A few weeks ago I told you the story of the dog behaviourist who visited us to try and sort out a problem we were having with our pups. Since arriving in Scotland we have been able to give the dogs a great deal more freedom off the lead, but we were increasingly finding they would run off at great speed with no regard for us, and then it would take us up to an hour to get them back.
The dog behaviourist recommended trying to reclaim our position as head of the pack by making the dogs make eye contact with us before they take their food, and by walking through the door first. She also told us to monitor the dog's excitement levels, only letting them off the lead when they were calm and to change direction when we were walking, recalling the dogs as we did so.
A lot of this advice was useful and effective, even if it did result in a lot of very teenage like behaviour from our Big Dog, who was the ring leader, and did not want to reliquish her position as boss of the pack! She started refusing to come in from the garden, destroyed one of our sofa cushions and sat around the house sighing a lot! As a final measure we also bought a remote control pressured air collar which has been brilliantly effective and both dogs quickly worked out to return to us when they hear it beep and before we have to squirt them with air.
All the training and the collar means I can now happily take both dogs for a fairly stress free walk without worrying about them ending up in the middle of a main road (as they did a few weeks ago) but there was one small problem... When we walk them on the beach, we can't use the collar in case it gets wet, but with their behaviour so much improved, last week we thought we'd risk it...
At first there were no problems, they ran around diving into the sea and climbing up the sand dunes, burning off lots of energy and returning to us frequently...
And then suddenly the madness took hold of Big Dog! She realised she was free, and that ahead of her lay miles and miles of sandy coastline, so she started running and she didn't stop...
We thought she was still in the dunes, so paced backwards and forwards calling for her. Eventually after an hour with no success, we had no choice but to come home. A fretful couple of hours hours later, we had a phonecall from a man who had been out looking for his own lost dogs and had discovered Macy, FIVE MILES down the coast in the middle of a (thankfully inactive) rifle range!!
She was apparently quite reluctant to be coaxed into the man's Land Rover and even less impressed when I turned up at his house to collect her. In her opinion she had been having a rather brilliant time until we all showed up to spoil her fun.
None of this is really entirely surprising when you consider Big Dog spent the first 3 months of her life living in a stable on a rural Albertan farm, while her mother spent her days running freely over the Canadian prairie... We have learned a lot about dogs since that day 3 years ago when we were blinded by her cute fluffy good looks...
...And clearly we have a bit more training still to do!
PS - Blogger has been having a few problems since I changed the URL of this blog at the beginning of the month. The only way I can see to get round it is to stop following the blog, and then reselect "follow" on the top right of this page, you should then get the new posts appearing in your reading list.
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