Hi, my name is Fano and I live in Greece.
As you may have heard, we have a lot of stray dogs in my country, and the economy crisis over the last years has only made things worse… Many people just open their doors or the backseat of their cars and let their dogs go. The last months I have been volunteering at a local shelter and in many cases I have boarded some dogs in my home, in order to train and rehabilitate them, and consequently make them adoptable. I closely followed the training method you suggest in your book with amazing results, although, to be true, at first I didn’t expect it to work that well! However, there is a problem in which I cannot find a solution. Namely, food scavenging. When I let the dog off leash, she falls in a food-seeking frenzy and ignores my commands. People here have the habbit to leave leftovers for the strays in parks and street-corners, something which is not completely bad, considering the number of poor, starving strays. But some of them leave poisonous baits in order to eliminate that number… My ‘trained’ ex-strays cannot resist the temptation and keep on seeking for food. The only solution I have found is to muzzle them, and that does not make them very desirable for adoption. They are quite happy and obedient with the muzzle on, in fact I trained them to see it as a positive sign of going for a walk, but I would prefer that it wasn’t necessary. How can I overcome this problem? Or should I forget the off-leash training alltogether?
