep. At least considering the fact that we've been training for under 3 weeks. Looking back I accomplished with purely positive reinforcement training a lot. And when I compare it to Daisy's progress, Gina has accomplished that in 3 weeks what I accomplished with Daisy in almost 6 month.
The progress with getting her used to other dogs is slow. But I expected that much. It all depends on the dog. Those with fairly balanced energy are usually no problem. But those who are unbalanced to begin with and those who bark crazy at Gina are the ones that cause problems. And she reacts always the same way. Getting ready to attack and launching at them. That's a pattern she has learned and it's nit going to be easy to break that pattern. And currently her security distance are about 15 feet. With that distance she doesn't react without me having to redirect her with goodies. I rather not want to use force to redirect as that is counterproductive as far as I'm concerned and it's exactly how people did it in the past to her.
But today a particular odd behavior surfaced. She walks pretty OK on the leash. And at this point I don't expect her walk right next to me. As long as she doesn't pull like a freight train, it's good as far as I'm concerned at that point. And when we start the walk it works with no problem. There are 2 intersections where she wants to go into the opposite direction that I want to go and she doesn't pay attention where I'm walking. But that's a minor problem. Of course I give here plenty of time to check out the cents and yes loud and strange noises still scare her. But I can get her off those pretty quickly. But after about 1/2 of the walk she starts pulling more and more on the leash. For me there is no apparent reason to that. The only thing I can think of is the fact that the second half of the walk is uphill. But even if I increase my walking speed significantly...that doesn't change a thing. And today it was particularly bad. And at a certain point I just lost it and yanked her back on the leash. That did get her down a little. But not for too long. And I did it actually twice. I just lost patience. After that I was mad at myself. And I made a promise to myself that I would stop that and go back to a purely positive reinforcement approach.
Thinking about the entire incident made me realize how much work I had actually done with Daisy and it took about 1 1/2 to 2 years back then. But that's something I've gotten used to. So guess I will have to remember how slow Daisy training progress was in the beginning. And I've made good progress with Gina so far. Putting on the muzzle is very little of a problem. You just have to use a 2 step approach. First she gets a couple of goodies. Then I put the muzzle just around her neck and let her eat another couple of goodies out of the muzzle, before putting the muzzle on. And it's very little problem. Yes, she doesn't particularly enjoy it. But no more showing of teeth and no more growling. Leaving her alone for a couple of hours...no problem at all. She just jumps onto the couch and sleeps where I'm usually chilling when watching TV. No whining, no barking...nothing and yes leaving the TV or my iPod dock on certainly helps.
When I take all that into consideration I really have to reevaluate my own position when it comes to positive reinforcement vs the methods like the ones pushed by a Ceasar Milan.
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