Meet Tammy!
It all started when…
Over the last 7 years, I have been hearing stories from owners about their dogs. These owners are at their wits end trying to find a solution to their issues. Some of them are so close to giving up! Most of them have been through all the training classes out there. Well I can tell you I started that way too!
For me it all started with my first German Shepherd. I had always wanted that to be my first dog. I named her Patches because I had always LOVED that name. We did obedience training and I began to notice her having problems with new dogs…. dogs she didn’t know. At this point I had no idea about drive and how to channel it!
So what does unchanneled drive get you?
Yes problem behaviors… My first dog was dog aggressive. In my mind I was shocked how does that happen? She had never had a bad experience with a dog that I knew of. We went on with life just keeping her away from dogs and as she aged her aggression became less but not fixed with every training I tried. I decided that maybe it was temperament or the way she was born… When Patches was about 7 she allowed us to get a second dog because it was a puppy. We adopted a Siberian Husky and boy was he the opposite of Patches. Full of energy and would play with toys for hours by himself, running around the house. He came with different problem behaviors… At 9 weeks he was guarding bones and by 12 weeks he was shredding everything in site. This was crazy to me then but I now know this was because he needed to be polar opposite of Patches, the dog already present in the home.
So interesting!!
Again we did training and tried to tucker him out so that he wouldn’t shred everything in site and some times it would work but other times it didn’t. This left me puzzled and confused, I figured I had to be missing something. indeed there was but it took me years more and another dog to really find it! So eventually Dakoda the husky grew up and stopped shredding everything in site but still he had that guarding problem… We managed it and crated him while he had bones but it still nagged at my soul. Why? why the guarding, the dog aggression with seemingly no cause? Patches passed away at age 9 with a cancerous heart tumor and we lost her really fast. This left my heart ripped open and I had this deep desire to have another German Shepherd puppy.
This time I was going to get it right!
I did my research picked a “perfect” breeder. Visited that breeder saw the parents and they had great temperament. I thought I nailed it this time. We ended up bring her home in January. She was perfect. She played with Dakoda and my brother dog, because I was determined not to make the mistake of not socializing. Everything was fine she was a little push with dogs but the dogs she was around seemed to handle it well. or so I thought. At 6 months of age we were in a training class, Mackenziee and this other dog in the class clearly had issues with each other. It was fine I kept her away but it was clear things were not perfect. This was the beginning of her dog aggression.
You say what Dog… aggression again? How?
This was the answer I set out to find. How do normally functioning dogs manifest these behavior problems? and why do the surface? how do I prevent them? When I tell you I tried every training out there I did. They all left me with holes in the theory of why? Until I found Natural Dog Training. This model changed my life. I felt so strongly about it that I began to take on shelter dogs and rehab them. I know your like you can fix it? YES with dedication of exercising the core exercises with your dog, and allowing them to express their deepest darkest junk we can fix it! But we don’t want to fix problem dogs we want to prevent them!! We look forward to meeting you and your dog. See you soon.
