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Heh, well the guy at the pet store said the day after we adopted him, within the next month or so the true dog will come out, and I think that’s happened, lol. When we first got him home he never made a peep, even though black mouth curs are supposed to be quite vocal. And he’s still pretty quiet, but he’ll bark more at passing pedestrians from behind our fence, and at the cat if he finishes his food first, and he still growls and lunges at pretty much any other dog that comes too close. But most of the time he just follows us around or looks kind of bored, waiting for us to play with him or go for a walk, which we try to do a lot of.
Last night he was probably the most difficult yet. We got him a nice bed for the living room in addition to his crate in the bedroom, but now he doesn’t want to sleep in the crate, so when we fenced off that section of the house he started going after shoes and blankets and making a general nuisance of himself. I eventually locked him the crate for the night, which I have mixed feelings about; I don’t want him to think of the crate as punishment, but at a certain point he’s gotta do what we say. He even growled at me briefly when I tried to handle his paws, which was a first. Should be interesting when I try to cut his nails.
One question I’ve had is whether I need to have him doing all the phase one commands in order with high success rates before moving on to phase two. I feel like without many corrections he may not have enough structure, and this may be contributing to somewhat bratty behavior at night (grabbing any sock, shoe, blanket within reach, jumping up on the bed, etc.). Also do I have to go in order with respect to fading off hand signals and moving to a variable reward schedule, adding in extended stay, or can those overlap?
I just did a much stricter walk than we usually do, giving him little leash tugs when he got to far ahead or behind and when he didn’t stop with me at crosswalks. He seemed to be in a much better state of mind by the end of it.
On the plus side, he’s pretty good at sitting with a bit of extended stay, I’m slowly fading off the hand signal on the down. Got him coming pretty consistently. Next we’ll do place and climb and we’ll be getting somewhere! Also did some crate training today to make him a little more eager to get in there.
Also got one of those starmark collars, but even 21 inch seemed to be too tight (he’s got a beefy neck), so I ordered some links for it today.
