I know a lot of you probably aren't interested in learning about Puppies or how things are going with Lylah but to be honest, that is what my life is filled with now. Puppy training, little sleep, and lots of love for this little creature I took in. So if this is something that you guys aren't interested or don't want to read feel free to skip this article.
Lylah is a mix of three very intelligent breeds. So as you can imagine her training has to be taken very seriously. Mishaps can happen and if they do then you get a dog that turns into this crazy beast. The dog never listens, thinks they are the alpha, and never dow hat you want them to do. It's especially hard when you have kids or when the dog meets other people. You try to warn them, be the in-between person but it never really works out well. Maybe you want a dog that will run with you but because you weren't strict enough or you didn't take training seriously enough the dog ends up pulling you into the concrete and you hurt yourself terribly. You get frustrated and end up hurting not only your pride as a dog owner but also enforcing that its ok to do that to you.
There are so many different ways to train and I have been studying so many videos and reading so many blogs to try and learn what the right way and wrong way is to train. It's difficult picking what those are.
Lylah has gotten comfortable with me so she has hit he rebellious five-year-old stage where not only does she know what I am saying but she doesn't do it without a little bit of reinforcement. It can be challenging and I must admit that there are times when I get frustrated and go to the normal "No that's not a good thing" Idealism of training. I will say this. With puppies, it doesn't work. I've been learning that with Lylah and its hard to break the habit of going back to those standards that most of us know. ITs a work in progress for us both and it honestly takes so much restraint to get that down.
Right now we are working on leash training/pulling. Lylah has a habit of randomly stopping when there is a noise, car, person, or another animal. She doesn't quite get that you have to keep going and ignore the distractions. She also has started to choke herself a little bit when we walk together and that in itself is a bad sign. If I don't stop the pulling now then that could translate later in life that it's ok to pull and when she's full-grown she literally will pull me down the sidewalk.
In the long term, I am going to do what I can to train her to the best of my ability but at six months I'm gonna enroll her in a private training course to refine her training and to make sure that she will actually do what she is told. Do any of you guys have a puppy and how is the training going?
