Thunder's greetings are mostly very good. She occasionally messes up (like first thing in the morning when she's oh so excited to see me or when visitors unexpectedly arrive before I am prepared) but that's very normal for a puppy. We're practicing being more excited when we greet her so she'll be more prepared when someone exciting comes along. The Gentle Leader will help with this too.
Anytime her excitement is over the top or she is really distracted, the Gentle Leader can help control her a bit. It is not a substitute for training. It's just a tool to use while in the training process. It helps because it gives you more control over her head and, where ever the head goes, the body will follow.
She was so cute today when I got her head halter out. We've been feeding with it on every day so she's started to have nice warm and fuzzy feelings about it. I caught her eye while she was playing ball with the other dogs...
And she trotted over and stuck her nose through the loop before I was prepared for her. Silly girl...
We've just started attaching the leash to the Gentle Leader and walking for short distances with it. It's funny, I acclimated dogs to head halters all the time so I don't think much of it but, when doing it for Thunder, I realized it really did take some patience. So many people just put it on the dog, the dog panics and tries to get it off, and the owner gives up. But we've spent almost two weeks just getting her ready for me to clip a leash to it.
She still tries to paw it every once in a while but mostly she is very accepting of it.
She is happy to walk with it and I reward her periodically just like a I do in our normal training sessions.
She's working on automatically sitting when I come to a stop. This helps her to stay in a little bit better control and helps her to pay attention to what I am doing.
Now she's starting to get the hang of it. We do short training sessions so we can end on a positive note. It won't be long before we can start using it in more distracting situations.
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