Who’s the Boss?

We officially hired a dog trainer to come over last night to help us get control of the crazy dog. What I’d chalked up to puppy behavior was getting a little too old, and so was the dog. She’s a little over a year and a half now, so I decided these were patterns of behavior, not just a puppy doing what puppies do.

I Googled a dog trainer in my area and clicked on the first link at the top, and wow did I get lucky. When I visited Marcia Martin’s website, there were tons of success stories of how she’d turned people’s lives around in just a couple of hours. I picked up the phone and called Marcia, expecting to pay an un-Godly amount of money, weeks of training and tons of frustration waiting for results. I told her about our doggie issues – jumping on everyone, not listening, counter-surfing, pulling the leash, peeing in the house – and she said we could probably address everything in about two hours, in one evening, at a really great price.

I didn’t believe her.

She showed up with a bag of tricks, and she fully expected to have to pull them all out from what I’d told her about Lucy, but in only 15 minutes, she had Lucy calm and cool, relaxed and laying on the floor, just hanging out. She said our biggest issue was this: Lucy was in charge of the house, not us. This meant that Lucy felt like she was having to run the house too, that’s why she never sat down or relaxed. She was behaving like the mother hen, running around checking on everyone, and we needed to take that responsibility away from her first so she would know who’s the boss and second so she could take a break and just chill like a dog is supposed to.

After less than two hours, we pretty much learned everything to get a really good start, now it’s just up to us. The hardest part for me was getting hubs to buy into this because he’s mostly the one that spoils her (he has such a tender heart for animals). But once he saw her behavior and how well she could behave, he immediately left for Target to pick up a couple of water bottles to aide with training (just one of the little tricks we learned for controlling her behavior).

We actually had dinner last night with her laying on the floor right beside us vs. her jumping up to the table or counter. It was great. I'll keep you posted on our progress.