I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Every time your dog does something ‘wrong’ it’s a training opportunity about to happen!
Here’s an example…
Cleon the German Shepherd was so excited on his one-on-one Accelerate Training outing with me that he decided to celebrate by zooming around – on a lead. Yikes! Some of you have possibly experienced this before, and it’s scary and uncomfortable for you the human.
BUT…
What a wonderful opportunity to practise calming down! So we did just that!
Some dogs only have a light switch which can be either on or off. They have no ‘dimmer’ switch. A dog with a dimmer switch is able to come out of excitement faster than a dog who only has a light switch. When the light switch is on, it’s on and it’s hard to switch it off again, whereas a dimmer switch has many gradients of more and less excitement levels.
As a result, for a lot of dogs, I’ll spend a lot of time working on loosening up that light switch so that it becomes more of a dimmer switch.
THE BENEFITS
You’ll end up with a dog who doesn’t overreact to other dogs and to people, a dog that is calm when people come over and can happily come when called on a walk.
Cleon’s dimmer switch is slowly getting stronger and this zoomy session gave us the best practise opportunity ever!