It’s me again, needing some more help with little Polaris.
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How does one train a puppy to go down the stairs? After much coaxing with treats, I got her to climb up, but no inducement would cause her to go back down. I’m sure that it’s the angle which frightens her, but she wouldn’t even step down a couple of inches onto my lap when I sat on the stairs. I tried gently pulling her front legs down to demonstrate that it wasn’t as perilous as it looked, but she wasn’t buying it.
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Aggression: Today, she picked up a dead bug off of the porch. When I tried to take it from her mouth, she growled and bit me. I immediately pushed her over onto her back (as I’ve read you should do in this circumstance) but I don’t think it made the proper impression.
She growls when playing with her toys. One of my dog books suggests that allowing this encourages agression, while another says that it helps the puppy to relieve some of it in a positive way.
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Biting: She still gnaws on me and my clothes. I know that she understands “no!” because she stops other behaviors when I say it. She’s also pretty smart: she already knows “sit”, “down” and “fetch”, so I don’t think this is a training issue, per se-- more of a behavioral problem. One of my dog books says that pups taken from their mothers as young as she was have a tendancy to chew on their owners, but doesn’t say how to fix this problem.
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Bathing: She screams like I’ve set her on fire when I bathe her, and trembles for a half an hour afterwards, no matter how much I try to make it a pleasant experience (treats, praise, etc.)
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My older dog’s intense jealousy: Training Polaris has been arduous, not because she’s hard to train-- quite the contrary-- but because my older dog disrupts the proceedings as much as possible. Polaris is afraid of her, so if the older dog is in the room, she won’t pay attention. When I go into the kitchen with her and shut the door, the older dog starts barking, and Polaris focuses on that rather than what I’m trying to teach her.
I’ve waited for the older dog to go upstairs for her nap, but I swear, the dog who can’t hear me when I yell for her to stop barking at the neighbor’s cat can hear me if I whisper “good puppy!” She runs back down the stairs and barks at the closed door, or otherwise makes a pest of herself. It’s too cold to train outside, and none of the puppy day care centers or trainers will let me bring her to their facilities until she’s had her third round of shots.
Any advice would be most welcome. Thanks in advance.