working through your problems

When a dog has an issue, whether it's with the box, with recalls, passing, whatever, there are several ways that clubs handle it. Some clubs ignore the problem and hope it will work itself out in time. Other clubs remove the object of the problem altogether. Some clubs devise creative work-arounds to the problems. What we like to do is to work through the problem. Here's an example of how we do this:

Chantel handles and trains Pickles. Pickles is your typical Jack - lots of energy, spunky, and highly distracted. The biggest challenge for Pickles has been to work with Chantel rather than running to Grace for approval. In the past to get any real progress out of Pickles, Grace had to leave the building. We decided to work through this issue and have been actively involving Grace in Pickles' training. Chantel is still the handler, but Grace has a definite role. In this video, Pickles is doing a drive drill to the box. You can see Chantel is running along side. What you can't see is that Grace is holding her for the drill.



Since we started doing this drill Pickles has shown a lot of improvement. We hope that by tackling the problem head on that we'll be able to advance in other areas of Pickles' training and this problem will no longer be an issue. Great work Chantel and Grace!!