Thanks To Walk Guru

Thank you again for your help with Finn in your Walk Guru program. I continue to give him two 20-30 minute walks a day and he is making such great progress with heeling and his reactivity to other dogs. When I need to get his heeling in check I use the “follow” protocol for a while and that does the trick. Everyone at the SmartPak office is so impressed with how he doesn’t react to other dogs now, even when they react strongly to him. Of course, I use his prong collar to give him some corrections leading up to the encounter, but they’re mild I don’t have to use many of them. He’s really getting the hang of it.

We’re also making progress with his off-leash training. Last week I did an exercise with Molly Heermans and her two dogs as distractions inside a roller hockey court. We practiced having Finn off-leash inside the court and worked on recall as she walked around the outside of the fence with her two dogs. Then we brought them inside the court with him and worked on recall some more. He did really well with it! He’s smart and really does want to learn. Steve and I just have to be consistent with our training.

Then today I took him for his first off-leash walk in a while. Molly and I took our dogs to a large conservation area where they can run off-leash. I had Finn tow his 30′ long line just to be safe. He did awesome! He did really well with recall, and many of the times I didn’t even need to use the Dogtra. Only once did I have to crank it up high when he and Puu got really far away from us and weren’t listening. We didn’t have any other dogs there as distractions since it’s a rainy day here, but I’m glad we got a solid off-leash walk under our belts because now I’m more confident to go back there when he will likely encounter other dogs and work on recall with that level of distraction.

I’ll continue to keep you posted on our progress. I’m attaching a picture from our off-leash walk this morning.

Thank you again!

Cathleen