At your local dog park.

[ElleBelle]

See, I know that it's predominately my fault, but I just find it hard to fix it within myself. I tend to be such a pushover when it comes to him. I feel like not even dealing with the headache of trying to get him up and going on the leash.

Shutter's only 15lbs. I was raised with dobermans. Understandably, my father was fairly insistent on them being trained from day one, and when David and I got together, I immediately added onto Shutter's training.

I'm frequently told by other people in a surprised voice that he's extremely well-behaved. After comparing him to other small dogs in our condo building, I see why. Many of them are downright horrible - the exact reason I used to hate small dogs. Lo and behold, it's because they're so small that most owners can act like you and not deal with much trouble - most of those dogs can be pushed aside with a foot, or dragged (note: I'm not condoning this). This is harder, or next to impossible, with a large dog.

I totally understand being a pushover about your - we find it really, really hard to resist feeding him scraps from the table, and thus have to deal with him begging. You just have to gird your loins and realize that after a while it won't be so hard to deal with because he'll accept the boundaries you give him.

For the record, we made Shutter wear his jackets or harnesses for a while around the house, like I said, to get him used to them, and now because they always go on when he goes outside, he knows they're associated with outside time and he practically puts them on himself.

Oh, you might also try boarding up the dog door when you're at home so that when he wants to go out, he has to do it on your terms. I'd probably leave it open while you're away just to avoid accidents, but this might increase his dependency on you enough to drive the message home.

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll have to give some of those a try. He used to completely rule the roost...sleeping in my bed, going wherever he wanted in the house, etc. When I brought little ElleBelle Jr home, and a lot of that had to change, and when I did simply HAVE TO set those boundaries, he seemed to understand. He would try to slink back into bed from time to time, but he did seem to learn quickly that he was going to have to be a kitchen/outside dog for a while.

Maybe if I act that way again, using those suggestions that he has to walk on my terms, I can find some success.