I grew up with dogs being a huge part of my life. As I was growing up, training methods were shifting from punishment based to more reward based - but just as today, the shift still had a long way to go. My first dog was the image of perfection. She was the perfect family pet and lived for praise and affection. She didn't really have any behavior issues. When I was a young teen, I became even more interested in dogs than before and took an interest in training. It fascinated me how animals could learn to do a behavior like "wave" that they didn't normally do. I started volunteering at the animal shelter and so desperately wanted another dog. My parents finally decided to add another dog to our family and we brought home a beautiful 9 week old Havanese mix puppy that was born at the animal shelter. It was a new experience for my whole family to raise a young puppy. We brought her home, took her to our yard to go potty before bringing her inside the house, then brought her inside......and she urinated on our carpet. We all quickly realized that it wasn't going to be half as easy as our first experience of raising a dog. We named our beautiful puppy, Lily, and started our journey together.
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