Fire in the belly
I never truly understood what it meant to have a 'fire in your belly' until Sunny came to live with me. I always enjoyed the adventure travel business I run, and loved working outdoors as a river or mountain guide, but I didn't appreciate what it felt like to be so motivated by a purpose, ...
Blazing the trail
If you've ever gone for a walk in the woods or in the mountains and followed a well-used trail, getting from point A to point B is just a question of glancing down now and then to make sure you're still on the path. In some areas there are blazes on trees, stripes of paint ...
Forcing the issue
I am a member of different online chat groups pertaining to training dogs, some geared specifically for fearful dogs. Online communication can be dicey at best. The printed word, without the benefit of inflections or facial expressions can be misinterpreted. Offense can be easily taken and the response often seeming more like road rage than ...
The economy of incentives and the surprising science of motivation
"It has already been demonstrated that an essential element of organizations is the willingness of persons to contribute their individual efforts to the cooperative system…the contributions of personal efforts which constitute the energies of organizations are yielded because of incentives. The egotistical motives of self-preservation and of self-satisfaction are dominating forces; on the whole, organizations ...
Due diligence
I was talking to a friend who recently went to meet the person she had been communicating with for months via phone & email. They'd never met in person but both had built a lovely fantasy of what their life together together would be like. They had much in common, respected the paths each other ...
Guest Blogger-Maizey’s promise
Katie from Lessons From 4 Legs has been kind enough to share the story about her life with Maizey, a fearful Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. The promises Katie had made to Maizey should be ones which we all make to our fearful dogs, and you will no doubt find similarities between their experiences together and ...
They are other nations
"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their ...
Dog training in the real world
I'm thinking about the comments I read or hear from people criticizing trainers as 'cookie pushers' or some other derogatory term they've come up with for reward-centric trainers. It dawned on me that if you don't know what you are looking at, you might very well just see someone feeding dogs treats. But as with ...
Affirmations for a fearful dog
One of the challenges for people working with fearful dogs, especially dogs who have suffered from confinement or restraint during their early development, is getting these dogs to offer behaviors for which they can be rewarded. Do not confuse this with trying to change how a dog feels about things using counter conditioning and desensitization, ...
