What a difference a day makes! I have to tell you all about this, about how different my training was on Thursday after our victorious day Wednesday! I have been doing this job long enough to know now that if I have a big up with a dog or dogs there can only be a big crash fairly soon after! 🙂 Thankfully, though Sue and Alex were present from Wednesday with Nessa and Tilly neither of their dogs were involved!
Thursday morning is group class morning, a regular group generally, but this week we had two new members, Gill with Fergal and Matt and Bella, both Border Terriers. Our fifth class member is Tracey with Ella a Welsh Terrier. Tracey had brought Ella training as she has a big problem with Ella with two Border Terriers in her village, one of them bit Ella as a puppy, as a result Ella has never forgiven them and kicks off the minute she sees them on walks! Tracey and I have worked on her technique and now Tracey can get round the village and see these dogs and Tracey is able to keep Ella’s attention on her, so things have been going well!
But now we had two of the offending breed in her class, oh dear Ella was not pleased! She particularly took a dislike to Fergal, the boy Border, which is interesting as it was the boy Border in her village that had bitten her. Fergal was not to happy about being the focus of Ella’s dislike and was not afraid to answer her back. Over the first part of the class I had both Tracey and Gill working their dogs with some good heelwork at opposite ends of the garden and they appeared to be settling, Tracey disappeared round the corner of the patio for a moment when I heard her shouting “lead” or that is all I heard, I ran to get in front of Fergal, knowing that would be Ella’s first port of call, (I am quick at these moments 🙂 ) as Ella appeared, trailing her lead, minus Tracey, I threw myself at her and did my best impression of a scarey human, she was not detered for a second and rocketed toward Fergal!
Gill was great and as Ella ran in on Fergal, managed to grab her leg, I grabbed the lead and yanked Ella away, the dogs only made enough contact for us to hear the start of fighting noises, just enough to know their were not going to get along, which they had already made clear at a distance! It was all over very quickly, though I have to say all our hearts were racing and we were all very distressed! Poor Tracey most of all, she had tripped over which is how she had lost hold of Ella, and was now going to blame herself for scaring us all! Even though it was an accident that could have happened to anyone, what was great is that she had enough presence of mind to warn us all so that we were ready to take action! Ella is one brave dog, not many dogs are brave enough to come past me in full scarey mode!