thanks for all your helpful feedback, everyone! by the way, our morkie is named "maki" and he's 6 months old.
wildcard - i'll definitely try the down suggestion and fading away with treats.
nancy - i doubt he's been physically abused, but he WAS constantly left alone at home, which is probably why he came to us like this.
i guess it's my inexperience with dogs that's got me flustered. our corgi mix came to us housebroken and fluent in "sit". he was also really attentive and eager to please/get his treat, so training him was somewhat easy. i've been training the two side by side for the past few days. funny enough, the corgi's been way more obedient ever since our maki joined us, so hopefully he'll catch on.
our biggest challenge has been potty training him. although my sister in law said he was pad trained at her home, maki seems to think it's his sleeping pad at our house and actually held his pee in for like 9+ hours yesterday to avoid peeing on it! argh. his last pee was around 4:30p and by the time i went to bed at 2a, he still hadn't peed. woke up this morning and saw that he finally caved in and peed on the pad overnight... we're going to buy some kind of spray today.
ashley - i think my tone is somewhere in between singing and yelling haha. it's firm, but maki just stares at me and freezes... unless he sees a treat. |