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

RSS doesn’t stand for Really Scrumptious Snacks, though it’s always a good idea to use them in training. RSS is an internet term, usually described as a shortcut for Really Simple Syndication. But this is a dog training blog, so why am I talking about this?

By using RSS and an online reader – I’ll be demonstrating with Google Reader, my favorite – you can keep up to date way more easily with your favorite online blogs, for dog training or whatever else interests you. In this article, first I  will try to entice you into wanting to use RSS and then I’ll tell you how.

Read the rest of this entry

Last night, I googled “dog training forum” and looked at several of the websites that came up. This was not a good thing to do late at night, as I got fascinated by two of the largest forums and stayed up quite late. I joined them and will describe how you can use them as a quick and easy way to get ideas when you are dealing with dog training or behavior challenges.

Notice that I said ideas, not only good ideas. Perusing any forum means wading through a lot of uninformed posts. In the case of dog training today, where there is such a wide spectrum of attitudes about what constitutes good training, you will no doubt encounter attitudes I would NEVER endorse on this website! In fact, I will eventually get together a list of dog forums that are on positive methods only. Actually, I was pretty happy with how extensively people mentioned positive methods, trainers, and books. A sign that the times are changing!

The two forums that I joined were: Read the rest of this entry

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.

In doing some research for my recent articles on aggression in dogs, I’ve found some other websites that are worth your attention.

1. The San Francisco SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, a non-profit founded in 1868) has several useful pages. Start here: http://www.sfspca.org/behavior/aggression.shtml and there are also good pages on understanding dog aggression and curbing it at home.
2. Here’s a site that was created after the people suffered from sending their dog to a “board and train” facility that didn’t work out. They have created quite a comprehensive site, good for anyone with an aggressive dog, lots of good basic information as well as many scholarly footnotes that actually are linked to places the articles can be found. I used to be a librarian, and I was impressed with how this site was put together. It’s not easy to find all the pages, though, so keep looking around. They also run a support group on Yahoo groups. I tend to be a little leery of websites with K9 in their names, as often they have a different training philosophy than mine, but in my browsing around the site, I didn’t see anything I disagreed with. http://www.k9aggression.com
3. Wikipedia is a website that is an online encyclopedia that anyone can help edit. It has a basic article with more links to other sites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_aggression They use the term “dog aggression” to mean only between dogs, but here I use it in a more general sense, to include attacks or bites on people as well.
4. Stan Rawlinson is a British dog behaviorist and trainer who uses pain-free methods. His article, Interdog and Human Aggression, is at http://www.doglistener.co.uk/aggression/interdog.shtml The title made me wonder if the article would cover humans being aggressive against dogs, but it didn’t! Interestingly, he comments that the most aggressive dogs he has encountered have been Toy Poodles or other small breeds, because owners will tolerate behavior from tiny dogs that they would not accept from larger ones.
5. This last website is not actually about this topic per se, but I found it so pertinent that I am adding it here: http://www.clickersolutions.com/articles/2001/dominance.htm is an article that gives terrific background on how the “Wolves are Pack Animals — Dogs are Wolves — You Gotta be Alpha” school of thought (my description) came to be, and why it is not accurate. The article is titled The History and Misconceptions of Dominance Theory and it is by Melissa Alexander, author of the excellent clicker training book, Click for Joy! This is her website and is worth looking around.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When I went to spell-check this article in the blog writing software I use, I accidentally hit a button I didn’t know about, which allows me to easily add links to books at Amazon. I’m sure I’ll be using it a lot. Here is Melissa Alexander’s book, admittedly not on the topic of dog aggression but it does follow from the last paragraph!

Click for Joy! Questions and Answers from Clicker Trainers and Their Dogs (Karen Pryor Clicker Books) by Melissa C. AlexanderRead more about this book…

Technorati Tags: dog aggression,aggressivedogs