Golden Retriever Therapy and Companion Dog Success Stories

Finley - Ina/Piano 2013

5/7/2014

This is a long overdue letter to tell you how much we adore our Finley. She's just incredible, as close to perfect as I could imagine.
When we had first read about Snitker's Golden's imprinting last year, we figured it "couldn't hurt," but now that we've had Finley, we wouldn't have it any other way! (Dave and I both nearly panicked thinking what we'd do when we want to get dogs in the future if you no longer breed!)

From the moment Finley got home and still now when she's ten months old, she has been more gentle and calm than our other goldens and more tuned in to what we want her to do. She's easily redirected by the "mama's growl" you taught us when we picked her up, and she looks to please us.

Finley was so easy to train. When we got our first golden 12 year ago, we had no children and a lot of free time. I had at least three training sessions every single day for the first year. When we got Finley, we had four young children and very busy lives, so (although I'm embarrassed to admit it) we spent about three minutes a day training her. She was so tuned in to what we wanted that she's far better trained than he ever was, even though she's still in her "puppy adolescence."

Finley doesn't jump on people, which can only be because of the imprinting, because she rarely even tried it. This was something we tried to break our first golden of until he was 10 years old!

Finley has been amazing with our kids all along, even though she was bigger than them just a few months. Our second golden always wanted to be the dominant dog. Finley always knew her place, which, again, must be largely due to the imprinting.

Finley is also a brave little girl. Not to pick on our poor first golden again, but he was always dreadfully afraid of lawnmowers, vacuum cleaners, garbage trucks, anything loud, and rakes (hmmm?). We had made a conscious effort to expose him to these things as we'd read to do in the puppy books, but I think it might have been too late. Finley, on the other hand, had these types of experiences at the right time due to the imprinting process and the directions you gave us when we picked her up.

A few weeks ago, the kids were playing at the park and Finley was tied to a nearby tree waiting for us. A man came over with a very hyper dog. He explained his dog's behavior by telling me that the dog was only 10 months. I said, "I had a dog just like that once." He pet Finley and said how nice it was when they got older and calmed down. Then he asked how old she was. I told her she was 9 months. He was completely shocked. He said he'd been watching her interact with the kids and wait patiently, and he assumed she was an elderly dog. Later he jokingly threatened to "dognap" Finley and leave me his dog.

Finley is just a happy, well adjusted, dog who has fit perfectly into our family. Thank you so much for all you do for these dogs. You give them the perfect start for happy lives and you give families a priceless gift.