carolh

Thanks for the advise. We have another dog and now that Cooper is pretty good at walking until of course he sees someone else I think we will try that again. We tried it a couple of months ago and it tired me trying to keep his attention on me. My other half took Max and walked him on the other side of the street and it was mission impossible even with the treat right in front of his nose. But he's a little better now so we'll give it another shot.

As you can now tell I am new at this forum and seem to keep repeating the reply but I will get this... :rolleyes: Here is a picture of our black shepherd Jerry who we lost last year. I miss him so much he was pretty special. Max is our 7 year old on the left.

We lost out 9 year old shepherd in November last year. Your Sheba was beautiful, our Jerry was mostly Black and I'll locate a picture of him for you in the next couple of days. Here's one of Cooper that I took on the weekend. I have taped his ears up since the picture because as you can see they don't seem to want to stay up for some reason. The breeder says he may need a little help and actually should stay up around 7 months but if not try taping them. He looks his part with them taped...like a little devil. :rolleyes: <img src="http://img102.imageshack.us/img102/4281/cooper6months24nz.jpg">

Wow, I sure don't need double trouble and I'm so glad that I asked the question before trying it. Thank you both for your advise. As for our trainer, she's great and the only time she suggests the okay say hi is when he's acting crazy in class or when taking him to the pet store. I've actually stopped taking him to the pet store because I don't want any bad incidents. Like you say most people will feel the need for their dog to say hi and sometimes it not pretty. There are 6 other dogs in the class and most of the time Cooper will bark and lunge all the way from the truck to the class. It's a little embarrassing. Once he's said hi to everyone he's pretty good. But of course these are dogs he see every week. Cooper was actually not that bad with his walk last night. I bought some different treats (liver) and it worked pretty good. I just held it right in front of his nose as we passed 2 barking dogs and he acknowledged them by a quick glance but then his attention came right back to me. Once we passed them I sat him and praised him for being such a good boy. Now remember this was just one time we'll see how it goes tonight We have another German Shepherd but he is totally opposite so this is quite a change in training. Max couldn't care less about other dogs but he will go nuts for people only because they mean play time. :cool: Tail wagging and toy in mouth kind of crazy. Everyone tells me that he will get it but my fear is that we will have a bad encounter before he does. I will make sure to keep him a safe distance for now and then gradually get a little closer to approaching dogs and owners. Thanks very much for the helpful advise. :p

Thanks so much for your suggestions. I am definately going to keep going to obedience even though he goes crazy every single time we get there . I have one more question. A friend of ours has a shepherd as well that Cooper (our shepherd)has never met. They are having the same problem as we are and were wondering if we did some backyard training with the both of them. Thinking if we were to try to walk the dogs past each other and if one or the other or both go crazy with us trying to distract with food or toy then we would simply turn around. Do you think this to be a bad idea? Our trainer seems to think downing the dog first and then saying "okay say hi" will work. but we've tried this and it's not really working. I end up so tired from trying to hold on to him and of course lose my cool which as you said is not good for him. I will also check out the pinch collar but until I can't hold him I want to keep trying without. Again that you for your advise, I really appreciate any help I can get. He's a wonderful puppy and it's the only problem we have with him. I just didn't know whether I was expecting too much from him too fast. He's just so big now that I want to make sure I have him in my control by the time he's full grown. The last thing I want is to make things worse for him. We are hoping that we can start some agility training once he gets past this. He picks things up pretty fast as far as the rest of the training goes. At this point though taking him to shows would be impossible with all the other dogs.

I have a 6 month old German Shepherd that started barking and lunging when he see other dogs and sometimes even when he sees people approaching. This has been going on now for over 2 months. We are going to obedience training and have tried everything the trainer has told us but nothing seems to get through to him. He is now around 70 lbs and very strong. If we walk him when no one is around he's great, watches me, knows the word heel, runs when I do and slows down when I do and sits when I stop. BUT, as soon as he sees anyone his hair goes up on the back of his neck and he lunges and barks like there is no tomorrow. We have also tried making him lay down and then give the okay to say hi but that doesn't work and all that ends up happening is the owner of the other dog gets scared. We have tried keeping his attention by going off to the side of the sidewalk and getting him to sit stay, shake a paw, down stay and all the while keep saying watch me and if it's a person going by sometimes it works but only if we notice the person before he does. If it someone walking thier dog then forget it he doesn't even notice us there anymore. Any suggestions?