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Hi Everyone, I am new to the forum and a brand new first time greyhound owner! My wife and I are extremely excited and love our new greyhound Arrow. She is 6, was a racer and was also mother to two litters of racing pups. We have had her about two weeks. 90% of everything is great, we are so happy! The one area that is becoming tough (besides stairs) is walking. She started off walking great, staying with us, not leading, etc. But in the last few days she has started freezing with increasing frequency and seems often not to really want to walk anywhere other than the backyard. There are a few factors I should mention: I have two residences due to work and every few weeks have to go back and forth between them (My wife and I work in academia; it's a pretty common situation in this field). Our dog was with us in our primary residence for the first week. Then we debated as to whether or not I should take her with me or leave her. I will be her primary caretaker and she will be staying with me 95% of the time, so we thought it best for her to go with me to bond as her primary caretaker. She did great in the car and did amazing on walks the first several days. But now the freezing has started. I've tried nudging from behind, which worked at first. I tried food, which doesn't seem to help that much. And the last few days she's really only wanted to walk around the unfenced back yard on the leash (which is pretty large), do her business and go back in. Also, I live on a main street here and the traffic can be quite busy, especially during rush hour. I'm wondering if this is scaring her off from venturing out? It wasn't an issue at all at first, but maybe something scared her? Any help would be much appreciated! I really want her to be healthy and happy! Thank you!

Hi all, I'm looking for some advice from anyone who has a grey that behaves like ours does please! Apologies it might be a long post! Poppy is 3, had her since 18 months, 'retired' but never raced. She's perfectly normal at home, gets more playful than our previous two greys, possibly down to being in kennels for less time and younger. Where the difference is is when out for a walk. She will be walking along and then suddenly freeze, refuse to go any further until we turn around. She will also do this at points on the road where she wants to cross or at junctions. Recently she's even done it after her walk refusing to come back in the house! She most often does it at or approaching corners or junctions but sometimes along a straight road or path. She also often does it at the end of the driveway at the start of a walk. We've narrowed it down to her being scared/anxious of something... or stubborn! There is no obvious single trigger (sound, object etc) and she doesn't whine, shiver, shake or tuck her tail between her legs or give off any strong signals of fear. We've tried being firm with her, pushing her gently from the shoulder or back, waiting for her, trying to give her treats, consoling her by stroking her and fussing her when she stops and none seem to make her carry on in the intended direction. We don't want to keep praising her for doing it if it reinforces the problem nor do we want to tell her off if she is scared. She enjoys walking and gets relatively excited when we get her lead out but will also be happy not to go for a walk all day (we don't want to not walk her!) So if anyone else has come across this we'd love to know if there is anything you've tried that stops this behaviour or can identify what the issue is. Thanks in advance!

I've had Henry about 4 months. He is the sweetest dog ever. And generally completely well behaved. About three weeks ago, I went out of town for work and the pet sitter said he started refusing to come in the main door to my apartment building. She said it would take him about 10 minutes to walk through the door. He has done the same with me ever since as well. He is very hesitant to walk over the threshold of the door. Sometimes he comes in easier than others. The entryway floor is tile and then carpteted stairs. He is fine with every other door way. Its very strange! The door has never slammed on him or anything like that. Could it be the tile? He just stands outside of the doorway wagging his tail and staring at me. It's very cute but annoying as well. I'm just trying to understand his hestitation? I don't pull on his collar, but after about 5 minutes of waiting and calling him in, I get behind him and nudge him in/ hug him and nudge him through the door. Then he runs up the stairs really quickly. Any advice? Thanks!!

