Great to read this, well done on persevering with this kind and understanding approach. I am sure it going to pay off in heaps. She is a lucky girl Our lab is also absolutely child crazy, she loves them so much.
Another UPDATE. Yesterday I took her to pickup my son at middle school and arrived early. I put her on the leash and walked her up and down the grass area. She was exploring and loving it. The beauty part with her never being on a leash before is I can train her the right away. She doesn't lead, she goes where I want her to go and I never put pressure on the leash. She is doing so well, I'm so happy for her. Saturday she gets the remainder of her shots and she can finally go outside for a real walk where other dogs will be. My cousin comes over every Sunday for football and she brings Madison her French Bulldog puppy. The last 2 weeks she hasn't been over but this weekend Madison can finally meet Shelby. Now I just have to train my youngest son on how to handle her, she rolls over him and bites him constantly. His tone doesn't change so she doesn't understand. Going to work on this tonight. Thanks for reading this.
Loving the updates, please keep them coming - some days will be a little more difficult but writing about it and sharing is so good.
UPDATE I took her outside out front on the leash, she did okay. It might have been audio overload and she wanted to sniff everything so we didn't get to far. She saw people never seen before, other dogs walking by and probably too much for her in one setting. My neighborhood is dog heaven, everyone has a dog. Also last night she was bad, she tore up my sons rug...very small area but she's been busted before and normally has avoided going back. Then she started to bite everyone and beg for food which she never does. We set a boundary which she was respectful at first to stay there (was waiting for my son to finish eating) when she barked at me. I was shocked. This is the first time she's barked. I distracted her by taking her out to potty and threw the tennis ball around for awhile. Then she went back to herself and chilled out with everyone around. Seems she wanted to press my buttons right in front of me. No worries, I have patience.
UPDATE We picked up my son again and I walked her for 40 minutes on the leash, no pulling, same side, she did so great. I took her on the leash to PetCo and she loved it! It was smell overload, she didn't know where to go or what to do. Tail wagging, other dogs there but no interaction yet. We got her favorite treats, running low. Then my son had an episode at church so we had to pick him up. I decided to take her with us in the car, she fell asleep of course. Big SUV with the wheel noise and she's out. We played ball when we got home. She's giving me a hard time coming inside the house now, she wants to explore. She's not biting the items in the house as much but she's still going after my youngest son. He's finally started to change his tone. This morning it was better.
You are definitely making progress. What I like is that you are interacting with her a lot, taking her places with you. IMHO that is incredibly important. It is one thing to take an hour or so a day to "train" a dog and use various "tools" (like treats, clickers) to elicit responses. But, if the dog spends a lot of time with you they figure out what you want from observing you. After a while it seems like they know what you want before you do. That is what I call a "connected" dog rather than a "trained" dog.
I don't want to hijack this great thread (and I will post a thread with some of this in it later). But. An example of what I mean is what happened yesterday. It was Murphy's first time at a dog park. I will skip the blow by blow replay cause it was all good. When we got ready to leave, we did not call Murphy. He was out playing quite a distance from us. He saw us heading for the entrance and he came over by us. Then he got in front and walked over to the gate and waited for us to hook up the leash again. Nobody said anything to him. He just knew we were going somewhere and he needed to go along. Then he understood that we were going to the gate. This is precisely the dog we always wanted. Not a "velcro dog" but one who knows what we do and does not require explicit commands. Ok, time to write the other post...if anyone has any comments, let's do it over there so we do not wreck the flow of this thread. This is all good stuff!
Lovely! You have just prescribed the perfect relationship one can have with your dog, based on trust, harmony and making the best choices because they can
UPDATE The entire leash issue has been fixed. Just patience really paying off. Started with putting leashes everywhere, by her bowl while eating, had one in her crate where she sleeps, mixed in with her toys, etc. She now loves the leash especially the retractable because I'll take her everywhere and she gets to explore. I taught her to sit down when other people or other dogs come by. She just sits there waiting for me to tell her to move. She got to meet her cousin Madison the French Bulldog puppy and at first very odd. Shelby wouldn't move but then after a few minutes got really jealous. If I petted Madison then Shelby would put herself in between. She was jealous with everyone, she didn't want people to pet Madison, only her. After 45 minutes Madison was still full of energy and I could see Shelby getting annoyed to the point she went in her crate to lay down. Madison entered her crate and the biting started. Shelby kept chasing her away, very territorial. We tried distracting them with toys but Shelby was being greedy with all of them not letting Madison have any. We put the toys away. They licked the crap out of there faces for another hour but Madison was still going and Shelby again wanted to chill. Madison left and Shelby was out like a light the entire night. Madison will come over every Sunday and I'm sure they will get along after time.
