Are you familiar with Dogwise? Even if you do go there now and then, maybe I can tell you some things you didn’t know. It’s a wonderful resource for dog lovers, full of excellent books and DVDs on all aspects of dog training. Plus some other things you may not have found, like a friendly forum, ebooks, and some interesting lists.

Dogwise Publishing grew out of a company named Direct Book Service, and it is a small (but clearly busy!) family-run company in Wenatchee, Washington. Here is a little bit from their About Us page:

Dogwise Publishing now produces six to ten new books a year on topics that are important to our customers. Renowned dog experts who are published by Dogwise Publishing include Jean Donaldson, Patricia McConnell, Turid Rugaas, Roger Abrantes, Brenda Aloff, Sarah Kalnajs, Rachel Page Elliott and Pat Miller. Our focus is on creating humane, understandable and scientifically sound information for people who enrich their lives by working with, playing with and loving dogs. Dogwise Publishing has an insider’s knowledge of dogs and serves both the dog-loving public and the dog-oriented professional.

Note that “humane, understandable, and scientifically sound information.” The emphasis is on reward-based methods like clicker training. While their website carry a wide range of dog training titles from many different publishers, the preponderance of them are very much in line with the principles of my website here, looking at training methods that the dogs enjoy. As the old saying goes, you can catch more flies with honey, and it is a pleasure to be involved with the movement towards pain-free, positive rewards methods of training dogs. Dogwise is at the forefront!

The Expanding Ebook Section at Dogwise

Dogwise has been bringing out a lot of their books as ebooks as well as regular books. This particularly pleases me because until they began this, most of the dog training ebooks were very high priced. Here is a link to the homepage of their ebooks section

I usually buy their ebooks in PDF format, which can be printed out, though mostly I just read them on my laptop. They also put their ebooks into the Mobi format which works on Kindles and in the ePub format which works on Ipads, Nooks, and other e-readers. You get all these format for one price, so if you start out with something as a PDF and later want it on your Kindle, you just log into your account with them, go to “My Ebook Shelf” and download the other format. They have help on the download page too.

The Dog Forum and Some Useful Lists

There is an active and friendly forum here, with sections on dog training, general chat, health, wellness, and nutrition, and showing dogs.

Here is a page which is a list of lists created by customers and staff. You can make your own list if you want to add one!

Dogwise has a variety of other lists in their sidebar menu too.

My Relationship with Dogwise

Besides being a customer, and sometimes posting reviews on their pages, I am also an affiliate of Dogwise. That means that if you click through on one of my links to them and buy something, I may earn a small percentage of the sale with no cost to you. It’s a way that Dogwise can reach more people, helpful to them as they compete with bigger websites.  I have been doing this ever since I began training-dogs.com… geez, I don’t remember exactly what year that was, but  it was  in the past century!

I still remember very clearly the  first sale I made from Dogwise. Someone bought Dr. Ian Dunbar’s excellent puppy training DVD–well, it was a video then– Sirius Puppy Training and when I saw that on my statistics page at Dogwise, I burst into tears. Not because I had just made my first three bucks or so as an affiliate, but because some puppy somewhere would have a better start in life. Later, as I watched my stats over time, I was surprised to see that some articles I had done on training deaf dogs had resulted in a lot of sales of a couple of books on the topic.

If you are interested in signing up yourself as an affiliate, go to http://www.dogwise.com/Affiliate/index.cfm to sign up, with the name of your website.

Do Take a Look!

Check them out at Dogwise, All Things Dog!

A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog is the most compelling dog story I have read. Well, duh, you might say–it’s by Dean Koontz. Actually, I almost didn’t download it onto my Kindle because of that.  What I knew of him was that he wrote in a genre I avoided.

I don’t read much fiction–as my father was science fiction writer Cordwainer Smith (link to my site about him), I grew up hearing more than a lifetime’s worth of scary tales. So I had never read a word by Koontz, an extraordinarily prolific and popular author, because I thought his stuff was too horror-filled for me.

But  Amazon has this useful–or tricky–feature where you can download a selection from the start of a book onto your Kindle. (Or your free Kindle reader for PCs or Macs, link takes you to Amazon page that explains how.) So I figured that I could look at the first chapter. That word “Joyful” in the title kinda hooked me. So I read the first chapter, and then on a Kindle, you can just click to buy the book and download the rest immediately. Without a moment’s thought, I did.

I was immersed for hours in the story of how Dean Koontz and his wife Gerda had been so hardworking for so many years that they had never had a dog or a child. But they both loved dogs, and evidently dogs feature in many of his novels. They had been deeply involved in supporting Canine Companions for Independence, which trains and provides service dogs at no cost to kids and adults with disabilities, and they had good friends in the organization. So they mentioned to one of their friends there that they were about ready to get a dog.

She found them Trixie, who had been a service dog but had needed surgery for a bad elbow and couldn’t go back to the person she had been assisting because of regulations about the health of service dogs.

Trixie changed their lives. In SO many ways. I’m not going to tell you any of the stories… Koontz does that so incredibly well. I did cry… several times.

I will comment that it was a tremendous pleasure to read some of the passages, here and there through the book, where he talks about how Trixie was to him and his wife a manifestation of the Divine. Here is one such bit:

I believe that Trixie, in addition to being a dog and a child and an inspiration and a revelation, was also a quiet theophany, a subtle manifestation of God, for by her innocent joy and by her actions in my life, she lifted from me all doubts of the sacred nature of our existence.

(can’t quote a page because Kindles don’t show them but it is at 88%)

That captures so well what brings me back to dogs again and again. If that point is not your cup of tea, I think you’d still like the book.

Trixie  has her own part of her dad’s website: Trixie Koontz.

Click on the image above to go to Amazon, where you can get it for the Kindle, as a hardback, as a paperback, or as an audiobook. Highly recommended!

I‘m reading DON’T LEAVE ME – STEP-BY-STEP HELP FOR YOUR DOG’S SEPARATION ANXIETY, by Nicole Wilde, and learning tremendously from it.

Nicole Wilde is a highly regarded dog trainer whose books and DVDs are top notch. Separation anxiety is a common canine problem, and it can be a huge problem for owners. Wilde shares her own experiences with her dog Sierra, a shelter rescue dog. Near the end of the book, she says:

As I write this, it is exactly seven months from the day we brought Sierra home. I won’t say she’s completely “cured,” but for a dog who’s been through so much in her short life, it’s a major improvement… Sierra is finally at the point where she can remain relaxed for a few hours while we are gone. We still wouldn’t leave her alone for a full day, and we can all live with that.

How did they get to that point? The book’s title includes “step by step” and the steps take you through evaluating the situation, for example, figuring out if the dog has separation problems regarding one particular person (our LarryDog has that with me) or whether it’s “isolation distress” that anyone being there can ease. (I think our Lola has this kind, but will try one of the tests recommended to see.)

Wilde has a lot of ideas for when you have to leave your dog or dogs home alone. She suggests methods that you first try out for very brief periods and later extend. Read the rest of this entry

Do you read dog training books? I have to admit that I love to read them.  I enjoy finding out how other dog owners and trainers have solved problems.  Here are a few of my favorites. Click on the images to find out more about them.

My dogs and I have had a lot of fun as a direct result of 101 Dog Tricks. We’ve done a few of the tricks — and I have made up tricks and games that I do with my dogs. Very satisfying! I notice that during a time when I am training tricks to my dogs, they pay more attention to me when I just walk through the room. Just in case! Read the rest of this entry