I’ve just been reading an article about house training puppies called Errorless Housetraining by Dr. Ian Dunbar. I kept saying “Brilliant!” and “Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?” all the way through it. Want to read it yourself? The link will open in a new browser window.

In a nutshell, Dr. Dunbar makes house training sound so easy. Most of his advice is quite like that on my own potty training dogs page, but there are some (brilliant) variations and explanations. He points out that puppy house training is very much about timing and describes a 1-2-3 process for doing it. He talks about how and where to confine the puppy while he is learning, and outlines an approach to expanding the area the pup can be free in as he gains control. Since one very good way to confine the puppy is via crate training, he talks about that too. The article recommends a particular reward when the puppy does its stuff — and that was one place where I said “Brilliant!” again.

Something that I hadn’t thought about much is the rate of speed to get a puppy outside when you are taking him out as part of his house training routine. Sure, if he was seeming ready to do something on the carpet, I would advocate getting him outside rapidly! But Dr. Dunbar makes a really good point: he says to regularly run quickly with your puppy to the area you want him to use, because if you dawdle around, he may urinate or defecate before getting to your chosen destination. He adds that the rapid movement will be shaking the puppy’s internal organs, making your pet more ready to do his stuff immediately when you stop. Now, if you can’t really run for whatever reason, just hustle along at the best rate of speed you can manage! Pretty soon you will have a house trained dog, and then you can slow down.

In case you haven’t come across his name before… veterinarian, researcher and long-time dog training teacher Ian Dunbar has done a tremendous amount to bring dog training to a new level. His dedication to positive dog training has had ramifications that have spread all over the planet, radically changing the ongoing dialogue about the best methods to train a dog.

Dunbar’s DVD, Sirius Puppy Training, is one of my favorites — that link takes you to my page about the program. I still remember the first time that someone bought the program at Dogwise through my link. It was the very first thing I ever sold from this site, and I burst into tears — because I had helped a puppy have a better start in life. I would never meet the puppy or know anything about it… but my webpage had created a connection. That was one of the defining moments for me in my ongoing dedication to working on this website. Not to sound mushy, but it’s true!

Errorless Housetraining is adapted from Dr. Dunbar’s useful, short paperback, Before You Get Your Puppy… this link takes you to its page at Dogwise, and the box links to it at Amazon:

Before You Get Your Puppy by Ian DunbarRead more about this book…

In summary, if we could all house train our puppies with the clarity of mind and humor that this article brings to the subject, that would be very nice indeed!

UPDATE: After I wrote this article but before I published it to the internet, I was delighted to discover that this entire little book is available online as a free PDF download! I will do a whole blog article about this later, but you can go ahead and get Before You Get Your Puppy, by Ian Dunbar, here at no cost.

[tags]house training puppies, housetraining[/tags]

I ‘ve just finished going through the my main website, www.training-dogs.com, and revising any pages that needed it. I do this once a year. Last year I did a huge revision so there wasn’t a lot to do this time. One main change I’ve done is on the menu at the main site — It was several levels deep and enough of a nuisance to revise that I sometimes put new pages up on the site, didn’t get them on the menu, so nobody ever found them!

So now the menu is just what you see here…. this is just a picture of it so the links don’t work. When you are at the main site, clicking on any of those topics will take you to a page called “What’s in this section?” with a descriptive list of the pages on that topic. Sometimes I have linked to an appropriate category here in the blog, or even to a particular blog article on some aspect of dog training if I thought it was an important enough page.

Not long ago, a Mac user told me that the menu was blocking part of the text on the pages. I had no idea. I *think* I have fixed that, but if you have that problem, please do let me know!

Next, I’ll be revising the blog.

I have plans to change the format of the blog. I should be able to do this without you seeing what I am up to till it’s all done, thanks to a handy WordPress plugin. But I haven’t tried the plugin yet. If you turn up at the blog and it looks really strange, figure I am just doing some testing!

The new blog layout will be what’s called magazine style and I hope we will all like it! It will make it easier to find things in the original section of the site too.

Much more “Web 2.0″ — what’s that?

This website gets between 700 and 800 people a day visiting it, and I was amused in doing my reorganizing to find a blog post from a few years ago where I was thrilled that it had jumped from 125 a day to 275. That’s people, a much smaller number than “hits” since one person can generate a bunch of hits.

