rescue dogs

Things Professional Trainers Never Say

By |2022-02-23T12:51:33-05:00June 15th, 2016|Categories: Dog training, Medications for fearful dogs|Tags: , , , , , |

Don't expect to hear any of these comments from a professional animal trainer. "I don’t feed the dolphins fish when they jump through the hoop, they should do it because they respect me." "We never use food to train our lions to stand for injections, that would only make them think they’ll get food every time they did it for us." "The seals at our facility ...

People Can Be Amazing!

By |2016-03-28T11:53:43-04:00March 28th, 2016|Categories: Dog training, Helping fearful dogs|Tags: , , , , , |

Somehow last week, while walking between the kitchen and living room I managed to misplace my wallet. After spending hours looking, clearly not everyplace, I gave up and cancelled the credit cars and headed off this morning to the Department of Motor Vehicles for a new license. It was during this early morning drive that I passed a couple walking a young cattle dog. As ...

Random Acts of Cruelty

By |2014-07-27T08:43:07-04:00July 27th, 2014|Categories: Dog training, Helping fearful dogs|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

In the same way that fast food has provided us with the opportunity to over consume sugars, fats and chemical additives that may be contributing to, if not outright causing, many of the diseases prevalent in the western world, the "balanced" field of dog training has provided us with the opportunities and excuses to be cruel to our dogs, the implications of which are ignored ...

You’ve Got The Ball: Dogs in the 21st Century

By |2014-04-07T10:00:45-04:00April 7th, 2014|Categories: Dog training, Fostering Dogs, Helping fearful dogs|Tags: , , , , , , , |

I suspect that those of us who work with dogs in any capacity, love them, respect them and want them to have the best lives possible. Yet I can't help but be surprised and disappointed when I hear and read information about dogs being shared that does more harm than good, or opportunities to educate the pet owning population are missed. Research on the social ...

Dog Displaying Fear or Aggression? Don’t Make Them Repeat Themselves

By |2014-03-31T10:25:55-04:00March 31st, 2014|Categories: Dog training, Fostering Dogs, Helping fearful dogs|Tags: , , , , , , , , , |

Go on Sunny, there's fun ahead. When a dog performs a fearful or aggressive behavior it's as though they are saying, "I don't have the skills to behave in any other way in this situation." Why would you want to make them repeat themselves? If you were to drop a kid into a pool that was just deep enough they didn't feel completely safe ...

The “Somebody Told Me” Effect

By |2014-03-28T13:21:43-04:00March 28th, 2014|Categories: Dog training, Fostering Dogs, Helping fearful dogs|Tags: , , , , , , , , |

One of my goals for this blog, my Facebook pages, group, and tweets, is to try to stave off the inclination pet owners and many dog trainers have to jump on any bandwagon that comes along in regard to training dogs, or to keep throwing different sh*t against the wall and hoping something sticks. There is no shortage of advice, methods, equipment and supplements out ...

Time To Raise The Bar

By |2014-03-21T09:15:10-04:00March 21st, 2014|Categories: Dog training, Fostering Dogs, Helping fearful dogs|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , |

There are few fields in which having grown up either performing a task or with the student, is enough to qualify one as a professional and justifies charging for one's services. Unless of course we are talking about dog trainers. I grew up reading and might be able to teach plenty of kids to read but if your kid has dyslexia it would be wiser ...

Getting It Our Way

By |2014-03-17T09:57:33-04:00March 17th, 2014|Categories: Dog training, Fostering Dogs, Helping fearful dogs|Tags: , , , , , , , , , |

I was having a conversation recently with parents about hitting small children as a disciplinary action. These were by almost anyone's definition good parents. They loved their children, took great care of them, fed them well, played with them, read stories, and did all the things we would recommend parents do with their children. They also happened to think it was ok to hit them, ...

Got Change?

By |2014-02-25T08:27:18-05:00February 25th, 2014|Categories: Dog training, Fostering Dogs, Helping fearful dogs|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , |

Nothing to worry about here! When we are training our fearful dogs we are facilitating a change in how they respond to events or objects (including us and other animals) they are exposed to. There is likely an endless array of ways we can come up with to do this, but ultimately what we are doing is making the scary stuff either neutral ...

Good Enough Maybe Isn’t

By |2014-01-23T11:02:30-05:00January 23rd, 2014|Categories: Dog training, Fostering Dogs, Helping fearful dogs|Tags: , , , , , , , |

Dogs are remarkable. They are so adept at figuring out what we want that we are often led to believe that we know what we're going. Enough dogs figured out how to change their behavior when faced with Cesar Millan's alpha rolling, tssking, and neck pokes that people came to believe that they knew how to be leaders and how dogs need to be handled. ...

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