Hello all, My partner and I adopted a three-year-old female greyhound (Alice) from a rescue shelter on 12/26/2016. She was racing up until 10/2016. She is extremely sweet and good-natured. The only issue that we have been running into is her freezing up. We knew that greyhounds tend to do this, especially in new situations. We live in a third floor walk-up, and our stairs are quite steep. Every time we try to take her outside to "do her business", she freezes and refuses to come to the door. My partner gives her a strong tug on the leash, and she begrudgingly will make her way to the stairwell. Getting her down the stairs is a combo of treats, calm reassurance, and firm leash guidance. Once we get outside, she pees and poops in our backyard area, but she has no desire to walk around the neighborhood. Positive reinforcement and treats move her inch by inch down the driveway. We have also tried applying more pressure on the leash/pushing her from behind/moving her legs, none of which help. Sometimes she freezes for up to five minutes at a time. If we manage to get her in the car and drive her somewhere new, she is much more inquisitive and tends to not mind walking around (though she will still freeze up from time to time). She especially likes being off-leash at the dog park. However, as soon as she can tell that we are heading back home, she runs up the stairs with little prompting! I am worried that she has begun to associate the scary new task of going downstairs with walking down our driveway and around our neighborhood. Our question is: What do you do when your greyhound won't budge? Is it okay to be applying firm pressure to the leash? As long as she does her business in the backyard, we are happy. Walking around the neighborhood can wait. We know that greyhounds can take weeks, if not months, to adjust to their new surroundings. We just want to make sure we are taking the right approach to everything! Any words of wisdom would be much appreciated. We are excited to be joining this greyhound community. Thanks so much!

Hey Guys - I am hoping you all may have some advice for this new greyhound owner We have had our little lady for 1 month, and she has been settling into city life really well after her rescue from the farm. However, in the last few days she has decided to freeze up when we take her to the common dog area where the dogs of our unit complex can poop, pee and socialise. We have had here in this area since she arrived and knows the park well. She has had no bad experiences (in my eyes) in these areas that would spook her, but she had decided in the last three days to freeze on the way to the park and refuses to walk anywhere near them. It makes life a little hard as this is the main area where she can do her business. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to reduce her anxiety on this? We have an adaptil collar on the way to assist with overall anxiety anyways, but this one just seemed a little strange Many thanks in advance! Sarah

We adopted Joey about 3 weeks ago. He was called a true "Spook" because of his fears. He was retired at 19 months because they couldn't train him to race. It started when we picked him up from his foster parents, where he had only been a week. Our organization does their adoptions out of PetCo. We couldn't get Joey to move his feet to `. We had to push and pull till finally my husband bent down and walked Joey's legs for him. When Joey finally saw the door of the van open he ran and jumped in immediately. When we got home, we couldn't get him OUT of the van.Our older Greyhound, Bessie, tried to get him out. She would jump in and out of the van. Eventually, somehow my husband got Joey out of the van and walked his legs into the house. Joey was initially afraid of every human who he encountered. It wasn't long before he LOVED me...unless I walk towards him. He won't take food out of my hand, such as dog bones. I have to set them down somewhere, making sure he saw me. The biggest problem we have is he will not walk on a leash or if I hold his collar. All of the other Greyhounds I've had, racers or not, jump up as soon as I hook my finger through the loop on their collar. Joey puts on all 4 breaksn and will NOT budge. He won't walk with me even if his sister is right beside him. Once in a while I have gotten him to walk right next to me as I held is collar, but only for about 5 steps or so then freezes again. Now we have the issue of peeing in the house. He sleeps in our room on his own bed and, knowing dogs don't like to potty where they sleep, we would put a baby gate on the door so he wouldn't have access to the whole house. This worked perfect! Until 2 nights ago. He peed on my husband's dresser. Don decided it would be easier to clean up any pee Joey may do during the night elsewhere than his dresser, which the urine ran under and out the other side. (thankfully we have laminate floors and no carpeting at this time). So, last night we just didn't put the gate up. Joey peed in the Family Room about six feet from the back door. Besides the leash issue, if we open the door he doesn't trust us. We have to leave the door wide open and walk away and sit down before he'll go out. HELP! Alice Momma of Bessie (9) and Joey (19 months)

