Apr 09 2024 12 mins
Hey there, dog lover! Welcome to this episode of the Unconventional Dog Trainer. We hope you enjoy our battle tested, relationship based solutions for helping your unconventional dog shine, with your host, Luzelle Cockburn Let's dive in.
When it comes to helping difficult or challenging dogs, I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is you need to love your dog in order to be able to help them. The bad news is love is not enough. What do I mean by that? What do I mean by you need to love your dog? And what do I mean by love is not enough?
All right. So before we begin, the first thing I'm going to tell you is At no point am I telling you to put your life in danger in order to put up with your dog's dangerous behavior. However, what I am saying is when you love your dog enough in order to
Try and overcome their difficult behaviors. That's where you grow as a person. That's where you grow as a trainer and that's where you'll get the results Now love is not enough because love alone can't change a dog But what love can do is love has power. Love has the power to motivate you in order to realize what you're doing currently isn't working and you need to change what you're doing.
Yes, change is difficult and until I could change what I was prepared to do, I could not help my dogs. I could not see results. I was never going to see results because I wasn't prepared to change. So, um, story time. My very first puppy was a German Shepherd called Kaz. And so she was an introvert and a future episode.
I'll tell you all about extrovert and introverted and extroverted dogs. But for the purposes of the story, you need to understand she's an introvert. So she didn't like a lot of things. She wasn't social. Her idea of the a good time was lying by your feet and playing with you. However. Not one time in those interactions did that, uh, involve hugs.
Did that involve playing with other dogs? Unless she was friends with them. That didn't involve, um, getting patted. It did not involve giving up her toy. Those things were not things she enjoyed doing. However, we could overcome many of those things if Well, if I changed what I was doing and if I was prepared to learn how to help an introverted dog, which took me a long time, it was really Kaz who motivated me to change, you see, because when I first got Kaz, I had a temper problem.
I was no good as a dog trainer or even a dog owner. I had no idea what I was doing. I'd got this puppy. I was a mental mess anyway. I'd gone through a crappy time at work and so I got this puppy and yeah, uh, proceeded to screw her up. However, one thing I did do was loving this little puppy and realizing that this puppy is not to blame for the way she turns out.
What's happening with this little puppy is My responsibility. Now you can't grow. If you have fingers pointing at the dog, because the problem with pointing a finger at the dog is that three are pointing back at you. The more you say, yeah, but my dog, the more I hear, I am not prepared to change, to help my dog.
Now I'm only telling you this because this is what I needed to see for myself in order to be able to help my dogs. Now, here's the other things that you need to, uh, that, well, where love can help you. So, love can motivate you to get help. Now, I tried getting help with Kaz, um, with her reactivity, but I was told things like, Oh, tell your dog to sit and correct her when she doesn't sit.
You don't correct her for reacting, but you correct her for not sitting. The problem was She was so freaked out by how close these other dogs were, she was uncomfortable, she didn't even, she wasn't even, she didn't even feel safe. So, that sort of feedback was not helpful for poor Kaz. These were professional trainers giving me this advice.
So, really, the problem is, Kaz was really the motivator for me to learn how to be a better dog. Trainer. Kaz is the reason I can help reactive dogs because Kaz is the reason I had to start questioning everything. I had to go right. Tried it, didn't work. In fact, made it worse. Now, let me tell you about Rosie.
So Rosie is a lovely little corgi who is very similar to Kaz in her personality. She's an introvert as well. She lives with three other dogs, you see, and her owner loved her enough to get help. Lucky for Rosie's owner, by the time they contacted me for help, I already knew how to help Rosie. I could quickly identify that Rosie was feeling overwhelmed by all, well, everything that was going on.
So Rosie's owner rang me up. She was afraid that Rosie was unhappy. And yes, Rosie was unhappy in her home. But it wasn't Her owner was afraid she had to re home Rosie because she was that unhappy, but it wasn't, she didn't need to be re homed and that was the good part. What Rosie needed was to have her space respected.
So what we did was teach Rosie she's safe in her crate, make sure that the other dogs Didn't crowd Rosie and Rosie was allowed to have space. Rosie was also told she wasn't allowed to tell the other dogs off. Especially if she entered their space and then told them off. That wasn't allowed. So this is the thing.
Now Rosie's really happy because she understands Her position in the household, she has her space respected and so she is amazing and her owner, I caught up with her this week and her owner is so happy. She was in tears thinking she had to get rid of Rosie and now Rosie is a happy dog and that. Is the power of love.
Now, the problem with that is not everyone you go to is going to be able to help you and not even I'm the right owner for a trainer for every owner. The problem when we're dealing with behavior problems is every dog is different. So here's another story. I want this to inspire you. However, I want you to know that I would have given up on this dog myself.
So this is a really, really amazing German shepherd. However, he went to the vet and The vets, he went in with an ear infection and came up with a bloodshot eye as well because the vets, uh, thought they knew what they were doing. The owners said to them, knock him out and just get it done. And instead, they didn't knock him out and end up fighting with this dog.
And then he came out with huge aggression issues. Do not mess with serious dogs. Knock them out, vets. Don't even go there. You are gonna lose and then you're creating problems for these poor owners. And that's unfair. So anyway, this is what happened with this German Shepherd. Now, he ended up biting his owner.
He bit me. Um, and that's all good and well. I knew that I made a mistake and that's the reason he bit me and I knew the owner made a mistake. That's why he bit her. However, she has spent a year working with this dog and finally she's got a breakthrough. I'm not saying it's going to be. Rosie from here on out, they are still going to struggle because he has got some serious ideas of how things need to be done.
As I said, full disclosure, I would have rehomed that dog to go to a home where he could be trained as a military working dog or a police dog would not have continued with that dog. Um, but full marks to the owner who loved her dog enough. To not only get help, and I couldn't go near this dog, she had to do it all herself with my guidance, um, and I got Charlotte Moore, um, from Perth, Australia, who is studying neuroscience, and we bounce ideas off each other all the time, I got her involved to help this team as well, and without this, the teamwork for this dog, we would not have got here. Now, personally, as I said, not a dog I would continue with, not because I don't want to save the dog, not because I want to give up on the dog, but simply because I know how quickly you can screw up with these dogs, and I'd rather send this dog to somebody who has got a better handle on these types of dogs.
So, I'm not saying you should continue with a dog who is hurting you and your family. However, I am saying to you That if you love your dog and if you are prepared to put the work in and if you are prepared to make the changes you need to make, you may be able to conquer your dog's behavior challenges.
You may learn how to change you. So that you can be the owner your dog needs to become the dog that they can be. So I hope this motivates you. I hope this helps you. I hope that this gives you the motivation to bring out that power of love. And that it helps you realize that love is not enough and you can't love a dog with challenging behaviors.
Well, because you, you just can't over mothering a dog is just as bad as being too much of a dictator. Nobody thrives in that kind of environment. Anyway, happy training. I hope this episode helps you and I'm looking forward to catching up with you in the next episode.
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Luzelle the Dog Trainer & The Chompy Malinois