Silly Sheltie Stuff

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My handsome perpetual puppy

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Nova and Lucky did the Disc Thing yesterday! I sat out because Broken Finger Things and took photos (which probably hurt more than doing the Disc Thing would have, lol)

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Ellie can be stupid photogenic. Also very judgmental.

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I’m hungry, but I guess I’ll starve. 😂

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Do you guys lightheartedly threaten your dogs? On our morning walk Kel wouldn’t walk home so I told her “if you won’t get walking I’ll sell you on eBay!” Obviously I would never but a woman went mental at me! Yesterday I threatened to sell Pod to the takeaway, I tell Kel I’d make her into a curry all the time or my personal favorite is I will return you to the dogs home and get bunnies!!

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All the time. “I’ll beat you,” “we’re sending you back to the breeder,” “we’re taking you to be spayed/neutered again,” are my top dog threats. Scuzzy cat hears, “I will end you,” and, “we’re never feeding you again,” like 50 times a day. We also threaten to eat everyone any time we’re deciding on a meal.

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I like to tell Ellie I’m going to punt her to Mars if she doesn’t behave! It usually comes with a few permutations. “If you bark, I’ll punt you to Mars so fast you won’t even make orbit!” “Sass me again, young lady, and I’ll punt you to Mars.” She usually gives me a smile and a tail wag in response. 

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Husband and I decided that we need to really work on raising Ellie’s threshold to help curtail her reactivity. At the moment, basically anything outside of our house is really stimulating for her. (Heck, her barrier frustration even makes it hard to open the door sometimes.) :/ Once she trips over her threshold, which never seems to take long, it’s nearly impossible to get her to come back down even with treats and luring.

We’re hoping to follow some of kikopup’s videos and teach her to be calm as a more default state, and then we’re going to try adding in distractions via hanging out in our backyard, where some (but not all) of Ellie’s most triggering stimuli lives, and then hopefully graduate up to the front yard and walks. We’re also going to work on teaching her to come down on her own once she gets excited, and going to a place on command.

We’ll still be continuing to go to Treibball training and having our other trainer come to us and help us work with her, but in the interim, we need to work on teaching her that “chilled out” should be a default state, rather than “omg hyperactive LOOK. AT. ALL. THE. THINGS”.

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About this Blog

This is a side blog dedicated to training a silly Sheltie dog named Ellie. She’s leash reactive and barrier frustrated, and my husband and I are two somewhat frazzled dog parents trying to do what’s best for her. 

+R training is our main goal. As is getting Ellie to a point where she’s less reactive. (She’s a very different dog in the safe confines of our house than she is out and about, and we’d like her to be the happy dog we know her to be as often as possible!)

She broke one of her back legs when she was just a few months old, and the recovery and rehab period for that injury (as well as the drama that followed, including an implant shifting during the healing process, its ultimate removal, a massive sac of post-operative fluids that leaked out of the suture site on a regular basis, and more trips to the vet than I can count) have set her back in terms of socialization. Our hope is to work her back up to where she should be, slowly and carefully, while also accounting for her reactivity and barrier frustration.