Bristled at everyone.
When Kelton came to pick him up, young Bo walked out of the front door with “bristles all the way up” and freaked out at him, and he did that with everybody he saw. The first time Kelton tried to take him out of a crate, Bo bit his hand. Kelton’s read was simple: Bo just didn’t want to be touched.
So the first weeks were about trust. Pulling went uncorrected, and every return was paid in belly rubs and hugs, until “coming to me doesn’t mean the end of the fun. It means the start of the fun.”
“Now he just wants hugs.”
Within weeks he was walking calmly through a busy lake park, ignoring passers-by and coming when called. “So as you can see, Bo is getting better,” Kelton told the camera.
In a store, a shopper stopped to say hello, and Kelton told her about the dog who had bristled at everyone: “Now he just wants hugs.”
“A much less scary place.”
By the end of his first program, Kelton said Bo had learned that the world is “a much more interesting and much less scary place” than he had thought, and pointed to how happy he looked.
He went home in January with a full handover lesson, and Kelton came back a week later to fine-tune things at the house.
The next repetition.
One problem was left. Bo was relaxed with Kelton at his crate but still growled at other people who approached it, so he came back for focused crate work. Other staff held still through the growl instead of backing away, and on the next repetition he looked away and sniffed instead.
Between sessions, Kelton showed him working on a plain flat collar in a busy craft store, through come, heel, sit and down: “Well, you see he doesn’t have any aggression towards these people.”
“Any growling?” “No.”
Because his owner wanted to be able to board him, Kelton staged a boarding kennel with two staff who had barely worked with Bo. The verdict at the crate: no growling, so they reached in and petted him.
Then Claudia, who had never given him a single command, took him out of the crate and got a release, a sit, a down and place, with Kelton out of the room.
“I feel like he’s listening.”
In late May Bo went home again, and Kelton could tell his owner plainly that at the crate, “he’s not showing it anymore at all.” People he hadn’t worked with could take him out of the crate and handle him.
On the walk that followed she held the remote and gave the cues herself, past people and other dogs. Her verdict at the car: “I feel like he’s listening.”
The plan for home: never let a growl work. Be there the first time someone else crates him, and ask them not to back away.
