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

The 2010 dog breed calendars are in stock now, at Dogwise. These make great gifts, assuming of course that you can bear to part with them!

Dogwise always has a great selection, and here is the link to their alphabetical list of 2010 Dog Breed Calendars. I went browsing around, and looked at some of the breeds that I have lived with, German Shepherds, Rhodesian Ridgebacks, Rottweilers, and Basenjis. (Clicking on either image below takes you to the calendar for that particular breed.)

I like it that you can see all 12 months of of the calendars. Actually, this one brought a tear to my eye, as several of the photos almost brought back to life our Rhodesian Ridgeback Cider, who has been gone for about 15 years!

I have a long list of possible topics for this blog, and “Nothing in Life is Free” has been on the list for a couple of years now. This is an approach to dog training in which your dog has to work for everything, and I mean everything. He wants to go out the back door into your fenced yard? You make him sit or do something else on command, then you reward him by opening the door.

Well, I just came across a very interesting blog post by Kelly Gorman Dunbar about Nothing in Life Is Free. It’s called Is NILIF Nasty? and it makes a good case that often people speak of this method, abbreviated NILIF, when in fact what they mean is that if you require a dog to do something, like sit at the door, before he gets the reward of going outside,  he will sooner or later make that connection and automatically sit at the door.

It turns out that NILIF uses this training principle (called the Premack Principle) to an extreme degree.

So now I have written my post on the topic, and I suggest that you read the article I linked to above, if you are interested in more. As for me, I will stick with the Premack Principle and not take the next step of NOTHING in life being free for LarryDog and Lola.

By the way, if you do click through on that link, you will be at one of the best — arguably THE best — dog training site online. Well worth browsing around!

The other evening, our Rottweiler Lola came into the house limping. She was doing her best to keep all the weight off one of her front paws. Right away, I said aloud, “Your left front paw, huh?” The soothing tone of my voice was for her but I really said it out loud so I would remember whether it was left or right myself!

She got over to her bed on the living room floor, and my husband took a look, with a strong flashlight. He found a scratch on one of her pads. The dog barely moved for the rest of the evening, but was better in the morning. She was still limping but at least she was putting weight on her foot. Within a couple more days, she was fine. It wasn’t anything that needed veterinary care.

What was most  interesting to me was how she conducted herself the morning after the mishap. She  didn’t want to move around much, and she kept coming to me for belly rubs and massages.  I stayed away from the tender area but worked that leg quite a bit, to help her relax. I had done that the night before too. I also did some Tellington touches.

Of course, in many situations you do need to take a dog to the veterinarian, and you may have meds to give him,  but still, do keep in mind that some simple massage can help a lot, by relaxing the dog, by feeling good, and by your giving the dog your loving attention in this way.

Want to find out more about massaging dogs? Here’s a page where I reveiwed a good DVD on bodywork for dogs.

Dogwise.com is a terrific dog bookstore and publisher, firmly in the camp of cutting-edge positive dog training methods. Like all businesses, they are noticing the economy. Here is part of an email that I got from them a few days ago:

Like a lot of businesses throughout the country, the current recession has impacted us as well. For Dogwise, cutting edge training and dog care books and DVDs continue to be in hot demand (thank goodness and thank you!).

What we have seen, however, is that certain items – which in a strong economy we would expect to sell at a good pace – have slowed down significantly. Books that keep sitting on our shelves don’t do us a lot of good, even if we think highly of them.

As booksellers we have two choices, one being to return them and the other is to offer to them to you at a steep discount.

We have chosen the latter, and if you head to our clearance section (there is a tab on the top of our home page) you will see that we reduced prices on clearance items dramatically, most are now selling for well under 50% of their suggested price. So take advantage! All clearance items are first come first served and will not be reordered.

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