Dogs Training Blog

I’m on week 5/10 on a beginning lvl dog school. We learn with a choke chain and praise. If the dog isn’t following the command you jerk the chain, if the dog is doing well you praise. My issue is that I have a 1.5 year old GSD (Samson) who is a very dominate dog to begin with. He’s also a rescue dog that I got when he was 6 months old. He always wants to walk in front of me and he doesn’t always obey me if there is something else in the picture (such as another person walking a dog). He’s really bad about mounting other dogs too. He’s also a biter. Not a mean bite, just you typical herding dogs bite. It’s annoying more than anything.My school said I have to “jerk his choke chain harder”. Doing that seems to have more of a positive effect on his obedience, but today he threw up and there looked to be some blood in his vomit. I’m curious if there is hope for such a dominate dog with this kind of training. I’ve been training him for 5 weeks for a minimum of 30 mins a day and I’ve seen slight improvement from day 1 but I’d say it’s about a 10% increase so far. I also think he’s may be one of the worst behaved dogs in the class. I know it’s the handler and I take full responsibility, but I work hard at training and it seems I’m missing something. I have also taken him for a 60min walk everyday or the dog park since I’ve had him. This is a basic obedience school where we are working on heeling, staying, sitting…etc. Does this kind of school work with dogs as dominate as mine? I will keep going to this school until it’s finished but I’m wondering if I should look into a class designed for dogs with behavioral issues?Thanks for reading and responding.

More: continued here