After nearly six months with Winnie, we’ve reached a breaking point, and something has to change.

Don’t misunderstand me; Winnie isn’t going anywhere. We love and adore her. However, we find ourselves at a critical point in our relationship with her where it’s time to get serious about course-correcting her destructive behavior.

I’ll be the first to admit that we haven’t been as diligent in her training as we should be. Winnie (like many dogs) requires continuous reinforcement to succeed. We’re busy, sometimes we’re lazy in enforcing the rules, and too often we let her win. Though we invested in weeks of positive reinforcement training, practiced that training at home for hours and hours, give her regular exercise and have managed our house to the point where no trashcans sit on the ground and no food is left unsupervised anywhere, we are failing to properly channel Winnie’s excessive energy into something good and to reign in her bad behavior.

At the end of our rope, what have we decided to do? Throw money at the situation and bring in an expert.

In a couple of weeks, we’ll have our first appointment with David from Bark Busters, a franchise of in-home dog trainers based in cities across the globe that promise to train even the most untrainable of dogs. Bark Busters offers a few different levels of service for your dog, and the program we’ve opted for involves inviting David into our home for a 2-3 hour consultation and intensive training session for Winnie, with unlimited consultations over the course of the next 12 months. He’ll help us learn how to communicate better, set boundaries that we all understand and (ideally) leave us with a plan we can implement to successfully correct Winnie’s destructive behavior.

Via Dogland Adventures, I’ll chronicle our experience with Bark Busters and the resulting training program we implement. I recognize that the first step to success is in acknowledging that the bulk of responsibility in Winnie’s success lies in our ability to enforce routine and continuity into our daily interactions with her. Just as I know Winnie is good, smart, kind dog who wants nothing more than please us, I know that we can return her good intentions and establish order in our pack that makes everyone happy.