First post so here goes. I have a lovely Labrador pup he is good with nearly everything walks well, behaves at home, his problem is other dogs and kids with balls! I've taken him to training classes and he was very good at first, but now (he's six months next week ) all he wants to do at training classes is play with the other dogs or bark and howl ( he rarely barks at home) also walking, he has started pulling and barking and leaping and howling if he sees kids especially if they are playing football, then I have a mad dog on my hands! Is this normal?
Hi Steve and welcome to the forum. It sounds like he's a perfectly normal Labrador puppy to me! My boy, Shadow, loves balls and would go a bit nutso when he saw anyone playing with them. All of the issues you've talked about come back to the same thing - impulse control. He needs to learn that doing the things he's doing doesn't work, and that staying calm gets rewarded. Do you clicker train? I'd highly recommend it for this sort of thing. Here's an article that describes it in some detail - do follow the links to read more about it. http://www.thelabradorsite.com/clicker-training-whats-it-all-about/ So, with the clicker training approach, I'd stand a long way from someone with a ball. Click him for looking at it. He'll turn to you for a treat. Repeat this a few times - every time he looks, he gets a C&T. Once you've done this a few times and he understands the game, you can withhold the click. You should find that he looks at you in an "Oi! Where's my click?!" kind of way. As he looks away from the ball towards you, you C&T. So, you've now moved on for rewarding him for registering, but then ignoring the ball. Over several sessions, you can get gradually closer, introduce movement (the person bouncing the ball, kicking it between two people etc), but every time you make one thing more difficult (ie introducing movement), make everything else easier again (ie move farther away). You can use the same approach for learning to ignore other dogs, and for rewarding calm behaviour.
Thanks for that and I will certainly give it a try, having had dogs before but never a lab its certainly a steep learning curve! Can I just say I think this forum is a great help to new owners especially as to what is 'normal' and what isn't. Thanks
