"Growly" dog class

So how did Daisy make such progress? Sure, we've been working on this two years and she still can't be friends with another dog. But at least we can feel pretty confident she won't bolt out the door at any opportunity. We can walk down the street or in the hills without hiding behind a car or a bush if we hear the sound of little padded feet. Well, some of the time.

We said good-bye to the first trainer after she told us that Daisy would always be at risk for dangerous behavior and that we'd have to get a chain-link fence. She seemed to think Daisy would always be a "bad" dog. Worst of all, we later discovered a yellow sticky in Daisy's vet file that noted her owners were "uncooperative". We were outraged. This lady was biased against all of us!

Then we got lucky and found Martina Contreras, who is fabulous with "growly" dogs. Martina did an evaluation on the lawn in front of her house, watching how her dogs and Daisy (on leash) reacted to one another. Daisy was all over the place, screeching and pulling. Martina's three dogs knew better than to get very near. They ignored her and sniffed other things. Martina told us that Daisy was definitely trainable and redeemable, but was completely unsocialized and might even have been seriously abused.

Martina invited us to observe her Saturday morning dog training courses in a high-tech company parking lot so that Daisy could get desensitized to other dogs. We started right away. We had been told to keep Daisy under her reactive threshold, so we moved further and further distant from the class. We were nearly a football field away and she was still freaking out. Daisy would need to at least be "in the same zip code" in order to become desensitized, Martina yelled over to us. But that took several months, probably. We went every week for more than a year, and still go often.