We have a miniature poodle (female), just under 5 months old. We've had her from 8 weeks, and have all fallen madly in love with her (DH, two teenage DSes, DD, 10).
However, we went into lockdown just after we got her (so socialisation disrupted), and also had employment issues, illness, and significant bereavement to deal with in the last 3 months. All of these things mean that I've not been as "on it" with training as I'd planned to be (and would otherwise have been).
I feel like I've well and truly mucked things up, and getting despondent.
The positives:
- She is affectionate, loving, funny, and generally lovely most of the time. Everyone in the family loves her.
- She's toilet trained.
- She can do a few basic commands (sit; paw; wait) and a couple less reliably (fetch; come here)
- She'll often walk to heel.
And the bits I'm struggling with:
- The biggest one - she still bites. She's mostly grown out of it with me, DH and our sons (teenagers), but she goes for DD (10) in a way that's playful but also perhaps wanting to dominate? She grabs DD's clothing and drags it, growling. She also barks at DD. DD adores her, and gets quite upset. To be fair, it's a few weeks since she last broke the skin, but she's still prone to these behaviours.
- She growls when you try to take something off her which she shouldn't have. Once, when DH took something off her, she nipped his hand and drew blood.
- We haven't crate trained her. She sleeps - generally very well, to be fair - at DH's feet (he has to sleep downstairs at the moment anyway, for various reasons).
- Any sound at night and she's up and barking (temporarily - she settles when the sound stops).
- She takes quite a while to stop barking at new people. Since it's been allowed, we've been gradually introducing her to both adults and children, and she is now getting quite a lot better. But I worry that lockdown (which spanned her greatest socialisation period) may have really hampered her.
- DH and I can no longer trim her fur - she now tries to play and snap at the scissors/clippers too much. We're willing to pay, but I'm scared no one will be able to groom her as she's too hyperactive and can nip. Have a "puppy appointment" with a groomer next week.
Now that they've started again, I've enrolled her in training, and we've got a few things going on with DD (trying to get DDog to respect her, basically, by getting DD to do basic training, be the one to give her food, etc).
I'm feeling overwhelmed by it all. Are we going to end up with a nightmare dog?
TIA