Doggie Bootcamp

On Friday and Saturday we went to doggie bootcamp with PK. Things were getting out of hand with Teagan's resource guarding and fear aggression. We needed an intervention because we were scared for Keeley's safety. Plus she had growled meanly at the kids that came to our Pumpkin Carving Party the week before and she probably would have attacked them had I not been there holding her back.

PK was Keeley's SATZ trainer when he was still a puppy. SATZ is a way of communicating with your dog using simple language so that you can get along in harmony. For more information, you can check out PK's website: For Love Of Dogs. For Keeley this was a SATZ refresher course, but Teagan had to learn everything for the first time. It's a good thing she's so smart and was able to pick it up rather quickly.

With SATZ, it's sorta like that game of Hot & Cold that kids play. You know like, "You're getting warmer. Warmer..." But instead of saying warmer or colder, we use the letter X since it's an uncommon sound in English. So if I tell Keeley to come here to me, the whole time he's moving towards me I'm saying "X, X, X, X..." and if he turns away then I stop giving him that guiding signal. It works really well.

The first thing we worked on at bootcamp was to get Teagan to stop barking and growling at people. This took a lot of work since she's a pretty darn vocal little girl. Whenever she'd bark, we'd all run into a different room and close the door leaving her alone. Then we'd make a lot of noise in praise of Keeley for NOT barking. If Teagan wanted us to come back, she had to be quiet. At one point she almost bit one of PK's assistants in the butt as we were running out of the room because of her growling.

Next both Keeley and Teagan had to learn to wait at every door until I told them they could go through and also to not run up ahead of people on stairs since that could be dangerous. My dogs still need a lot of work on this at home now since old habits are hard to break. They also have to come to me immediately if I say "Here" because that's a safety issue too.

Another aspect of SATZ is "Get Easy". It's like this, basically dogs have 2 options every time they're in a scary situation: Fight or Flight. SATZ gives them a third option of just relaxing until the scary thing has passed. That's what "Get Easy" is. We need to practice this everyday till it's second nature for my pups.

Amazingly, Teagan excelled at this at bootcamp. Since she had growled at kids a lot, PK made her get easy while there were loud and fast moving kids in the same room. Oddly, Keeley who loves kids, was the one who had a hard time with this. We kept having to do it over and over until he got it right.

Another great thing Keeley and Teagan are learning is to "Check In". When they're off leash, they're supposed to "Check In" with me, meaning that they run past me and make eye contact. They have to learn that it's their job to watch me, not the other way around. We've still got a lot of work to do with this but I can see it's going to be great once they master this. I won't have to worry so much anymore.

Keeley and Teagan are also working on walking with a loose leash. I'm walking each separately until they're really good at it. On Sunday, Keeley walked the best he's done in his entire life. I was so proud of him!

And Teagan is also learning not to jump up on visitors. She really needs work on this. Sometimes when people ask what breed she is, I tell them that she's part jumping bean. She's got so much energy!

Already my dogs seem to have a new respect for me. At first, I wasn't thrilled about having to go to bootcamp but I think it's really paying off big time. People always say how cute my dogs are, but now they're going to be saying how well behaved they are!

I think that's about it. Oh yeah, I was also going to talk about some other changes around here. First, Teagan is back to sleeping in her crate since she lost the right to sleep in my bed. She may regain that right sometime in the future if she continues to do well with this new training and learns some manners. I've told her that she's relied on her looks for far too long and that now she has to learn some discipline.

The second change is my dogs' diets. Teagan had been eating Narure's Variety Instinct grain-free kibble and Keeley was eating that kibble in the mornings and Nature's Variety raw medallions in the evenings. But now both dogs have been switched to an all raw diet. This morning they each had a raw chicken leg quarter, the bones and everything. I thought it would take them a long time to eat something like that but Teagan was done with hers in about 5 minutes! I almost threw up in my mouth because the sound of her gnashing up the bones sort of grossed me out.

Also I was worried about the bones since anytime Keeley swallows anything larger than a dime, he throws it up. But so far, so good. There's no throw up yet. It's so weird to be blogging about puke but I know all you DWBs understand.

I'll end this rather lengthy post with a cute picture of Keeley that I took a few days ago.