05/09/2026
The best feeling yesterday. Amby and his owner who im helping through his reactivity to dogs managed a calm loose walk with meadow without a single reaction towards her, multiple sniffs, building friendship and trust. Most importantly adding to his bucket of good experiences to help him feel more positive in future 🥰.
The previous session before this we had made really good progress, however the final sniffing phase had seem Amby get spooked by meadows movement. Today we made sure Amby expected the unexpected by asking meadow for a whole range of exciting behaviours while Amby worked on switching from 'obedience mode' to 'relaxed mode'. We gave amby the opportunity to make his own mind up and feel relaxed.
We were rewarded by a lovely parallel walk. Weve still a way to go with Amby as we need to now work on ignoring dogs that we aren't going to attempt to be social with and how we reduce the time needed for calm interactions with both the friends he's making and new relaxed dogs he may meet out on walks. This boy is social so staying away from other dogs isn't the answer once he's made a friend he really rather enjoys them 🥰.
We already know a huge amount about Amby as his owner is so fantastic with information gathering. I'm super excited to see where we get to with this boy as I feel he's already becoming such a different version of himself 🥰.
Once again another job I couldn't manage without my beautiful meadow ❤️.
Building on lead meeting skills is often hard for young dogs, but it is exactly that, a skill that we need to train as we live in a busy area. Our dogs need to know we either ignore or say hello when we give permission. Its the safest way to handle this, particularly when your dog has big emotions.