Well, I’d really like to have a lot more people coming here, given how much work I put into this! And more importantly really, how useful the information can be to dog owners. I usually rank #1 at google for the phrase “training dogs” but doggone it (pardon the expression), no matter what I have done so far I rank very low for the much-more-searched phrase “dog training.” Just checked and today I am #220 for that phrase. Doesn’t get me any traffic, I’m sure! It’s some consolation that I rank #16 for “dogs training” and #1 for “dog training methods” and am in the top rankings for a bunch of other phrases. (I don’t check this by hand… there is software that does it.)

Here’s where web 2.0 comes in…

You may or may not have heard this expression but it refers to the fact that more and more internet users are connecting with each other in a variety of applications like Facebook (which has a plugin for your dog called Dogbook), Dogster, Twitter, Squidoo, Hubpages, delicio.us, stumbleupon, and many others. On these sites, people communicate with each other about all sorts of things from where they walked their dog to their favorite pages on dog training.

Bit by bit, I’m using these sites more, to connect with other dog owners. Just today I watched a great dog video at Youtube and read reviews of a fascinating dog training book due to comments on twitter and another group I’m on. These will become topics in later blog posts. If you twitter, do sign up to follow me (trainingdogs) and I will do the same with you.

So in a nutshell web 2.0 gets us away from relying so much on the big search engines for finding our information. I have already started a series of articles on other dog websites that I like, and I will be doing more of these. If you have a website related in some way to positive dog training methods, let me know and I will look at it. I don’t do link lists anymore, but if I find something interesting on your site, I may blog about it.

I ‘ve been wondering for a while what people want to know when they search for the phrase free dog training tips. it’s quite a common search term, with or without the word free. What dog or puppy training issues are they trying to resolve, what advice or hints on techniques or methods are they seeking?

Read the rest of this entry

I’m writing this with a heavy heart, because this morning a friend took a dog to be euthanized for behavioral reasons. I know my friend well, and she knows a huge amount about dogs and dog training. I have seen her with her dogs and with mine. When our Rottweiler Lola was a bit timid around her on first meeting, she didn’t hesitate to get right down on the floor and coax Lola gently with some treats. It worked like a charm.

The dog that my friend couldn’t keep was also a Rottweiler, also a female, but getting up in years. My friend had fostered this dog for several weeks, when euthanasia was the only other choice (due to changed circumstances of the dog’s previous owners and a failed placement with someone else), and she had worked with her and with her own three large dogs.

It simply didn’t work out. There had been several fights between the guest and one of my friend’s other dogs, a female Boxer. My friend and her husband saw that the boxer seemed to be very jealous and aggressive toward other female dogs, which they hadn’t really noticed as it had been minimal with their other female dog. They also saw more and more that the old dog, who had never been socialized with other dogs and was an only dog in her first home, was very inappropriate with their dogs causing a lot of the problems herself. For example, instead of sniffing butts she would approach the other dogs head on; my friend’s dogs clearly didn’t care for that behavior. All this provides a very good reason to socialize your only dog with other dogs.

They tried keeping the newcomer separated from the other dog and the cats, but everyone’s quality of life suffered. It was not always possible to keep the dogs apart, and the results were several hundred dollars’ worth of veterinary bills for the old Rottie. Partly because this dog had threatened the woman in the previous placement, my friend deemed the dog unadoptable (also because of age, health and lack of socialization), and made the sad but I think correct choice to euthanize her. Local shelters had already indicated they too thought she was unadoptable.

I told my friend I was writing this and she said, “I think it needs to be clear that with a younger, healthier dog every effort should be made to place the dog and not euthanize. We could have placed this one in a single-dog situation if she had been younger. She really wasn’t aggressive. I want the article to reflect that she wasn’t aggressive but was old and poorly socialized. Also placement of a big dog needs to be with a person confident with big dogs, which that first foster person was not.”

Okay, why am I telling you this sad tale? This is not exactly a fun training tip.

Because I think we all need to be open to the occasional times when the best choice really is euthanasia. Some risks are not worth taking, some compromises are too limiting. I hope you never need to use this tip, but do file it away in the back of your mind just in case. Especially if children are involved! (They were not in this case.)

I don’t know if my friend believes in the Rainbow Bridge (you can look up the phrase in Google if you aren’t familiar with it), but I believe that when this woman eventually crosses that bridge, the dog she tried her best with will be among the most enthusiastic greeters she will meet.

[tags]euthanasia[/tags]