Nemesis goes down

Back in July last year I posted about my parent's dog Boss who was making life difficult for me (and the rest of the world) when I was living at home for a period.

Well his behaviour hadn't changed one iota since and on the food/biting front, he was actually becoming worse. The lasted incident was a rather scary attack on Dad - blood was drawn, bandages were applied, doctor was sought. Dog got away with it scotfree. Don't get me wrong, he's a beautiful dog, who is lovely to be around 99% of the time. But he does manipulate the folks and doesn't know his place.

Anyway in the interests of harmony and fear that he might go at the girls one day, I decided that a Dog Whisperer (DW) was required. So on Tuesday I headed over to Mum & Dad's for a group lesson. Just like on TV Boss knew that DW was the real boss and she had control of the house instantly.

We did lots of role playing around the issues that we have with Boss and learnt what we were doing wrong and how to train him - super fun. The feeding bowl was the real problem, Dad showed DW how he feeds the dog, which meant grabbing a dog biscuit and throwing it at the bowl from a distance of about 3m - very funny.

During this lesson Boss broke into his rage and surprisingly went for DW, but more surprising, she just took her hands out of way, stood on his lead and commanded that he lay down. He kept trying to attack, but finally submitted - huge respect DW.

It was a great couple of hours, we learnt so much about how to control him and move ourselves up the pecking order. As you can imagine the easiest way was via food treats - very effective when you've got a golden retriever. Training him will be great fun, just have to make sure Dad (the big sook) doesn't let the side down.

So if you are visiting M&D, just knock on the door, give them time to arrange the dog, wait to be invited in and simply ignore Boss, don't touch, don't look him in the eye. You can say hello later, he just has to know that he is the least important thing in the room.

So Boss is no longer be my nemesis! I'll just have to find another.

BTW: I tried the training techniques back home on Foxy the cat - doesn't work!