This summer was chock full of good times for us. Our doggies had a great summer, too. No camping for them, unfortunately, as Jake still has his moments with strange dogs and crowds of people, but, lots of walkies and keeping cool inside when the temps got too hot for them.
We are hosting our famous “PastaRama” at a music festival in Virginia.
Since all the summer fun is ended, we are concentrating on Jake…again. On one of our walks at a local park, Jake and I met a couple walking their tiny Yorkie, Mattie. We let the dogs meet. Mattie snarled and snapped at Jake at first and then calmed down nicely. Jake barked at her and wanted to leave. Anyway, they told me about the place they were taking Mattie that was really helping her with other dogs. I gave them my cell number in case they wanted a play date at my yard and then went straight to the K-Nine Dog Camp nearby.
While there I was able to talk to the employees and Jake got to look around a bit. We made an appointment with a trainer for an evaluation which we did yesterday. The trainer was great with Jake. He tried to ease him into the place using non confrontational dogs, one at a time, and on an anxiety scale of 1-10 Jake went from an 8 to about a 3 in an hour’s time. We soon realized that I wouldn’t be able to leave Jake there that day and they wanted another eval from the owner. The trainer felt pretty sure that Jake would improve after another couple short visits, supervised, of course. They had just had a recent nutcase, Oscar, a small terrier type, who acted very much like Jake did, and he was now part of the group of dogs and calmed down tremendously. Oscar was part of the evaluation and got along with Jake, no trauma.
This center has been the only place where they didn’t want to dump Jake in a yard full of all sizes of dogs without a thought to how to introduce him to the experience. I never felt good about any of the other places I checked out. This place is really concerned about each dog there and they have lots of employees that are actively involved in the care. They also have cameras focused on all the areas that you can view from their website! How cool is that?
Jake's and Gillie's Blog 