Hi all; just having a bit of a vent. My puppy (6 months on Monday) Murphy had his first day of obedience class today, having previously graduated from puppy school a couple of months ago.
He's generally very well-behaved and is improving his ability to not excitedly react to other dogs within a certain distance (a few metres now). We walk twice a day and while he pulls now and again he's often content to have a loose leash most of the time. I've been looking forward to group obedience to improve further on his good progress.
Instead he was overwhelmed and reactive the entire class, rarely paying attention to me at all and getting quite upset. Not his fault at all, he's just a kid and it's a new environment with other dogs, but it was a rough time for his class and I left feeling like we'd actually regressed rather than improved at all. I've got ADHD myself so I was struggling to focus on both him, my own body language, and also the trainer instructing the class all at once, which only confused Murphy more and made him retreat from me a lot as I fumbled my way through the exercises and forgot everything immediately after it was explained. I was being shadowed by another trainer who basically had to stick by me the whole time and constantly correct what I was doing and I felt so embarrassed, lol; by the end I was holding back tears and felt like I was completely failing my little boy. They told us at the start not to compare our dogs to other dogs but I was the only one that was having such blatant issues and difficulties and I didn't retain any of the information because I was blue-screening pretty bad.
At first I wanted to just get a refund on the course and try to continue training him on my own since he's a lot more well-behaved when we're at home and on our daily walks, but I've had a bit of time as the morning's gone along for my emotional state to calm down a bit and I'm going to keep going to the class next week. Overall though I just feel defeated and almost a bit ashamed; until now I've been really confident in his training and now I'm just questioning everything I've done and wondering if I've actually been enforcing bad habits.
The training itself was also very treat-heavy so he ate a lot while we were there; once we got home he vomited it all back up again. Poor little buddy's sleeping in his pen now, I'm just trying to give him space for a little while.
Has anyone had similar experiences of obedience classes being a much more stressful experience than regular training?
submitted by /u/CroyBoyJames
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