Dog Name: Bandit P.
Breed: German Shepard/ American Pitbull mix
Age: 4 years old
Training Goals: Bandit was having issues with overexcitement and hyper activity. Could not handle seeing other dogs on walks and was always pulling on walks, barking and jumping on people when they would enter the house. Bandit is a larger dog, so having him be controllable by both mom and dad was a must, as well as not getting over the top when playing with the children. Bandit was also having a tough time when going to the vet and going to get his nails trimmed by a groomer. The parents wanted to make vet visits easier and work on allowing someone to trim his nails.
Length of Training: 1 year
Results:
Bandit has learned how to politely greet people when they enter the home, both people he has known for some time and new people coming over. It used to take Bandit over 20 minutes to calm down when someone came into the home. Now he greets people politely without any barking and has stopped constantly jumping up on people to get attention.
On walks, he no longer barks and drags mom and dad towards other dogs, he can politely check them out and keep moving along with their walk. His pulling on the leash has greatly improved and is very responsive to verbal commands when outside.
His parents are now able to trim Bandit’s nails themselves with no fuss, and Bandit is a lot calmer and manageable when going to the vet.
Additional notes: Bandit’s first hurdle was getting him to start using his energy in a more productive way. We started with basic obedience and using exercises and games that pushed bandit to think about how to tackle the task at hand. He picked things up quickly, and this made training for both the parents a lot less stressful. For his owners, making the training they did outside of our lessons fit into their busy schedule helped Bandit’s training be so successful. Making their exercises easy and fun made everyone want to do more, and setting bandit to consistently be successful helped accelerate the pace of Bandit’s progression
