I have been really bad at blogging for quite some time. It doesn't just apply to this blog, without all my blogs. Maybe there is a change coming, since this will be the second post of the day. I thought I'd tell you a bit about how I deal with Boyo's teenage behavior on walks, today.
I have so a teenager here at home. My personal opinion is that he's been in his teens for quite some time at this point, and my patience is really not my strong suit. Boyo's biggest thing going for him is that he absolutely cannot stay by my side, but flutters back and forth, preferably with the nose glued to the hill, he can't focus on moving forward but likes to be a bit everywhere just because he can. He can't walk nicely on a long leash, he can't walk nicely on a half-length leash, and when he goes on a short leash like that… I'm not going to say he necessarily pulls, but he likes to rush ahead, although the leash is short.
This is not favorable to my patience, nor for the degree of pleasantness of the walks. It gets even worse when Lilo is involved, because he finds it even more difficult to concentrate. And she is there quite often. 😀
So now holds me to make a plan for how we can solve this dire scenario. It's not fun for me, it's probably not much fun for Boyo, and not for Lilo either.
Regarding our joint walks, I have given up the idea of actively train Med Boyo. You know, just like in dog training – that which I think is so incredibly shitty fun (you can hear the irony dripping, va?). I'm also reminding myself that dog training isn't actually very difficult for humans. It's a fixed idea I have – that dog training is soooo troublesome… You can hear for yourself how stupid it sounds.
Today when we adapted by Lilo to her mother, we went for a walk, me and Boyo. Not a long one, because I planned for us to practice that walking in a nice way on a leash. And we did. One of the things I find so damn hard about Boyo is that he is so incredibly fluttery, unfocused and unfocused on me. He is, if he himself gets to decide, totally uninterested in what I do. I think it's a shitty attitude in my dog, so today we worked on it.
So what did me with the poor thing, when?
Already, I had whole hand full of sweets (I have bought a new candy, I think I've linked to it before – from Zooplus), and he had to follow my hand by my side, and then he got a small piece – quite often, actually. Not to mention how much praise he received. We went straight, we walked diagonally across the cycle path back and forth, we walked in small circles, we stayed, made eye contact and left again.
Now we did not so during the entire walk. At times he had to walk on a longer leash, smell, pinking and shitting and stuff like that. But we alternated training and longer leashes throughout the walk, and I am on the whole very satisfied. He behaved much better during training than I could have ever imagined, so maybe it's the case that the hormones are starting to fall into place in his body.
I intend to continue do this with him. Because that's the way it is that I find it completely unbearable to walk with a dog as big as Boyo (ca 71 cm high – I have told it?) when the dog cannot move on a leash. Thankfully, Boyo hasn't discovered that he's probably quite strong, for which I am extremely grateful and would love to see it continue that way (but perhaps not entirely likely), but it's probably too much with a dog that constantly wants to be somewhere other than where I want him to be.
So right now it feels like my plan looks like this; on the walks with Lilo we have to try to consolidate what we practiced the day before. With emphasis on trying. But every walk without Lilo should be trained with Gottis, heaps of praise and so on (assuming he actually does the right thing), so I think this will eventually be as good as it gets. I hope so, in all cases. And why wouldn't it?
Further combined with additional contact exercises, so it will be completely, absolutely fantastic.