Introduction

Do you have a dog? Do you experience training challenges with your dog? Does your dog do unwelcome behaviours? Do you want a better behaved dog?

The answer to all these questions for me is a resounding YES!

We have a 9 month old male German Shepherd named Jake. We've had him since he was 8 weeks old and I'm not afraid to admit that we have made some mistakes along the way.

When we got him, we focused on doing some basic obedience training ourselves at home. We made the decision to skip obedience classes and admittedly we are paying the price for that decision. Jake is now a 70 pound dog that rules our house. Being that it is mid-November, it's too late to enrol in an obedience  class. The next round of classes don't start until January. In the mean time, we have issues that we need to start working on now. We could enlist the help of a trainer and take private lessons, but Jake's issues are not severe and if we start now I believe we can start addressing some of the issues ourselves at home.

I wanted to start this blog to document the sources of information and steps taken in beginning to train Jake. I'll document the issues I'm trying to resolve, the methods used to try and solve them and successes and failures.

Hopefully there will be some people out there that will find what I'm doing interesting and maybe learn something along with me.