There, Jennifer Arnold, her brother, her veterinarian husband, and numerous other workers and volunteers train Golden Retrievers and Labrador Retrievers to be service and seizure response dogs for people–both kids and adults–with a wide variety of  challenges.

This is an expensive undertaking, and they have some good fundraising approaches. Besides corporate sponsors including Milk-Bone and Delta, they get a lot of support from everyday people. As they say on the site, “95% of donations go directly to the training and placement of service and seizure response dogs with children and adults throughout the country.”

While they originally worked with some shelter dogs, they now breed their own service dogs and start their training at 2 days old. I found this fascinating. It makes a lot of sense, too, in terms of what is known about cultural enrichment for young children!

Well, I was spellbound by the program and right after it  ended I was online and found that Jennifer Arnold had written a book, also titled Through a Dog’s Eyes. (Clicking on that link or the image takes you to Amazon, but you can also get the book and the DVD at Canine Assistants.) I got the book on my Kindle, and read it. As was evident from the program, the training methods used are all pain-free. Arnold has some interesting ideas about dog training, and what with 75 to 100 dogs going out the door in a year, her ideas must work well! The book expresses her dismay, which I share, at some of the outdated dominance methods that reach a wide audience. She refrains from saying who she means so I will too!

Here is a link to one chapter of her book, one of the most powerful,  on the Canine Assistants website. It’s right there on the webpage to be read.

It is simply inspiring to see how a small group of devoted people can do so much work for good, helping others get the service and seizure response dogs who make such a huge difference in their lives.

Through a Dog’s Eyes: the Remarkable Canine Assistants is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

Dr. Ian Dunbar is a veterinarian and one of the main people to get the positive dog training movement started.( I’ve written more about Ian Dunbar here.) A few years ago, he and his wife, dog trainer Kelly Dunbar, started Dog Star Daily as a place to be a major information resource for dog training. There are now blogs from numerous positive trainers. Great reading.

Today I took a good look at the many free dog training podcasts on the site. I was on the page where they are all listed: http://www.dogstardaily.com/radio so I decided to cut and past some of the titles from the first season. (There are three seasons now.)

I was a little surprised when all the links copied over too, but hey that makes it easier for you. Click on any of the topics to hear the podcast, or to download it. Note that they are listed with the most recent programs first so if you want to listen to them all in order, just start at the bottom.

Dog Star Daily Podcasts is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

I sure don’t have to worry about it this year. Our tree is on top of Lola’s crate. She’s a Rottweiler so you can imagine the height of the crate! Now the cats may climb up and play around a bit… oh well!

Does Your Dog Lift His Leg on Your Christmas Tree? is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

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.

Some Dog Training Blogs I Follow via RSS

http://www.dogstardaily.com/blogs
This is a collection from quite a few different bloggers, on a site run by Kelly Dunbar, wife of Ian Dunbar, in other words you can expect top-notch positive dog training methods and ruminations here. Before I developed the habit of using their RSS feed, often several weeks would go by and I’d realize I was way behind in my reading. Now, I still can’t read it all but I can quickly pick out the articles that interest me the most.

http://www.theotherendoftheleash.com/
Patricia McConnell describes herself as "a certified applied animal behaviorist and dog trainer who is crazy in love with her dogs." She’s also known for her dog training books, DVDs, and workshops. I find her writing to be some of the deepest and most interesting that I regularly come across. Here’s a sentence that inspired me to increase my time spent training my dogs: "I think it’s awfully easy for advice about dog training to be easy to give if it’s theoretical, but an entirely different matter when you’re really living it." Food for thought.

http://blog.johannthedog.com/
http://blog.raiseagreendog.com/
These two delightful blogs are done by same dog… umm, I guess I mean person, but  Johann’s is written so well from the dog’s point of view that I tend to forget there’s a person typing away!

I subscribe to several more but you get the idea. You can of course subscribe to my blog this way too! If you have signed up for my free ebook on clicker training and my Tuesday morning email newsletters, if you find you like RSS better than the newsletters, you can just unsubscribe from my newsletter using the link at the bottom of each issue.

How to Get RSS Working for You

[1] Go to a blog you like and look for the RSS symbol. It’s most commonly orange but can be any color. Here it is on the top right corner of this blog

Sometimes it’s a lot smaller, like this one from another blog:

And sometimes there is no image, just the words RSS Feed or even just RSS.

