Last week I took my Border Collie Iggy to be groomed, at Algonquin College where he gets all buffed up by the students. He came home with the new name of Romeo because he spent the entire time giving love. I am still amazed how much Iggy loves everyone, his favorite thing in the whole world is just a line up of people waiting to be hugged and kissed. I often wonder how his tongue doesn't get tired. He is such a love bug and even at home regularly needs affection and is OK with lying on top of you.
I think why this is so astonishing to me is that I have had 4 dogs before him and all so couldn't care less about people. My first dog was an Akita named Yukon, as a puppy he liked people and would pull like a truck toward them. Knowing what I know now most of that was just really bad training. Once he got there he would wait to be petted and that would be that. By the time he was 2 years old he didn't even do that and people where nice but not exciting. My next three dogs couldn't have cared less about people, all where comfortable with people but felt no urge to encourage petting or attention from strangers. Even with us they were't particularly cuddly which works great because we aren't either.
To this day my Siberian, Max still turns to me for a treat whenever someone pets him on leash. This comes from doing pet fests where a lot of people would come over and pet him. I wanted this to be a positive experience and knew if I didn't build some value it would soon turn to a negative experience. Easily solved you get petted and you get a cookie, kept everyone happy.
In fact I found in much harder to train Iggy because everyone was so wonderful it was much harder for me to build value for working with me. The more I got upset because he would rather be with anyone the harder he worked to get to everyone. I am truly thankful he has taught me to be a much better dog trainer because everywhere we went the distraction level was so high.
It is amazing how different dog's personalities are. Some of this can be predicted by breed but some is individual characteristics. We can work on changing some of them but hard wiring is hard to change. Instead we have to accept our dogs quirks and love them for them.
I think why this is so astonishing to me is that I have had 4 dogs before him and all so couldn't care less about people. My first dog was an Akita named Yukon, as a puppy he liked people and would pull like a truck toward them. Knowing what I know now most of that was just really bad training. Once he got there he would wait to be petted and that would be that. By the time he was 2 years old he didn't even do that and people where nice but not exciting. My next three dogs couldn't have cared less about people, all where comfortable with people but felt no urge to encourage petting or attention from strangers. Even with us they were't particularly cuddly which works great because we aren't either.To this day my Siberian, Max still turns to me for a treat whenever someone pets him on leash. This comes from doing pet fests where a lot of people would come over and pet him. I wanted this to be a positive experience and knew if I didn't build some value it would soon turn to a negative experience. Easily solved you get petted and you get a cookie, kept everyone happy.
In fact I found in much harder to train Iggy because everyone was so wonderful it was much harder for me to build value for working with me. The more I got upset because he would rather be with anyone the harder he worked to get to everyone. I am truly thankful he has taught me to be a much better dog trainer because everywhere we went the distraction level was so high.
It is amazing how different dog's personalities are. Some of this can be predicted by breed but some is individual characteristics. We can work on changing some of them but hard wiring is hard to change. Instead we have to accept our dogs quirks and love them for them.
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