I have been stalking you all silently for a while now - so first a quick thank you for all the great information and lovely pics here! All of my questions up until this point have been answered in other topic threads, but I am totally stumped on this one and am hoping to be enlightened... My hubby and I adopted our first greyhound, Asha, just under six months ago. We 'fostered to adopt' which means we got her straight from the track, so we are the only retirement home she's ever known (which means this is our fault of course!). She is now 2.5 years old and is a very easy hound to live with, with very good house manners, and moderate leash and social ones . She is also the least food motivated dog we have ever come across. As a result, while she is quite well trained in commands that are enforceable by a leash or my body - such as wait, leave it, let's go, this way, and to a lesser extent, come & up, my attempts at training her to do anything that requires her to move herself by herself have failed. This includes lie down, and go to your bed, among others. The difficulty is two-fold: 1) getting her interested enough in some kind of a reward to take the action in the first place (she might not bother to follow a 'lure' and is not at all motivated to keep 'trying' things until she earns her treat) and 2) once she understands the command, motivating her enough that she will bother to do it. On a side note: I have tried the 'lazy training' method of saying the command as she is about to do one of these things of her own volition, and then rewarding her for it. I'm not sure whether she just doesn't connect the dots, or doesn't care enough to do it on 'command' later, but I have not had any luck with it. Considering most dog training assumes you can use food (or something your dog values highly) for luring/motivating/rewarding, I have tried a huge variety of foods to tempt her delicate palate. This includes: cream cheeses, cheeses, custard, ice cream, bacon, deli meats, raw and home dehydrated liver, heart etc, raw and cooked mince meats, peanut butter, bbq chicken, hot dog, fish (tinned and freshly cooked), butter, bread, fruit & veg, and so on. Many of these she won't even deign to eat in the comfort of her own home, freely given (even the ones she likes, and has eaten before on other occasions). She is a happy, relatively confident greyhound and is not at all anxious or distracted in these instances - she just doesn't care about food very much. The best response I can hope for is a low-moderate interest. She is on a raw diet, which I'm sure decreases the value of these other offerings, but I'd be reluctant to change her diet just to try and increase the value of treats. She is of course more interested in food around dinner time, but being slightly more interested doesn't go all that far when she is so disinterested to begin with. The bottom line is, that while I can use treats as training motivation/reward for low difficulty tasks, food is never going to be more important to her than an exciting situation (like spotting a kangaroo or cat) or avoiding something she'd prefer not to do. She is affectionate and loves attention and pets, but again, this has limited value for her when it comes to harder activities or more exciting environments. She does like toys too, but only when the mood suits her, so they can't really be used as a reward. The one thing she absolutely loves is walks (unless it's raining) and I have managed to use this in some training instances, but it's applications are fairly limited, at least as far as my poor brain can figure. I think one of the best examples of this as a problem is getting her to jump into the car. As mentioned, Asha LOVES walks, and nine times out of ten, we drive somewhere to take her for a walk. She also comes with us on various social visits, day trips, errands, and even long road trips and is very happy in the car, enjoying all the sniffies that accompany it, and of course being close to her humans! The point is she likes the car and has very positive associations with it. We have taught her the command 'Up' and she definitely knows what it means (we use it to get over logs and streams etc as well as in the car and on the human bed). On the way TO a walk, or if we are otherwise going out, she jumps into the car on command very easily. However, once we have finished walking, or visiting a friend etc, a lot of the time she will refuse to jump into the car. Trust me when I say this is not about the different terrain etc when the car is parked in different places - under the right circumstances (i.e. it's raining and she wants to get out of it, or she's been out with us all day and is ready to go home, or she decides that high value treat might just be worth bothering to jump for) she jumps in without difficulty. She has jumped into the car literally hundreds of times. However, when we first got her she didn't know how to jump, at all, and we had to lift her into the car, over small logs, onto our bed and so on. She is very happy to be picked up and I suspect she would really just prefer us to lift her, thank you very much! We have tried a bunch of different strategies here - including all sorts of high value treats (which works, occasionally), sitting in the car ourselves ignoring her until she gets bored enough to jump in (worked 2-3 times), leaving her tied up while driving out of sight, then coming back 30 seconds later and trying again (again, worked, about 3 times), backing her up when she doesn't jump in the first time, then asking again (worked 2-3 times)... you get the idea. All of these have been followed by high praise and treats every time when she finally does get in. But nothing we've tried works without fail, and most only work a few times before she decides she doesn't care about that anymore. What does this mean? Is she being stubborn (or dare I ask, dominant)? Or is this standard greyhound behaviour if you haven't come up with sufficient motivation for them? As we have given in on a few occasions, is she too intelligent and just trying to train US to pick her up? I'm at a bit of a loss as to the implications of this obvious refusal to follow a command she knows - and also what the heck to try next! She seems generally respectful from what I can tell - she waits until I tell her its ok to eat, she will drop/leave something she's found if I say 'leave it' (though she will try again multiple times if she is very into it and I don't take it away - but still drops it each time). She only gets off our bed slowly and with a fair bit of verbal encouragement - but she does get off, and I've noticed she takes her sweet time to get off even if someone's at the door or dinner is ready etc too. When we first got her we were very careful to always go out the door first, but we are more slack about it these days. If anyone has any tips on motivating a very non-food-driven hound, or insight into what might be going through her mind, please chime in! Thanks for reading my essay