[2] Click on the symbol or the words next to it.. Then you may see something like this:

or you might see a page with something like this as part of it:

In either case, you are asked what RSS reader you want to use. I’ve used the Bloglines and the My Yahoo ones in the past, but lately I’m happy with the Google Reader.

[3] So choose whatever reader you want to use. If you  use gmail as I do, you already have a Google account. If you don’t use any of the online Google services that require an account, I imagine you would be taken to a page to sign up. So let’s say that you have done that or have a gmail account. Then after you click on "Subscribe Now" in the top image or one of the logs in the lower one, you will probably see what I do at this stage… Here is part of the page.

[4] Click on Google Reader and you will be taken to your own Google Reader page. Here is what the top of mine looks like right now:

I know you can’t see it all that clearly at this size, but I just want to point out that on the left you will see a list of blogs you have signed up for. I have organized mine so that all the dog training blogs are together under the heading Dogs. There is the number (21) after the word Dogs above, and that indicates that 21 new blog posts have gone online since the last time I caught up in the reader.

[5] Using the Reader: On the right, you see the caption "Raise a Green Dog!", and that shows up there because I had clicked on that title over on the left. You can see that some of the titles under "Raise a Green Dog!" are bold. That’s because I haven’t read them yet. Just after the title you can read the first few lines of the article. Then if you are interested, you can either click on the title to read the rest of the article in the Reader or you can click on the tiny arrow on the far right of the line and the whole article will open in a new tab or window.

Some websites have their RSS feeds set up so you can only read part of the article in the Reader and need to click on that tiny arrow to see it all.

When you’re done reading a blog, just below the name of the blog on the right, click just below the name of the blog on the button that says "Mark All as Read," and none will be bold after you do.

[6] Make a habit of checking your reader. I do it a couple of times a day but then I am a bit of a nut about things like this. Whenever you do it, and how much you do it. matter less than that you get around to reading a bit of the inspiring and fascinating dog training material that is out there.

Well there’s lots more I could  say but I am setting a record here for a long post. I do want to mention that Cynthia, who writes Johann’s blog mentioned above, told me on Twitter that she loves a Firefox plugin called Feedly where you can arrange your Google Reader contents. Haven’t tried it yet myself  but will soon.

If you liked this article, please let me know! I could do one on Twitter for sure and maybe some of the other ways that dog lovers connect online. But now, it’s time to let my dogs train me to go outside and play with them!

Train Your Dog – with RSS is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

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:

• Dogforums.com where the direct link to the dog training forum is http://www.dogforums.com/3-dog-training-forum
• Chazhound.com where you can find the dog training forum at http://www.chazhound.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=5

They were the top two in Google yesterday, and they both are very active. I like active forums, where any question is likely to be answered. My username is RosanaHart on both of them, if you want to look me up… it is free to join either one. I suspect I will become more active on Chazhound, for the simple reason that it permits links in your signature file and of course I am always interested in people finding this site. If I read the rules correctly, on Chazhound I will be able to refer to articles I have written on this site and give a link, where this did not seem to be permitted on Dogforums. Since I really slave (can you tell?) over some of my best articles, I would rather link to them that rewrite the same ideas.

There was another dog forum that looked quite popular, but its color scheme hurt my eyes, so I skipped it.

Five tips on how to use a dog training forum

[1] Think for a moment in advance how much time you want to spend on the forum and if you have a specific purpose. These places can gobble up your time. (I knew this but re-learned the lesson last night.)

[2] To find the answer to a specific question, find the word Search, with or without a search box visible. On almost all forums, you can search without joining, and it’s a good way to get a sense of a forum.

I just did searches on Dogforums and Chazhound for the world pulling. Despite Dogforums being the larger site, Chazhound had almost twice as many threads that contained the word pulling. Next, I tried narrowing my topic a bit by searching pulling on leash. Chazhound returned the same number of threads, 500, but Dogforums didn’t like the word on, so I had to search pulling leash and then it gave me the same number as just for pulling, 266.

Now here is where tabs in your browser save a lot of time. Firefox and the newer versions of Internet Explorer have them. Look at the list of threads that have come up from your search, and guess which ones look pertinent. Consider the title of the thread and also how many answers have been given… this number usually follows the title in another column. Typically you will also see how many people have viewed the thread as well.

Choose a promising title, and right-click on it to open it in a new tab. Stay with the page you are on for now, and open several promising threads. Once you have some open, go take a look. Warning: some of the threads have heart-rending titles, like “Should I put Fluffy down?” Only open those if you are willing to be distracted. (I was last night, and I was very impressed with how caring many of the responses were.)

