Hi Melissa, are you still looking for tips on a closer front? I was at a training seminar in March with Raino Fluegge, a national judge, and his advice was to teach that position first and seperate from any of the retreives or recall. Hold the dog in a sit with the underside of the jaw resting on your body. Raino's comment was "you have to teach him where to go". In the training tape "Drive, Focus, and Grip" Bernhard Flinks demonstrates this very well. I've been working on this with my male. I am getting him used to the fact that his head in contact with me and I calmly stroke his muzzle while keeping him there for several seconds. It took a while before he was willing to stay for any length of time. Now he calmly stays till I release him. I don't know when we will be ready to insert this into the skills since we're still in the middle of it ourselves. The other tip about this , only praise happens here , no corrections, this becomes the 'safe' place.

Debbie ,
when trying to put my dog into sit front , she always steps back so i need to pull her toards my body...it apears that she needs to "see my face" that why she needs to have a fare distance....i was even trying to push my body toards her when she does that ...the result was that she steps back more and more till she is on her back...lol...))

any idea on that?
thx

Remus used to do something similar, keep aprox. 1' from me with the front. I used the leash on the dead ring of the fur saver and pulled him into a sit and stepped in even closer until we were in contact. The entire time I'm saying 'good here' so he learns that "here" is coming into the sit with contact to me. For a long time he wouldn't sit that close. Alot of patience and calming and he is getting used to being there. Mind you he doesn't come in that close yet when I do the recall. That said he is coming closer than he used before we even started working on this. Just remember to keep it calm , nothing bad happens in this position (except maybe the tugging on the fursaver to keep them there) When Remus tries to move out of that position before I release him I just say 'No, here' and pull him back into position. Does this make any sense? Any one else have any suggestions?

It's outrageous that they dared to even say anything about the use of a product they sell themselves. I didn't even know they had a no-corrections training method, I've never watched their training sessions. It's easy for me to say "milk it for all you can" - but I know that my own mentality would be to drop everything I had in my hands on the ground, walk out the door, slam it on my way out, bitch about it for a few days, let it go, then never go back again. I don't have any major issues with petsmart personally, I just follow my own 2 rules:

1. Don't ask them anything, the less you speak to them the better. Know what you want before you walk in the store, run in, pay, run out, don't look back. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" />

2. Don't take my dog with me!! As you may know from my other post on socialization... I have a friendly pup, before I know it, petsmart employees all feel this urge to make my dog sit, it's too late by the time I can tell them not to, he'll be sitting nicely licking their hand <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif" alt="" />

His commands are all in dutch, but Zit and Sit sound so similar that he responds to either. I want to buy a cape vest that says DO NOT PET, i get irritated by the number of people that take it upon themselves to touch my dog without asking, or don't understand why I said "no" to them.

So! Today I went to PetSmart to buy a prong collar. Standing in line at the check out holding this "torture device" I'll admit I was nervous to hear the cashier's reaction. She makes a comment about how a lady asked her "don't they hurt?" and the cashier told the lady "no they don't"... so I'm thinking "ok cool she doesn't think its cruel"... a few moments later another bored cashier walks over and starts a conversation with my cashier about people with service dogs. They get onto talking about how mean they think it is that old ladies with service dogs wont let them give the dogs treats, n that they don't treat the dogs right n are always yanking on their chokers n treating the animal like a piece of equipment. Then get onto the subject of training, and talking about how all you need to train a dog is a bag of treats.... so I'm standing there with a prong collar in my hand thinking "ok I wanna leave now" lol. That's one conversation I had no intention to participate in.

Now that is why you need to order a nice Herm Springer collar from Leerburg <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> They are much nicer than the ones they sell at Petsmart anyway

I really like the looks of amazement when I walk thru petsmart with my Siberian Husky off lead with her prong and pull tab on. One of their trainers came up and had to take aclose look at my dog because she just couldn't beleive it was a husky... she thought they were untrainable.

We have the same for our gsd - 95lbs of male working line and it is working great. I haven't had any problems with it 'letting go' either the way I've seen other brands do. I highly recomend this product from Leerburg.