socialization

Is Your Dog Trainer A Professional?

By |2016-02-07T15:56:25-05:00February 7th, 2016|Categories: Dog training, Fostering Dogs, Helping fearful dogs|Tags: , , , , , , , , |

For the majority of my adult working life I was involved in the travel and outdoor recreation industry. Early in my career I was introduced to the reality of legal liability. I make no claims about my depth of understanding of negligence vs. gross negligence or how they would be argued in a court of law, I do understand that providers of goods or services have ...

Grow Up

By |2014-07-17T17:36:54-04:00July 17th, 2014|Categories: Dog training, Fostering Dogs, Helping fearful dogs|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |

At some point early in the life of a human we develop intellectually and emotionally enough to realize that it's not always just about us. Hopefully when this happens we've had plenty of time to learn to feel safe and loved. It's not an easy step to take, but a step that most of us not only take, but run with. We go on to become teachers, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Suffering the Consequences

By |2013-12-16T09:46:33-05:00December 16th, 2013|Categories: Dog training, Fostering Dogs, Helping fearful dogs|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |

I heard an interesting piece on NPR's This American Life radio show. The topic was institutionalized, racial segregation in housing in America. During the 1960's when people protested, often violently, against this practice a comment made by then President Nixon went something like this, if the demands were met (end policies that perpetuated segregation in housing) the protesters would be rewarded for protesting or rioting, ...

History Matters

By |2013-11-06T08:31:24-05:00November 6th, 2013|Categories: Dog training, Fostering Dogs, Helping fearful dogs|Tags: , , , , , , , |

I'll be at my vet's office tonight running a class called "Vet Ready!" to help owners and dogs feel more comfortable coming to the clinic. Few things are as clear as how they respond to handling to give you an idea of what they have learned to expect from you. For some owners the way their dog responds is....well....history. The dog has learned that visits to ...

Take It When You Can Get It

By |2013-09-29T14:12:12-04:00September 29th, 2013|Categories: Dog training, Helping fearful dogs|Tags: , , , , , , , , , |

In November Sunny will have lived with us for 8 years. He has remained wary and afraid of my husband for those 8 years. There are likely a variety of reasons for this. John is a man, dogs tend to be more afraid of men than they are of women. Early on in their relationship there were several events that scared Sunny, quite literally sh**less ...

Wasting a Good System

By |2013-09-07T11:09:26-04:00September 7th, 2013|Categories: Dog training, Helping fearful dogs|Tags: , , , , , |

Every organism on the planet needs to behave in particular ways in order to survive. For some the behavior is more complex, for others it might be moving in one direction with their mouth (or whatever it is they have that allows nutrients in) open. Even microscopic organisms will change their behavior based on whether or not they are reinforced for a particular behavior. They ...

Over Equipped

By |2013-04-28T09:13:07-04:00April 28th, 2013|Categories: Dog training, Helping fearful dogs|Tags: , , , , , , , |

I should start this post with a disclaimer that I am not advocating against the use of the pieces equipment I am going to mention, rather that we should take a good long look at how and why we are using them. Routinely a post will make the rounds of the social media circuit about a dog who while playing with a dog, ended up ...

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