Embarrassed: We Got a Handful

Join Elizabeth of Telltail Dog and Dawn of Odin_Pup (https://www.instagram.com/odin_pup/) for a look into the handful that is Odin. Dawn's familiar with being severely embarrassed by her dog -- and she's a dog trainer. Tools and methods mentioned in the podcast are linked below through the blog post.

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Excerpt:
Odin's personality continued to emerge, and Dawn and Mark weren’t sure they’d be able to keep him. “I would say that there’s probably a lot of reactive dog owners who feel that they have the wrong dog,” Dawn said. “And I would say that they probably don’t, they just haven’t figured out the language yet, but at the same time, I’ve been there. I felt the same way. We were worried that if we couldn’t figure it out, we’d have to find Odin a new home because we weren’t the right home for him."

Then Odin scared Mark, who had been bitten by a dog the year before. Odin latched onto his arm, tugging. “We thought it was aggression,” Dawn said. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, we have to go put this dog down because he just bit my husband.’ Turns out, he had literally no idea what to do with his mouth. He was so overstimulated and he’s a reactive dog who was like, ‘Oh we’re playing tug now? Let’s play tug REALLY HARD.’"

They had some hard discussions and then reached out to Dana Falsetta, a close friend of Mark’s and a dog trainer and then a manager with Philly Unleashed. “She fielded a lot of phone calls from us at 10, 11 o’clock at night in tears, because we just didn’t know what to do,” Dawn shared. “I wasn’t a trainer yet. I had no idea. I was reading all of the books, reading all of the articles. It was a very intense year.”

Read more: https://telltaildogtraining.com/embarrassed-we-got-a-handful/