Firstly I must apologize for being over a week late with this post, but we’ve been busy getting ready for the holidays and finishing up everything that needed to be done this time of year.

We celebrated Wellie’s 2nd birthday this month and I made her a snazzy hat as well as amped up a few of her muffins to be some delicious pupcakes. I added bananas and extra blueberries (Wellie’s fave!) and of course, peanut butter icing. The dogs obviously LOVED them and ate them up probably a bit too fast!

We had some setbacks this month and I think it may have had something to do with the fact that Wellie was given up this time last year. She was given up on December 6th, three days before her 1st birthday in 2010. She remained at Animatch for three months before we brought her home and I think this time of year may have brought some feelings of stress and maybe even fears of abandonment back. I’m not sure what triggered them, but she ended up reverting back and was being really bad – peeing inside again, beating up Paddington, barking at everything, getting into things and the list went on. I’ll be honest, it was really tough for us as well and we were wondering what we did wrong.

We soldiered through and decided to tackle the housetraining issues with putting a bell on a string on the back door so she could tell us when she wanted to go out. The problem was that she was barking downstairs while we were upstairs and we thought it was just her barking at random things, but it was actually her telling us she wanted to go out. Not wanting to encourage the barking, we thought the bells may be a better alternative. And boy were we RIGHT!

Wellie, the smartypants that she is, only took 30 minutes to learn how to use them. Each time we let her out, we would take her paw and hit the bells and say “outside”. She figured it out so quickly and we haven’t had an accident inside since we put them up! Continue reading →

What a great month we’ve had! Wellie has grown into such a sweetheart.

On the housetraining front, I am very happy to report that she hasn’t had any accidents in our house since month 8! She did have two accidents at my in-law’s house but it was probably because we weren’t reading her signals correctly, so that’s our bad.

At home, she has been asking to go out to pee and poop – even when it’s raining! Every time she asks to go out and actually does something, my heart swells with pride – so proud of her!

In the past three weeks we’ve also made another leap forward in that Wellie is ok with being outside in the back yard without one of us standing at the back door. I am convinced that in her previous life, her owners must have left her outside for a long time because she was very self conscious about being left outside. Now she has gained the confidence to explore – even if Paddington and Corduroy don’t go out with her! We never leave the dogs outside for long, only as long as they want to be out there and ask to come back in, but this is great because I know it means she is getting more confident.

In terms of crate training, we are still using the crate overnight and once again in the morning after breakfast, but that’s it. She still is crated when we leave the house and will be for a while longer. She doesn’t mind being in there, and with me working from home, there is usually someone here with her anyways.

In the past month, Wellie has also calmed down quite a bit. She is more relaxed and more willing to play on her own. It’s so lovely and again, I am so proud of her.

One hilarious thing that happened this past week was so funny, I just have to tell you about it. I caught a bad cold last week and have been feeling down and out. I was drawing a bath for myself and as the tub filled, I went to check my email. A few minutes later I went back to see the progress of how it was filling and I found Wellie IN the tub! She had jumped right in to the tub filled with water and was playing around. It was so funny, I grabbed my camera and we had a little session. I then took her out and let her outside because she usually has to go to the bathroom after her bath….she then got REALLY muddy and I had to put her BACK into the tub to wash her off. I dried her off again and emptied the tub, and she jumped BACK in to play more! It was so hilarious!! I have never had a dog who actually LIKED baths! Please enjoy the images from her adventure.

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I can’t believe it’s been six months since we brought Wellie home from Animatch and she became a part of our family.

This has been a good month. The dogs have finally settling into a routine of having me working from home and things are going well.

Initiating the routine for Wellie’s crating has been integral in her progress. It hasn’t been perfect, but she is so much better and we are feeling much more confident about her housetraining.

Every once and a while, Wellie regresses back and lets us know she’s unhappy about something – last week I was out the front speaking with my brother-in-law and Wellie peed in the front hallway because she was unhappy that I didn’t take her out there with me. Next time I’m speaking with someone outside, she’ll be outside, tethered to Thomas, or crated. We learn from our mistakes and move on!

We went to Toronto to visit with my parents this month and I’ve found that Wellie reverts back to her old self when we are in other people’s houses so we’ve been making sure to tether her at all times when she’s out of the crate. I made the mistake of letting her off at my parents house on a few occasions and she had two “accidents”. One was purely her letting me know she was mad, and the other she was playing around with Sonnet and she just stopped and pooped. I think maybe she didn’t realize how much she had to go.

