Ellie will be 12 weeks on Monday. I can't believe we've had her half her life now. It's been a rough road but I believe we are FINALLY on the correct path. And, when I say, we, I mean the humans in my house. Having a Lab puppy has been a huge learning curve and I've tried various things to train her and what I've found is that she does well in one area (say obeying commands) then her house training regresses. Housetraining going well, then she regresses in chewing/biting/obeying. It's been baffling me and I've spent the last 6 weeks trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong... and then figuring out how to fix it. First things first, the biting has to stop... and she still does that attack-like bite. I decided to try the clicker training. HUGE success!!!! I only started it this morning and already there's HUGE improvement! HUGE! She's biting less and amazingly, since I started, she's consistently gone on the wee pads. Housetraining regressed to the point that she would sometimes go on the pad and sometimes not. After I started the clicker training this morning, she's only gone on the pads! I'm so happy I cannot even say. We had concerns that she might be aggressive because she would bite like attacking us sometimes and we worried about that. She did well with other training though like sitting, come, drop it, stay. So I knew that she is capable and that we were doing something wrong or doing something that simply wasn't working for her. The clicker training seems to be it. yay! Lisa
Re: Ellie update Well done! Great to hear Often puppies (and dogs) don't do what we want them to do because they don't understand what we want. We think we've been clear, but we haven't. A clicker is great because it's a special sound, just for them, that has no other meaning than "you're getting a treat for doing that!". It's a language they can understand, and we can use it to be better communicators.
