For a very good guide to all sorts of dog training processes and dog behavior challenges, I use and recommend Clickertraining ...that link goes to the description of this terrific ebook you download immediately, wherever you are! -- Rosana

I can find out all kinds of interesting things about who comes to this website and what they do, in the aggregate. I recently put a little world map on the homepage of training-dogs.com, which shows where people are coming from. (This information comes from something called the IP address of your internet connection.) This has been a surprise: I expected readers from the US, Canada, the UK, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, but the map also shows quite a few people coming from various parts of Asia and the Middle East. We truly live in one world.

The number of people who come to the site daily has been rising steadily. The past couple of months it’s been about 550 people a day. But before I get happy that I’m influencing 16,500 people a month to train their dogs in a more positive way, I’d better look at my stats for how long people stick around. Over a third of the people are out of here in under 10 seconds! This is actually typical of how people surf the net.

But the people who stick around do sometimes read a fair amount. At the other end of the spectrum, I can see that this month 107 people stayed at the site for over half an hour. For those who made it past that first ten seconds, the next largest group (some 1400) were here for three to ten minutes.

The most popular pages are the ones on potty training and crate training dogs, the homepage of the site, the Ian Dunbar page and the one about his Sirius Puppy Training, a list of puppy supplies, and a couple on positive and clicker dog training. All of these pages have been up for several years and have had time to get known… The potty training and crate training pages often get recommended at Yahoo Answers, for instance.

When I redid the site recently, I added this blog and my weekly newsletter partly to make the site more “sticky” — that’s the word webmasters use. At present about 9% of my visitors are returning and 91% first-time. I like the idea of creating a location on the web which has a particular vibe to it, so that people who resonate will come back from time to time.
I don’t know how many people are interested in this behind the scenes stuff, but there have to be a few. That’s what I love about writing webpages… I’m pretty much guaranteed that somewhere someone will enjoy or benefit from any given page.

There’s no getting around it, LarryDog is a barker, and he is impelled to defend his territory. At our last place, where we had over an acre fenced, he would run the fenceline at top speed, barking his head off, at the relatively few vehicles that went by. Of course, UPS was his favorite.

Now we have a long narrow quarter of an acre, with a quiet street at the bottom of a gently sloping hill and the house just about all the way at the top of the land. Larry loves to sit on our front porch and go charging down to the street when he notices motion through the slats of the gate. Once there he barks, of course.

That’s relatively easy to handle as he will almost always come when called. He’s a lovely enthusiastic sight, running back to the house, leaping the flowerbeds in his eagerness to see if there is a treat this time.

But now we have a different challenge. We’ve hired a couple of men to do some construction on the side of the house. They need to leave the front gate open, so we keep the dog inside while they are here.

And he’s been barking at their frequent comings and goings. It’s made me appreciate again the barkless Basenji we had until she died a couple of years ago.

So I’ve been working with LarryDog. I had read that dogs don’t bark when they are sitting. I’m not sure that he has read that, but it does help and he does have a very good sit. So I try that. It doesn’t always work, but reinforcing it with goodies at my desk helps. So does asking him to come to me and then rewarding him with some petting. Also rewarding silence.
On an obnoxiousness scale of 1-10, where 10 is the worst, I’d say it has dropped from a 9 to a 7 so far. think I’d better stick a clicker and some treats in my pocket!

I’m really stoked by how dog trainer Leslie Nelson gets dogs to come when called — reliably! Her methods have saved some lives already and I’m sure will save a lot more. I wrote an article for the site called Teach Your Dog a Really Reliable Recall and also did a page on Nelson’s Really Reliable Recall DVD. (She’s done a booklet too, and it’s mentioned on that page.)

You can use her methods with a dog of any age, with any established habits. It will take more time in some cases, but it’s really worth the trouble. Poignantly, a couple of days after I did those pages, I was surfing the net, for once not even with dogs on my mind, when I came across a sad blog entry in Australia, by a woman whose dog had been killed by a car a few days before. I can’t even type this without tears coming to my eyes. Our dogs are so precious, they give us so much! Here is something we can do to make their lives safer.

For some reason, one of the most popular pages on my website has always been the one on potty training puppies and dogs. Maybe it’s because I give enough information for most people to get the general idea. For several years now, I’ve had links to a couple of downloadable ebooks on that page.

I’ve just added another ebook to that page: The Ultimate House Training Guide, by Martin “Scoop” Olliver. I put it in first place because I think it’s the best.

In fact, I liked it so well that I wrote a whole page review of it here.

I just wondered… did the author get his nickname “Scoop” from the amount of poop he has scooped in his 12+ years of dog training?

If you want to skip all my writing (I won’t be offended…) and go right to the webpage about this ebook, with comments from people who have used the ebook to housetrain their puppies and dogs, as well as a full description of what’s in the ebook, just click on the image on the left.

And if you use it, do come back and post a comment!