There is a sunny side!
It's probably just me, maybe it's cabin fever or hormonal, but I've been particularly bothered lately by all the bad press that dog owners have been getting in blogs and tweets that I follow. Sure there are bad owners out there, negligent and even criminal ones, who should never be allowed control of a dog ...
If not the ‘dog friendly’ trainers, then who?
I was helping out with a reactive dog class and a woman enrolled with a Great Dane she had recently adopted. She had been turned away from another class because she was using a shock collar on the dog. In effect she had been sent off to find a trainer who uses shock collars to ...
More management thoughts
I heard a well known trainer say that the hardest thing for many owners to do is to stop putting their dogs into situations where they react inappropriately. Her recommendation that they find alternatives to the ways they are currently managing their pets routinely goes unheeded. In some cases a certain level of management may ...
Management & Skills
The process of working with fearful dogs could be simplified and broken down into two steps; management and skills development. Management: Handlers need to come up with plans for managing a fearful dog so as to eliminate or minimize their opportunities for responding in fearful ways. This can often be challenging and many owners find ...
The price of a fearful dog
Years ago a friend decided he was ready to adopt a dog. As a young man he had traveled cross country with his beloved chihuahua and he was hoping to find a small dog to add to his and his children's lives. Small dogs were not easy to find at nearby shelters so he looked ...
Their brains make them do it
I recently heard about a study that was done using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), a type of specialized MRI scan, which measures the change in blood flow related to neural activity in the brain of humans or other animals. This technology makes it is possible to see which neurons are active in a brain ...
Evolution anyone?
I watched a 28 second video yesterday of a trainer in Canada, doing some pretty rough stuff to a dog. The abuse that he inflicted on the dog included sharp collar jerks, pulling the dog off its front feet and slapping the dog on the face. It was unclear what the dog, a large breed, ...
Drop these D’s
I am constantly trying to eliminate the belief and the feelings I get when I assume that dogs' failures to respond to my requests are due to their choosing to be; disobedient, defiant or dominant. Not that dogs don't necessarily have those as motivations for behaving inappropriately but most dogs, and especially fearful ...
No, YOU get over it!
When people talk about their fearful dogs I often hear the questions, how do I get him 'passed his fears' or 'over his fears'? It's as though fear is a location that a dog just needs to journey through. Although it makes a nice metaphor, the image of a path from a place of anxiety ...
