Quote:
Originally Posted by Lups
I'm the worst pacifist in the world and my older son will be bullied for his missing ear for all eternity. I'd sign him up for all self defense classes there are but he has zero interest. He likes science and he has a ton of friends because he can apparently be cool because he can translate really weird bug knowledge from English to Finnish.
They did have a show and tell at their school a while back and he presented me, his boring old mom who can train dogs. He had asked his friends to bring along their dogs and I taught the kids how to teach tricks to their dogs and then I showed with mine what a trained dog can do.
I let them hide a toy to their pockets and i told my dog to search for it. Then I told my dog to herd them in to a circle. Then I showed them how a police dog stops a suspect.
Then I told all the kids to put treats in front of the dog and I told them that I'd buy a pony to the kid who can get her to eat them.
Obviously my kid got the pony since he knew the release word.
I'm not cool in the normal way, neither is my kid but he knows I have his back and I spent some time to teach a big dog to make him feel secure.  |
And while I admire you for the investment of time you've put into the dog to make your kid feel secure, I'll say this as a word of advice:
We also had a well trained German Shepherd, she was trained by a specific trainer to be a family guard dog, and she was very good at it. Very good. The problem we found, is that with kids around 8-11, the dog had a very difficult time determining whether or not my brother's friends were just rough housing with him (just boys being boys) and he was doing the same back OR, whether my brother needed protection.
And normally, she erred on the side of "Let's protect him". Which meant the other kid was going down hard - never bit or anything, just knocked the kid down and stood over him making sure he knew not to get up till one of us arrived.
Ultimately, we had to get rid of her, it was too much of a liability, so we gave her back to the trainer, but it sucked, because I really liked her and she was a part of the family.
So hopefully you'll be able to train yours when your sons are just messing around with the other boys that this does not require her intervention!