[3] Once you are in a thread, skim through it to see if it actually discusses what you are researching. If it does, read it through and — using your own judgment! — take from it what is useful. You can copy a part and paste it into a file you have on your computer, to print out or refer to later, if you wish.

[4] If you find that you like a forum, join it and contribute your knowledge. If you have a dog-related website, often there is a place in your profile to put the website’s address, and there may be a thread on the forum (as there is at Chazhound) where you are invited to tell people about your site.

[5] Explore other dog-related topics. Both of these forums, for example, covered dog food, health, rescue, and a bunch of other matters as well as dog training.

Two Top Dog Training Forums is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

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.

Training-Dogs.com: Webmasterly Musing on Changes is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

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.

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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

Dog Aggression: Some Good Websites is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

Dogwise carries dog books and DVDs that you can find nowhere else, including Amazon. With such a wide selection (over 2000 items), it’s easy to find what you need. Owned by a family who are passionate about dogs and dog information, Dogwise is also fun to browse, just to keep up with what’s being published about dogs.

With my particular interest in clicker training, here’s a link to clicker training books and DVDs at Dogwise.

Not content to just be a distribution center, back in 2001 Dogwise began its publishing arm and has now created numerous very useful books and DVDs. From any page on the site, click on the tab that says Publishing to read about their publishing program, and scroll down a little to see what they have published. I counted over 35 titles just on dog training and behavior.

If you go to a dog show, you may see their booth there. My credit card would be in serious trouble if I did that, but maybe you have more restraint. There’s a tab on the website called Shows & Info which lists the shows they will be attending, all over the US.

While I’m describing the tabs, the Welcome one takes you to their homepage, with featured new items. The Features one I would have called Categories, because it is a detailed list of the many topics that they cover. Bargain Books and Help/Contact, both self explanatory, round out the upper menu. As a webmaster, I like this clear, clean navigation.

On the left side, you can search for anything, and browse a number of interesting things, including their forums, reading lists created by customers, and more.

Click on the image to go explore Dogwise:

[tags]dog books, dog training books, dog dvd, dogwise[/tags]

Dogwise: What It Is and Why I Like It So Much is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

This week, I had an AHA and now it’s finally got some content on it.

The website is www.online-dog-resources.com and my plan was to bring together a variety of places where you can get dog supplies online. But I never quite got around to it, maybe because it seemed like a daunting task to pull together.

My AHA was to use eBay as the main resource. I have a program which provides eBay data to be put on a website and continuously updates the listings, and since I’m already a fan of the “world’s largest marketplace,” it was fun to do this.

You can see sample results for a page I did on small dog carriers. There are plenty of other topics I’ve done there too, and now I’ll give the site some time to season before deciding whether to put more up.

Besides eBay, I do also have a link on every page (upper right) to the specials page at one of my favorite dog supply companies.

My Other Dog Website is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

The number of people who come to the site daily has been rising steadily. The past couple of months it’s been about 550 people a day. But before I get happy that I’m influencing 16,500 people a month to train their dogs in a more positive way, I’d better look at my stats for how long people stick around. Over a third of the people are out of here in under 10 seconds! This is actually typical of how people surf the net.

But the people who stick around do sometimes read a fair amount. At the other end of the spectrum, I can see that this month 107 people stayed at the site for over half an hour. For those who made it past that first ten seconds, the next largest group (some 1400) were here for three to ten minutes.

The most popular pages are the ones on potty training and crate training dogs, the homepage of the site, the Ian Dunbar page and the one about his Sirius Puppy Training, a list of puppy supplies, and a couple on positive and clicker dog training. All of these pages have been up for several years and have had time to get known… The potty training and crate training pages often get recommended at Yahoo Answers, for instance.

When I redid the site recently, I added this blog and my weekly newsletter partly to make the site more “sticky” — that’s the word webmasters use. At present about 9% of my visitors are returning and 91% first-time. I like the idea of creating a location on the web which has a particular vibe to it, so that people who resonate will come back from time to time.
I don’t know how many people are interested in this behind the scenes stuff, but there have to be a few. That’s what I love about writing webpages… I’m pretty much guaranteed that somewhere someone will enjoy or benefit from any given page.

Perusing the Stats for this Website is a post from: Training Dogs Blog