Good dog!

We’ve had a breakthrough with Bess’ training. We seem to be more in control of the ‘running up to dogs and barking’ thing. In fact we’ve managed to prevent it on three occasions! I bought a pet corrector, which is an aerosol containing compressed air. When you press it, it sounds like an angry hiss and a hiss is a noise which a lot of predators make. It interrupts the bad behaviour along with a command (such as leave or no) and eventually, you can just use the command without the corrector. We’ve also been using it on Pluto who barks when the boys go upstairs, or if people are too noisy when they go passed the house! We’ve been interrupting his behaviour and he’s a lot mellower as a result because he doesn’t feel he has to ‘guard’ us all the time!

If we can get Bess to stop opening the kitchen door at night so she can go and sleep on the sofa, we will have very well behaved dogs indeed.

There’s still work to do but we’re heading in the right direction!