We’ve had Sam now for around 20 months and a very different dog is he too. You can see him here wearing his ‘festival look’ having spent the day out with Darren, Gemma and their friends. Our aim was to be able to allow him to run off the lead and introduce him to water he appears to be the only lab we’ve met who walks around puddles!
We undertook training with a vengeance with the initial focus on lead-work and recall. Several times we were relegated to the ‘isolation field’ for over boisterousness and inattention but gradually the methods taught began to take effect. We have just returned from a month long holiday touring the south coast of England and are proud to say that it was like taking a different dog away to the one we did last year. He was able to ignore 95% of other dogs whilst out making a walk around towns much more relaxing and we have at long last been able to let him off lead in some environments. He has been on the beach and was fooled into entering the water by a doggy playmate he met but quickly shot back out again. I guess we will have to put that on the back burner for a while, maybe someday he will realise what he is missing. Sam had a lovely run today with a labradoodle named Clover through fields and came to us when called – something again we were unsure we would be able to achieve in the beginning. We are very much enjoying seeing him able to enjoy the freedoms all dogs should and are even contemplating a playmate for him sometime in the future. To anyone considering taking on a rescue dog we can’t recommend training classes highly enough, with the right class and trainer and a lot of love and patience you can really get the companion of your dreams.