It’s absolutely true, and it happened right here. Our darling Rottie Lola was a total nuisance to walk on leash… any walk with her in our neighborhood or in the mountains close behind us was an erratic tour from one possible munchie to the next.

We currently live in a town in Mexico where garbage collection can be intermittent, and several times Lola ended up with diarrhea. It’s almost always my husband who walks her — partly because I have been afraid of not being able to handle Lola in the event of an untoward encounter with one or more of the large street dogs we sometimes see.

A solution was needed, seriously and soon. Lola and Kelly needed those long walks for exercise and fun. He bought a muzzle from our veterinarian here, and I trained Lola to accept wearing it by using lots of treats offered through it before gradually buckling it. She never reached

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Why do dogs do the things they do? I often wonder about that. (I wonder it about people too but we won’t go into that just now.)

So I was interested to find out that a lot of other people wonder that too. (Dogs. Still not touching the hot potato of human behavior.)

Dogwise, the topnotch online dog bookseller and publisher, has analyzed what their customers buy and noticed that dog behavior is “right up there” with dog training methods. They say that whenever a leading dog behaviorist comes out with a new book, odds are that the book will become one of their best sellers.

Somebody at Dogwise  looked at the sources these current books refer to, and compiled a list of dog behavior books that are frequently drawn on. Read the rest of this entry

What pages out of the dozens on training-dogs.com do people read the most? More to the point for you, are any of these ones that could help you right now?

Through website analysis that Google provides to webmasters, I can find out what people read. I know that the site gets about 500 to 800 people visiting it each day, and sometimes I get a bit puffed up about how much of an effect I must be having on dog training. These stats unpuffed me pretty quickly, as the average amount of time someone spends on this site is about two minutes. Oh well, that’s a bit better than the overall internet average, and of course if some people are outta here in a few seconds, others do take a lot longer.

Here are the top eight pages on the site, as of summer 2008, in the order of popularity. The links open in a new page or tab, so you can open a bunch easily:

1. http://www.training-dogs.com/potty-training-dogs.html
This is a comprehensive step-by-step guide to housetraining puppies mainly, with a few tips on adult dogs, and people linger here for 4 minutes and 4 seconds on average.

2. http://www.training-dogs.com/crate-training.html
People average 3 minutes 24 seconds here, reading about crate training, how to do it, and alternatives to it.

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This article is excerpted from the free ebook I wrote, Seven Steps to Clicker Training Success with Your Dog. The link takes you to where you can get a copy by signing up for my weekly email newsletter. (It just takes a jiffy, and you can always unsubscribe.) The ebook covers every aspect of getting a good start with clicker training dogs.

Actually Do Some Clicker Training Sessions

For success with clicker training, you have to do it. That sounds like a no-brainer, but learning any new skill involves going through a stage where you aren’t sure of what you are doing. Taking action, no matter how uncertain or clumsy, is the most important thing you can do now.

In Step Two, I’ll make some comments about your dog, outline two actual sessions you can do at home, and talk about how you can convert your existing training procedures to clicker training. Once you have done even one or two sessions, the later steps in this manual will make a lot more sense to you, because you will be building on experience instead of just book-learning!

If you have more than one dog, just work with one at a time at first. If at all possible, have any other dogs somewhere else while you are learning.

If you and your dog are new to clicker training, your dog won’t understand that that the sound of the clicker means anything. Some dogs may be startled by the sound at first. That’s why the first session I outline is for getting your dog used to the clicker.

Be attentive to how your dog is responding. Whatever the age of your dog, he can learn about clickers. I trained a young Basenji puppy to sit in the first few days that we had her, with the clicker. I’m currently teaching my ten-year-old mixed-breed some new tricks. Blind dogs can be clicker trained; people have trained deaf dogs by using a flashlight instead of the clicker.

Click (your mouse, not your clicker) here to get the ebook: Seven Steps to Clicker Training Success with Your Dog