A little off topic, might be in the wrong section. Just wanted to say that my hard work in training is starting to show off! Today I did something different, drove about 30 minutes to an outdoor shopping center that was pretty popular today and had a fair amount of foot traffic (being its tax free week) and vehicle traffic, different noises, sounds, music and such. Axle did great, we didn't do anything crazy. I mainly wanted to just go and get him exposed to it and do some very simple simple basic easy stuff. To some, that might be dumb but to me it seemed like the best idea was to just get him in the environment as stress free as possible and just run basic stuff like sit, wait, down and some simple attention markers.

It started off with him wanting to go and meet the people, very quickly he changed his attitude once he noticed I had delicious treats we did lots of walking loose leash, when he would pull to go meet someone I would verbally correct him, as soon as the leash went loose or he would look at me he got marked. Soon after the first 2-3 times he pulled there was no more pulling, nice loose leash walking even passed screaming kids and other dogs!

I met a nice lady, the only person I let him meet. She was 87 years old, walking for exercise and she noticed he was a pitbull and could not stop complementing him. She was very nice, she told me how back in WW2 her husband and her had a pitbull as their pet and he was perfect and we got into conversation how BSL & city breeders have played a huge part in the changing view of the breed.


Anyway! Sorry for the rant, just wanted to express the fact that my training and hard work is finally starting to pay off and I couldn't be happier, the plan is to take a once a week trip there.

Congrats on your training! Sounds like your guy is becoming an ambassador for his breed.

Before pits became dogs of inner city toughs they were family dogs, dogs for old people, the dog on "The Little Rascals".
50-60 yrs ago, the average dog owner had an understanding that all dogs can bite, and raised with respect and handled like dogs, not cartoon characters, there was no problem.