Hi, this is my first time posting and we need some help. My dog refuses to go outside, even to potty. We got our grey, Shelby, Sept 2012, when she was 2 1/2 years old. For the first couple of months she loved going for walks. Then, suddenly, she had to be coaxed to go for a walk, although she LOVED to run around in fenced yard and would pee and poop out there. We hadn't trained her at that point, and only my husband was able to get her to go out for a walk. Long story short, we hired a very good but VERY expensive trainer for about 4 months in mid-2013. She showed us how to lead Shelby, get her to focus, and we were able to walk her again. Fast forward to about 8 months ago. Shelby started refusing to go for a walk in the morning. My husband leaves for work very early, and sometimes she would come downstairs and he'd let her in backyard to potty. But when I tried to takeher out again around 8:30, she refused to even come downstairs. I tried EVERYTHING to get her down (treats, going outside, starting my car and coming back in with garage door opening/closing) with only rare success. That meant that she wouldn't go out again until around 3:00 pm!!!! She only had 1 accident in the house. Otherwise, she'd go out with husband when he came home from work around 3. She didn't seem sick and had normal poops and pee. We'd take her out at night before bed without any problem, and she was fine then too. However, she wouldn't touch her morning meal - probably because she didn't want to have to poop again??? About 3 months ago, she started refusing to go out at all, even at night. We'd get her leash and she'd run to her bed in the den, or the couch. However, once we were able to get her outside (morning or night) she was fine. Then, about a month ago....it started again, whether on or off leash. On the rare occasions I am able to get her out, she goes down the driveway, pees, and then stops. Maybe I can get her halfway down the block, but after that - she digs in her heels and I cannot and will not drag her down the street. I try the techniques the trainer taught us (that once worked before) but now nothing works! She won't even poop. And worse - she won't even go outside. She won't even go out when out neighbors try to walk her, and she loves them. She used to go for walks with them without any problem. She is afraid of certain loud noises - school bus, "booms", and others - but even when there is no discernible noise she won't go. I do not know what to do! She's a little better with my husband, who has established himself as the alpha, but she won't budge with me. We have a vet appt in a couple of weeks for her yearly, but I don't know how much help he'll be. I'm really worried about her physical/digestive health, in addition to mental health. We cannot afford another trainer or a dog walker. This is not normal behavior. I feel like such a bad parent!!!