What was going on
Lockie is a 40kg Labrador Retriever. At two years old, he was pulling hard on the lead, eating everything he could find on the ground (cat poo, discarded food, chicken bones) and becoming increasingly difficult to control when he locked onto something he wanted.
It wasn't just frustrating. It wasn't safe. Ellen couldn't let her elderly mother or her kids walk him because there was a real risk he'd pull them over or drag them into the street. Daily walks, which should have been the best part of having a dog, had become something Ellen dreaded.
What Ellen had tried
Ellen grew up with dogs in the country, where roads, traffic, and other dogs weren't a concern. Raising a dog in the city was a different challenge entirely. She'd been trying to train Lockie herself, but as she put it: “I didn't know what I was doing wrong. I was rewarding but maybe at the wrong time or didn't ask enough of him.”
Everyone around her had opinions. None of them were dog trainers. The conflicting advice was causing tension in the household on top of the stress of managing Lockie's behaviour.
What we did
Ellen signed up for a combination of our Walk & Train program and Group Classes. The process started with an initial consult to map out the specific behaviours we needed to work on. From there, Marianne collected Lockie and took him out for trainer-led walk sessions, working on lead skills, impulse control, and disengagement from ground-level distractions.
Periodically, Ellen joined the sessions so Marianne could show her exactly what she'd been working on and transfer the skills across. The group classes gave Lockie (and Ellen) a chance to practise those skills in a social setting with other dogs and distractions.
What changed
The biggest shift was a simple one: Ellen had been accidentally rewarding the behaviours she wanted to stop. It's one of the most common things we see: well-meaning owners reinforcing exactly the wrong thing without realising it. Once Marianne identified the pattern and showed Ellen what to do differently, things moved quickly.
In Ellen’s words: “Marianne had sorted that out quick smart.”
Ellen now walks Lockie every day and enjoys it. Her mother and kids can handle him safely. The tension in the household has dropped. And Lockie? In Ellen’s words: “When he's passed out completely, happy as a clam, I have done my job.”
