Does your dog chase cars? I certainly hope not.

I have had plenty of clients over the years whose dogs have chased cars or have at least tried to chase cars. It is an activity that can be quite dangerous, as you can imagine.

I have a couple of clients right now whose dogs do so. One elderly client was knocked down when her German Shepherd decided to chase the car that drove past them. Fortunately, no one was injured and the person in the car was nice enough to stop and give her time to get her dog back under control. (And fortunately, her dog loses interest when the car stops.)

Zooka has been considering taking up car chasing as his new hobby. I first noticed him contemplating it when he was around eight-and-a-half months old. This was in mid-January 2020. At this writing, he is ten-and-a-half months old, so it's been two months since this started.

We live on 13.5 acres on a rural area. Most of our walks are on trails on our property. When Zooka and I start out on our morning walk, we usually head down our south driveway (we have two driveways) then loop up through our field and around the rest of our property.

We live right on the main road that travels through this area. The speed limit is 50 mph. Some people drive around that speed. Many other people drive 60 to 65 mph. So as we walk down our south driveway, it runs somewhat parallel to the road.

Now, we have a fence up along the road and we have gates that we keep locked when no one is needing to enter/exit. So, Zooka is protected from getting to the road.

I still do not want him chasing a car even if there is a fence there. There will be times we are walking places with traffic and there will not always be a fence in between. Safer all around if we do not get into any bad habits.

So, I said he's thinking about it. He's at the age when he's really gung-ho about chasing moving objects. Mostly that's bunnies. And birds that fly low or are flitting about in our scrub oak. Once in a while that's deer. Once in a while that's a bird flying over.

But he also started watching the vehicles driving by. Prior to seeing this start, he ignored the cars. Which is what I want him to do. Pay no attention. We want the vehicles to be a non-issue. But he really wants to chase things.

And those cars are going fast. The appeal in chasing something that moves that fast can be hard to deny sometimes.

At first, he was just watching. But I could tell that he was thinking about chasing.

So we have been working on keeping control. Keeping that self control that prevents him from following through on what he's thinking. Sometimes it's harder than other times. Sometimes he does ignore them if he's busy with other things.

But about six weeks after I caught him first thinking about it, he decided to give in to his urge. A car drove by as we were walking down our south driveway. He took off after it. He did not respond when I called him. Fortunately, our fence stopped him from continuing.

I do not know if he would have stopped if the fence had not been there or not. He was more or less running parallel to the car (but behind it) as he ran on our property. He did not attempt to get to the road.

Regardless of whether he just wanted to run alongside the car or actually chase it, does not matter to me. Either way, it is not acceptable.

Now, initially he was on leash on these walks. But he had been doing so well we worked up to off leash on this part of the walk. Of course, if we did not have it fenced/gated to prevent access to the road, he would still be on leash. Which would not stop him from trying to chase, it would just be another measure to prevent him from succeeding at it.

That was the only time he has tried to chase and did not respond. We've had a few other times when he started to run and I called him back and he returned immediately.

If he were not responding well, he would be going back on leash while we work through this. But he is responding well except for that one time.

But returning when I call him is not enough. He needs to learn NOT to chase at all. Not cars. Or trucks. Or motorcycles.

Some of our walks, we are walking a bit farther away from the vehicles and not walking down our south driveway. Some days I can see it in him. That desire to chase. And we keep our distance to resist that temptation.

Some of our walks, we deliberately do walk down that driveway so we can practice. Sometimes we practice sitting and waiting. Sometimes we practice Heeling. We practice doing things that are incompatible with chasing.

Most of the time he does really well. Most of the time he does not try to chase. But I still catch him thinking about it sometimes. And I watch carefully. And I give him the direction he needs to make better choices.

We will overcome this issue and prevent it from becoming a problem. I am confident in that. Because I know how to handle it. And I know how to manage things to prevent it if it starts to become more difficult for him.

I am glad that I was able to catch it when it first started. It is always harder to change once it's been going for a while or once it's become a bad habit. We can still change it even then. It just takes more work.

Zooka is still thinking about a car chasing hobby, but I am going to convince him to forget about it and find other ways to have fun and burn off that energy that is racing through his adolescent body these days.

We will put car chasing behind us and one day it will be a thing of the distant past.

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