Since we’ve been back home again we’ve been on track and there have been no accidents. We’ve even gone so far as to replace the rug in our living room, which we discovered after feeding some wires under it, that the dogs had been using it as a pee pad for goodness knows how long. Ew. We definitely rustled up some smells that day! Continue reading →

This week was full…really full. And not only was it full, but we had several ups and downs throughout the week.

Right after I published last week’s post, Wellie decided to have the stand off of all stand offs. I had spoken about how we bought the water guns and that they were working in helping us correct her behaviour, well what we didn’t realize was that it extended to water in general. She decided that water falling from the sky was also bad and she didn’t want anything to do with doing her business outside. Ugh.

That evening we knew she had to go to the bathroom and was just waiting to do it inside so we had a stand off…a 45 minute stand off in the pouring rain. It was warm out, so nobody got cold, but we definitely got wet! We wanted to end the experience on a a positive note so we made sure to wait until she went pee and then we were more excited than we’ve ever been. She still doesn’t love the rain, but she’ll go outside and do her business in it now…most of the time.

This week was Wellie’s first long car ride. A friend of mine from high school got married this weekend in Toronto and we brought the furry family along to my parent’s house for the occasion. I was so proud of her – she did fabulously. All three dogs travel in their crates when we travel and Paddington and Corduroy have always been amazing travellers. We were both so happy to discover that Wellie is as well! We gave her a bully stick to chew on and either she chewed on that or had a nap. She didn’t make a peep the whole time and waited patiently to have a pee stop midway through. We were both really proud of her. She was equally as good on the drive back yesterday as well.

When we arrived at my parent’s house, we were greeted by an ever growing Sonnet, who is 11 weeks old now and completely and utterly fearless. She was so excited to see Paddington, Corduroy and Wellington and she basically bugged them the entire time we were there. Wellie was pretty good about it and played with her the most out of the three dogs.

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Well I must say that this week was the best week we have had so far! After posting our week two update, I got some really good advice and tips and they have made the world of difference – mostly having to do with changing MY behaviour.

In the second week, I was really stressing about the three dogs’ relationships to each other. One reader pointed out that maybe the reasons for me being stressed out were on me, and not on the dogs. She was right. I was humanising my dogs’ emotions when really, they were just fine.

We have also changed tactics in regards to training. One reader pointed out that there are holes in the dominance theory and that there is a lot of documentation on the Dominance Myth. It’s actually very interesting and makes sense. One point they argue is that it is unfair to compare our domesticated dogs to wolves because they have been domesticated for so long that it just doesn’t make sense. It would be like asking a monkey for parenting advice.

Having looked into that I started to research into other methods of training and came across the amazing Ian Dunbar. I have featured his videos on the blog before and I ended up spending a whole afternoon watching some of his lectures. They are really captivating and if you have some time, I suggest you check them out. Another great resource is Dog Star Daily, which is a website filled with info by Dr. Dunbar.

Having said that, Dr. Dunbar teaches that we need to really focus on the positive to shape the appropriate behaviour. Thomas and I tried this and saw results immediately. It will be up to us to consciously make an effort to recognize and reward good behaviour constantly. Usually I would think to myself, wow the dogs are being good, and now I want to TELL them they are good. As I mentioned, this is going very well and we are so happy about it.

One thing that I’ve noticed this week is the relationship developing between Corduroy and Wellington. They are really starting to get along very well and I’ve even caught them snoozing together which I find adorable. I will be watching how their relationship grows over the next few weeks.

This past Sunday we went to Global Pet Foods in Hintonburg for a nail trim fundraiser for Bullies in Need. It was the first time Wellie had her nails trimmed with us and we discovered that she doesn’t like it. We suspect her previous owners didn’t touch her paws very much so we will be gently touching her paws over the next few weeks and praising her a lot for letting us do so.

We are still working on the house training, although the accidents are getting fewer and farther between. We have discovered that she LOVES her Kong stuff with a mixture of yogurt, peanut butter, bananas and honey and then frozen. She also loves her treat ball with blueberries in it! This is a ball with a hole in the end and she has to bat it around to get the blueberries to come out. She is very good at it and I recorded a video that you can see below. If you feed kibble, I know some people who feed their dogs their dinner using this. It’s amazing.

Watch a video of Wellie and her new treat ball Continue reading →