Bingo: Good for the Self Esteem

Saturday night I received an email from a gal who said she had just become a puppy raiser and she lived in our neighborhood. Did I remember Princess from the last meeting?

Princess: yellow lab, 7 months old, a finisher as the older lady who had her decided she was too much to care for and gave her back and Stephanie bravely stepped forward to grab her leash. I picked up the phone right away and scheduled a play date for the following morning.

Fortunately for me, I was a veteran of three of Jennifer's SEGD obedience classes and so I had a fairly large repertoire of distraction exercises to run through. We started with the one where you walk toward to the other dog with the intention of passing them. If the dog is going to lunge, then you do a right about and go back and begin again. You do this until they can pass without lunging. We did this for about five minutes with Bingo and Princess both lunging quite athletically at each other and having to be yanked back inline and corrected, turned around and taken back to the beginning. After a while, Stephanie looked over at me and said, "I feel so much better!"

Yep. That's my Bingo. He's an esteem builder.

We continued to work the exercise taking periodic timeouts by doing doggie pushups to engage them even more, until, finally, we achieved boredom! They walked by each other.

We went out and did it again today, and within a few minutes we had achieved boredom. We even managed a long walk side by side!