Lessons with Mr Knightley

We've lived with a completely out-of-control Maltese x Cocker Spaniel puppy now for six months. 

Knightley (after Mr Knightley in Jane Austen's Emma) has reached the stage where my two-year-old niece is so terrified of him leaping up at her that they rarely visit, and one of the three nuns who live next door was heard to be shouting at him over the back fence (you know it's bad when a nun loses her patience...)  We can't take him for a walk without him straining and gagging on the lead, the door-frame needs re-painting from his scratching, most of our shoes are worn out and we are not far behind them.

The solution was obvious: train him.  We knew this, and tried, using several different approaches - none of which made the slightest difference - until we gave up.  My working from home was starting to revolve around standing at the back door yelling at him to stop barking in case the police (who live on the other side of us from the nuns - we really have to behave in our household) have one of the neighbours report us for noise pollution.

Eventually, I bit the bullet and stripped the credit card of several hundred dollars by calling Bark Busters.  Within two minutes they had him calmed down.  Within two hours he was a completely different dog and we were a different family living the kind of idyllic dog-owning lifestyle I had first envisaged when I fell in love with him in a pet shop window on the way from Sydney last time we went up for a weekend.

The moral of this story?  If you know what to do to fix a problem and nothing is actually stopping you (except yourself) - stop playing the victim and just DO IT!  

The other moral - this weekend, when we're on the way home from seeing Il Divo in Sydney - just drive straight through Mittagong and don't stop for a coffee at the pie shop beside the pet shop...