07/29/2025
I was happy to work with 3 sweet little last week; Daisy, a , and Bella and Bentley, both dogs. Daisy is 9 months old and has never been able to be fully . In the past few months, Bella and Bentley have started marking in the house even though they were previously housetrained. They had tried many things to fix the problem but had been unsuccessful so they called for help. Very often it isn't just putting actual housetraining techniques into place, but putting rules into place, especially due to the . Marking is a dominance issue. Bella and Bentley had not "lost their housetraining", they were marking. And yes, females can mark also. The dogs basically had no rules and got everything they asked for, so the dogs were in charge of the household in their minds. This definitely had a hand in causing the marking. They also couldn't watch the dogs 24/7 and they had never kenneled the dogs. Part of the time they were pottying in the house at night when the owners were asleep. Changes needed to happen. We talked at length about how dogs communicated and how we would use that to train the dogs, using and . They would use 3 different voice tones to communicate with the dogs. They would also initiate the attention with the dogs, showing leadership. We talked about, and worked on exercises to show the dogs the owners could be good leaders for them. Changes were evident almost as soon as we started working with them. The dogs understood it quickly because the owners were . They will need to be consistent but the will follow them and they will have help when they need it. It was fun working with this family! I will be looking forward to the two week follow up!