From the Beginning

Let me start at the beginning. One sunny May day last year I went out to dinner with some of my online friends. Our common thread is that we all have brown dogs (Chesapeake Bay Retrievers) although we don't only stick to that subject. We met at Woody's in NorthEast, Maryland, and had a wonderful dinner. One of the ladies, who helps rescue CBRs, mentioned that they just picked up a small litter of CBRs and asked if I would be interested in one of them. Of course I was interested. I just had to convince my husband that we needed another dog as we are already owned by a then 10 year old CBR named Chazzie. Chazzie's a gem of a dog. He's almost perfect. Well, after some pleading my husband agreed, and on June 9th, 2008, we picked up Kodi, a beautiful little male CBR mix. He fit in well with our family and got along great with Chazzie. We took Kodi everywhere with us and we also introduced him to lots of friends and neighbors. At this point he was fine with meeting new people and going to new places. At approximately 4-5 months old Kodi and I started with obedience classes. The first two lessons were great. He was a little timid with the other dogs but he did great with the lessons. Week 3 Kodi was afraid to go into the building. Week 4 he started lunging at other dogs in the class. All the time the "trainer" told me to bring Kodi back and that we would work things out. At this point I could tell that Kodi was very stressed, but continued taking him to classes. I was a complete dummy about fearful/reactive dogs. I listened to what "experts" had to say and completely ignored my instincts. Needless to say Kodi got progressively worse at being fearful of people and lunging at dogs. I am embarrassed to admit that I continued with that 6 week class and then two additional 6 week classes. Kodi was a complete mess. He would bark and growl at people coming into our house while being very loving to his family.