Our Australian Shepard, Blue completed a three week board and train a week ago with Chelsea!
She is amazing and does such great work!
We got Blue when he was 8 weeks old and started working with him from day one. He never seemed afraid of anyone, he just didn’t care about anyone outside of our LARGE family!
He was well socialized and was exposed to everything! We worked with purely positive training and thought we could work him through anything with praise, redirection and lots of conditioning!
As time went on he became reactive towards people, especially children. Even though we have five of our own and he showed no aggression to them. He also was very nippy and would nip us in the face when excited!
Blue ended up biting one adult and nipped at several children! He never broke skin, but we knew if we didn’t find a solution soon we would have to rehome him.
I saw a friend who posted about PUPS and the tools she uses to help rehab and train them. This opened my mind to balanced training! I learned that rewarding the behavior you want and correcting the behavior you don’t want gives a clear message to the dog and helps them to feel more confident.
Also having structure for your dogs, makes life much easier for you and your dogs.
Not only is Chelsea training the dogs, she is training us, as the owner, how to be successful at home after she has put in the time to create a foundation for the dogs! She gave me a lot of resources to watch and read so I would know how to continue the work she has done.
While Blue was away, we were able to see updates and videos of his progress! Since having him back we have seen such a big difference! He is no longer reactive when people come to our house. He is able to politely greet them and then go back to place or free roam depending the situation. His obedience is amazing, Chelsea was able to get him to a level in his obedience commands that I wasn’t able to do in the nine months I had been working with him!
I recommend Chelsea to anyone struggling with a reactive dog or someone just wanting to start off with balanced training and give their dog clear expectations.
