Dog training session

This morning, Gerry and I went with Kimmy to our second session with our new trainer, Carole. Kimmy seemed very excited to see her and was even more excited when Carole announced we were going for a walk in the woods.

Kimmy was like a typical puppy, bouncing with energy and good mood. Carole put her on a long lead and tried out what it's like walking our princess. Kimmy, true to her self, didn't hesitate to jump up at Carole, bite in her pants and generally be a nuisance (but a very cute one, of course!).

Carole determined very quickly that the biting pants was not due to stress but due to overabundance of energy and puppyiness, and told us that the best way to deal with it was to channel the energy on something else, by giving Kimmy a command to follow.

So we started to introduce the "weiter" command (voice and hand signal), it's German for "further", and basically means "keep on going", and with the hand we show the direction we want her to go.

Carole also told us it was important to teach Kimmy that it's good to pay attention to the one who walks her, and to do this, we need to verbally praise her every time she stops to turn to look at either me or Gerry.

We soon saw that highly excitable Kimmy was like Tigger from Winnie the Pooh every time she got praised for eye contact, which meant she would run up to me or Gerry and jump up trying to lick the face.

So we needed to praise very calmly, not to excite her even more.

During our walk we passed a couple of people with dogs, Kimmy barked her head off at the first one, but watched quietly as the second one passed us. She was just dying to run off and play ;)

We did some more exercises, like "find" - we hid a treat in the snow and told her to find it, to make the walk more interesting and mentally stimulating.

I find the one on one training sessions so much more better than the group ones, it really makes it easier to focus on what we're trying to do with Kimmy, and because the trainer is only paying attention to us, she can better see what we do wrong in body language etc.

So I think these private sessions althought a bit pricey are money well spent.

As we were leaving, there came the next client with her dog - a one year old Doberman bitch Vicky. Very similar to Kimmy, the big difference was that Vicky's tail was docked extremely short (she barely had a stump left).