Every now and then I go take a look at the statistics about who is viewing this website. It’s kind of a one-way street, to write websites and blogs, so it’s fun to see some evidence that there really ARE people out there reading this site and training their dogs, people who are interested in the better ways of training that aren’t based on pain and fear.

Recently I checked my stats and found that by far the majority of the people reading this site in the past month are Americans, as I am. Next came Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Ireland… all English-speaking countries and to be expected.

But then the list begins to move all over our planet. The Philippines, India, Mexico.

South Africa and New Zealand didn’t surprise me. English speaking.

The list goes on: Spain, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Germany, Greece, Hungary, France, China, Netherlands, Norway, Indonesia, Portugal, Israel, Belgium, Italy. Brazil, Japan, Puerto Rico, Sweden,  Egypt, Pakistan, South Korea, Thailand.

I’ll stop there, but there were as many countries again that a very few readers came from. Two from Mongolia, for example.

Gosh, I love the power of the internet to bring us together! I’ve been to some fifteen of those countries, and if you are from outside the US, I’d just like you to know that I write for you as much as for the North Americans that are my main audience. You will be among the beneficiaries of what I am going to blog about soon: noted dog trainer Dr. Ian Dunbar’s “next revolution” in dog training.

Curious about that revolution? If you sign up for my free Tuesday morning newsletter, you’ll be able to keep track of what’s in this blog, and you’ll get a free ebook I wrote about clicker training.

Anyway, as I’ve been writing this, I’ve been thinking about how our dogs are international too. Larry, our Mixed-breed, has ancestry from at least two continents: he’s part Australian Cattle Dog, part Chow from Asia, and perhaps more. Lola, our Rottweiler, is of European background,  born in Mexico. We’ve had two dogs with African ancestry: our wild little Basenji, and our gentle Rhodesian Ridgeback.

In a world that is divided in so many ways, it’s nice to think that everywhere there are people loving their dogs. And of course, the dogs love us, sometimes more than we think we deserve.

There’s no specific training tip in today’s article, but I do invite you to contemplate the worldwide human-dog bond as a bit of counterbalance to the news you can read or watch elsewhere. And where do you and your dogs come from? Do post a comment below!

Hi -- If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Also, you can get my free clicker training ebook. I am getting a lot of comments that say things like "Great post!" or "Why did you say that?" where the people are just trying to get a backlink from my site to theirs. I simply delete this kind of thing. But I do love comments, if they add to the conversation. Thanks for visiting! -- Rosana

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