Ashleigh brought Remy in for a 6-week board and train. Remy is a Belgian Malinois, and the pattern she came in with was fear reactivity, the kind of barrier-frustration and on-leash explosion that makes every walk feel like rolling the dice.
Mals are not casual dogs. They run hot, they pick up patterns instantly, and when a Mal goes reactive, the size of the dog and the size of the response do not match. The good news: when you build the right system around a Mal, that same intensity is what carries the training forward. They go from "too much" to "too sharp to ignore the work." That is the bet you take with this breed.
Six weeks of structure
Six weeks of structured days at our Upland facility. Five days a week, two sessions a day. Marker work first, engagement second, obedience layered on top. The point of a 6-week program with a reactive Mal is not to "fix" reactivity in a vacuum, it is to give the dog a different default mode under stress, and to build the handler skills Ashleigh would need to maintain that mode at home.
A different walk
By the end of the program Remy was, in Ashleigh's own words, a dream on a leash. Not because the breed magically changed, but because the system gave her a clear way to communicate, a clear way to ask, and a clear way to confirm. That is the whole game.
I never thought we would get here and could not be happier. The experience has been nothing short of transformative.