The Beautiful Flow of Experimentation
When we are living with any dog, but especially a fearful dog, we need to be prepared, at any moment, to reinforce behaviors we like. This is what behavior modification is all about. If you sat two children down, one with a pile of marbles, the other with a bucket of tennis balls and gave ...
Do You Have Any Business Punishing a Dog?
How would you justify going to a surgeon who claimed to be really good at cutting out tumors but had flunked out of classes on physiology and biology? Maybe some of their patients survived the surgery and went on to live full lives without a tumor, but what about the others? What about that nerve ...
Are We Their Best Friends?
I was asked by a newspaper to write a review for the film One Nation Under Dog which will be showing at a local film festival. Here it is. One Nation Under Dog is a documentary divided into three segments exploring the complicated and often eccentric relationships people have with dogs. Though some of the ...
Think Like A Human
Pet owners are often encouraged to think like a dog when faced with behavior challenges. I can’t help but feel a twinge of discomfort when I hear it. Attempts to think like a dog are often accompanied by fables of why a dog is behaving as they are. They’re jealous or angry, we need to ...
Train em, Don’t restrain em
Last night when I should have been doing other things or at least heading off to bed I was looking at Facebook. A friend had posted a plea for information about how to get ointment into the eye of her resistant little dog. Almost all of the suggestions included using some form of restraint, including ...
Stockholm Syndrome?
I was reading a post in The Crossover Trainer Blog and was struck by the implications of this comment made about her observation of Cesar Millan at his 'Dog Psychology Center'. "........He walked in with me and one could definitely sense he had an effect on the dogs. I concede he does have “something” about him that effects ...
Failure Must Always Be An Option
"Deb-ra, it's 10:00, get to bed!" I'd been in the basement for hours learning how to use the pogo stick my parents had given me that day for my birthday. Throughout my childhood there were many skills I practiced for hours or days. There was the set of stilts my father made for me after ...
When in doubt, leave them home
We'll skip the crowds thank you Recently I spent the day at a booth at a Pet Expo. The dogs and owners I saw could provide me with a year’s worth of blog posts. I met some of the most caring and empathetic people you’d ever find, like the young man who lived ...
Sunny & The Kid
Sunny is my dog with the most fear based behavior challenges. For short I call him my 'fearful' dog. It's not an accurate description of him, because he is so much more than just fearful, in good ways and bad, but when managing him around people, it's the easiest label to slap on him. It's ...
