Sibling Stories Part 1: Doubling Your Dogs & Overcoming the Training Struggles that Follow
Left-to-right- Leela, Seven, Hyzer
By Andrea Bakeberg
This is the first blog post of several related to the trials and lessons learned while raising two adopted female littermates. I will be covering a variety of topics and sharing resources. I will also be imparting some wisdom about things I wish someone would have told me so I didn’t have to learn them the hard way.
In 2019, my husband and I were looking into adopting a third dog as we had a Great Dane, Brewzur, who was getting on in years, and we wanted to have another dog to keep our Border Collie/Blue Heeler mix, Hyzer, company once Brewzur was no longer with us. We had adopted both of our dogs through friends, and we had a cat that we had adopted through the Western Hills Humane Society in Spearfish, so we were only considering adoption for our new family member.
When looking online, I came across two female littermates that a rescue in Nebraska was trying to keep together. They had come into the rescue at 6 months old and had been fostered together for about 5 months. They were Italian Greyhound/Xoloitzcuintle (abbreviated Xolo and commonly referred to as Mexican hairless) mixes, so I did a little research on the breeds. I was drawn to adopt these two dogs as I didn’t think many people would consider adopting two dogs, and they were listed as not being good with children. Since we didn’t have kids and had no plans to have children, I felt that we were the right family for them
I filled out the long adoption application, was asked to submit a video of our home and yard, and drove to Nebraska a couple weeks later to pick up our new family members. After bringing them home, we learned the issue with bringing two dogs into your house at the same time is that it seemed to undo much of the training we had already done with our existing dogs. We struggled for several months trying to re-train our two males that learned new things they could get away with while trying to get our two females up to speed on their training. We simply did not have the dog handling skills for the task.
I became so frustrated I started looking at options for getting professional help. I found a dog behaviorist in our area, but she was going to charge $700 to come once to our house, which I wasn’t willing/able to pay. I ended up learning about a group dog training class led by Tracy Kobberdahl who owns Kobberdahl K9. I wasn’t able to get both of our females into the class as the time conflicted with my husband’s work schedule, but I signed up and took our dog Seven.
I learned some basic dog handling skills that were very helpful. Here are several you can try with your dog:
Leash Handling
Hold your dog leash in two hands. The hand closest to the dog holds the leash loosely and the other holds the handle of the leash. This allows you to easily shorten and lengthen the leash to have more control over where your dog goes.
Teaching the “Sit”
When teaching your dog to sit. Say “sit” and pull up on the leash straight over the dog’s head and say “sit” as you do this. You can also put pressure with your foot on the back of the dog’s back leg, essentially forcing them to bend their knees and sit.
Never push on your dog’s rear end to get them to sit for two reasons. First, if you lean over to push on them, you run the risk of being bitten on the face if they decide they don’t want you to push on them. Second, dog’s have a lot of strength in their back legs, so it is very difficult to physically force your dog into a sit by pushing your dog down.
Teaching Sit: Hold the leash straight up above the dog’s head
Teaching Sit: Place foot behind the-dog’s knee
How to “Down” your dog
You teach your dog to lay by saying “down” or “lay” while holding the leash down so you can step on it with the foot closest to your dog.
When putting your dog into the “lay” or “down” position this way, you can completely control them. This is great if you have a dog that tends to be aggressive or gets overly excited and tends to want to jump on people.
You can put your dog into a down position this way when someone is walking by, for example, so there is no way they can lunge out at the other person. This is also effective when introducing your dog to new people to keep them under your control until the dog calms down.
Teaching Down: Place the leash on the ground.
Teaching Down: Step on the leash close to the dog to make them lay.
Teaching the “Come”
You may recall a time when your dog took off, and you ran after them yelling. To your frustration, your dog continued to run away. However, from your dog’s perspective you are running in the same direction as them being loud and excited, so they are thinking, “yeah let’s all go get that squirrel!”
This takes two people. In class, we put Seven on a long lead. The instructor would hold the lead and I would excitedly call her while jogging backwards away from her. Once she came to me, I would pull her into me giving her lots of praise. This teaches that come means to come physically to you, the dog learns they will get attention when they do this, and then you can get your dog on a leash or grab their collar to regain control.
If I were to go back, I would have gotten both of our new dogs into training right away after we adopted them. This would have saved us a lot of stress as we struggled to manage four dogs. Even if you are just bringing one dog into your home, it is extremely important for you and your family to all be on the same page when it comes to training. This will create clear expectations that your dog knows and understands. If you do not have strong dog handling skills, it is worth the cost in my opinion to take the time to get professional assistance to train your dog. My husband and I made the mistake of thinking that because we had two well behaved dogs that we were much better at training than we really were. I felt completely defeated and was so stressed before finally getting help. I am glad I finally decided to check my ego and got the training both me and my dogs needed.
Resources: https://kobberdahlk9.com