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Marieke
Breed: Yellow Lab
Owner(s): Forest & Tjitske
Trainer: Two Bears Dog Training (Obedience)
The PROBLEM
"MARIEKE"
Lafayette, Colorado
Marieke is a 2 and a half year old female lab whom we have had since she was 4 months old. She is as good
natured as it is probably possible for a dog to be as you can take her favoriate bone out of her mouth even
if she is hungry. She is loving, non-destructive, and wouldn’t hurt or attack anything or anyone. That’s
the good part.
PROBLEM
Marieke loves people and has a high drive to make contact with all new people that come in front of her.
She also had no fear of people, lacked understanding her place and was impervious to human commands in areas
of much distraction. People who wanted to greet her would find 75 lbs of exhuberant pandamonium coming at
them, jumping, licking, leaving people a disheveled mess running for cover. She liked to please people
including her owners... but if she suddenly has another agenda... you could not get her to mind, pay attention to
you, listen or whatever. Being reprimanded just went over her like "water rolling off of a duck’s
back".
Although my wife and I had owned numerous dogs over our lifetime with no obedience issues, we sensed that
we just didn’t know how to train this high drive Lab... so we read all the books we could find about training
Labs in particular and went to several trainers in the Boulder area. But training was not going well and one
of the trainers even said, "Well, she’s a real pistol". That didn’t help us! Trying to take her
on walks and trying to train her to stay with you (heel) seemed to be an endless exercise in futility. If
she wanted to go somewhere, you just had a "tiger by the tail".
After 18 months we were both becoming very frustrated and discouraged. We were starting not to want to
take Marieke anywhere or even on a walk because she was always one huge struggle. Tjitske had been knocked
off of her feet several times trying to hold on to Marieke which was dangerous for her because she has a
pacemaker. Forest had developed cronic tendenitis in one arm.
We noticed that many other people that had Labs seemed to have this problem also, but the only advice we
ever got was that they would get better as they got older! That was even more discouraging because we were
starting not to see ourselves as people who would want to have to deal with this problem for a number of
years more into the future... just waiting for your dog to get old and tired as a solution.
One day out hiking in open space, we saw a woman coming with two large Labs. They both started to run
toward us and of course we were struggling for dear life trying to hang on to Marieke. Before the other
Labs reached us, however, their owner gave them just one command, and they both stopped in their tracks.
She gave them one more command and they both returned to her... as in IMMEDIATELY. Wow, we were impressed!
We almost couldn’t believe what we were seeing. And obviously that threw out all the arguments and fears
that one can’t train a Lab or that they will mind only when they are much older. She said she had once had
our problem but had met a trainer John Hendershot and Diann
Yandrich (Two Bears Dog Training) and that the money she had spent with them was the best money she had
ever spent in her life. She also said she had made the decision to train her dogs with an electronic collar
(something we had a prejudice against) and that now both she and her dogs had the freedom to enjoy being out
on the trail. Looking at these two happy but obedient Labs and dog owner, we obviously had to check it out.
We called up John about as fast as we could get home. John’s approach was different from any other
trainers we had met. After evaluating Marieke he said that Marieke could actually be trained to be an
"obedience dog"... which we would both have considered a preposterous statement... except for how
well Marieke responded to him. I had not seen any other trainers do that with her before.
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