But despite all this—despite the snarling, the messes, the apologies to friends and Grandmas alike—after the training starts, a bond usually forms. It’s not immediate. It is forged, bit by bit, by stuffing Kongs and training “sit” even in really hard places and tracking successes on a scrap piece of paper and watching carefully for a thump-thump-thumping tail and putting up baby gates and setting up careful introductions and all this stuff we do to train problem dogs.