Kojak’s Training Journey
Rottweilers are renowned for their strength and loyalty, yet they can also exhibit a stubborn streak not to mention an ADHD streak. Kojak could be running after his ball (one of his favorite toys) and be distracted by almost anything: a bird, another ball, blades of tasty grass and so on. These characteristics make effective training essential, as it forms the foundation for a harmonious relationship between us and Kojak.
In more everyday terms, we have a big strong dog (cute as a button!) that we would like to take on walks and to the store without worrying he’s going to scare little children (and adults!) with his exuberance. If you can imagine having a dog that weighs over 100 pounds lunging at you or jumping up on you begging you to pet his head, you have some idea of what we’re up against. Unfortunately we’re late to the game as we should have started training him as a small puppy but we were sick from the end of October through March and really didn’t have the energy for hooking him up, loading him into the truck and trying to do the training exercises at home. Now that we’re better, we’re surely paying the price.
As an Amazon Associate Kojak earns from qualifying purchases.
Our trainer, Val, fortunately is non-judgmental but I can tell she’s kind of thinking we’re bad owners. We’re trying to teach Kojak things that little puppies learn (sit, come here and the like) but he’s had time to make some of his undesirable traits a habit. For instance, walking him on a leash usually ends up in a tug of war since he’s big enough to drag Libby wherever he wants to go as well as pulling my arm out of the socket (not quite, but almost). Compounding our struggle is the fact we have about 2 acres fenced in with an invisible fence and Kojak is used to just going out and playing in the yard. To walk him on a sidewalk for instance we have to load him into the truck and drive somewhere where there’s a sidewalk (and preferably with no people and surely no other dogs). Hard to find.
Skills Kojak Has Recently Learned
Some of these skills were discovered accidentally. For instance, he really wants to sleep in our bedroom at night but we have the door blocked with a baby gate. He just can’t be trusted to not chew our rug or eat our socks or chew on the furniture. We’re working up to letting him in the bedroom, but that led to some unexpected behavior:
Our previous dogs had no interest in hopping on our bed and actually couldn’t jump that high (our bed is about level with the top of our dressers). Kojak had no problem jumping up and making himself at home.
It should be no surprise to his fans that Kojak is a power chewer. He is pretty good about chewing on his toys but he’s not above chewing on the steps, the couch, shoes and parts of the house (I should do a post on things that Kojak has chewed on!). We can’t give him any “soft” toys – you know, the fun ones with squeakers and fluff (they look like stuffed animals and last maybe 10 minutes before we’re looking at a winter wonderland of fluff)
Since he’s such a dedicated chewer we’ve had to replace all his toys with either Kong rubber toys or hard plastic toys. Being ever inventive, he figured a way to make an innocent plastic toy more destructive:
Se we’ve now embarked on a journey to replace all hard plastic toys with rubber ones.
As an Amazon Associate Kojak earns from qualifying purchases.
I think he really wants to play fetch, but he hasn’t grasped the concept that he has to let me have to toy to throw it so it just ends up being an endless game of tug:
He has also taught me a few things like don’t drop the mail on the floor (especially if it looks like it might be a dog toy), big dogs CAN balance very well and don’t have your guests park within sight of the window unless you want him to bark and howl half the night:
He HAS actually learned some desirable skills such as walking on a leash, sit, lie down, lie down all the way (flat on the floor) and roll over. I’ll post another entry with some of his more conventional skills as this one is getting a bit long. At any rate, here he is demonstrating that he CAN kind of walk sorta calmly on a leash. At the dog trainer’s location. When he’s been tired out. And it is hot. And Libby has a lot of treats in her pocket.
