Mastering the Walk

I promise my blog is not going to become all dog all the time, but Jin's the most exciting thing in my life at the moment so you'll have to bear with me for a few more entries :).

Jin's kind of a lazy dog. He follows me from room to room and then plops down and stares at nothing in particular. This does not make him very photogenic. I've been trying hard to get a more active picture of him so that you can see his personality, but every picture I take makes him look like he's bored or sleepy, or maybe even dead. I'm working on it :).

This does not mean he's a boring dog, by any means. He's incredibly affectionate. He won Ashley over completely when she went to pet him and he suddenly flopped down right onto her lap. He'll nuzzle up to you, curl up at your feet, roll over for you to pet his stomach. And once you get him outside, his energy surfaces.

I have some ground rules for the dog. No furniture (that's Ashley's rule since most of the furniture is hers). No lingering around the kitchen table if someone's eating there. No leaving the house in front of me or coming in before I do. I think Kelsey thinks I'm being a little bit of a dog Nazi, but I think it's really important to establish the rules so that the dog knows from the beginning what the bounds are, and doesn't get confused.

The biggest thing that I've been working on is the walk, a la Cesar Millan. The goal is to get Jin to walk next to me instead of pulling in front. It's taking some work. You might not know it around the house, but he has a will of his own, and he's very strong. But every time he begins pulling we stop and I tighten my grip on the leash (the leash I'm using has a loop right above the collar). If I loosen my grip and he strains forward even a little, I pull back again and we stay put until he's relaxed. Once he's relaxed we move forward again, but if he starts straining again I stop immediately. I have to admit that this has made it slow going occasionally, but he's clearly learning. On our walk this morning he walked very, very well almost the entire time, and we even ran a bit. He stayed with me very well and I think he's going to be a great running dog.

He was doing so well this morning, in fact, that I began to think that I wasn't going to need to go out and buy him a training collar (or choke collar, but that doesn't sound as nice) after all. That's what they've been using at the Humane Society for him, and he walks very well with one on. But I was feeling a bit cocky this morning. He's a strong dog and so I understand their use of the training collar, but clearly I know what I'm doing as a dog walker and I can keep him from dragging me around by sheer force of my "calm assertive energy".

And then we encountered a rabbit. And all the calm assertive energy I could muster was no match for the rabbit. Or Jin, who is a gentle dog but not a small dog. Now we have a training collar. But he's doing better and better every time we go out for a walk.