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 title combines two things that might not be related but are. We are going to be making a long trip with our dogs and cats. My husband and I have been living in Mexico for four years, near Lake Chapala. It’s been really nice in many ways, but now we are selling our house here and moving back to Colorado. I’m very excited that we will be living in a small town where we lived for a decade and there is a real sense of community.

The long drive north will be in late April, and I’m already doing a bit of training review with the dogs, as I recommended in this article I did back in 2008: Train Your Dog Before Vacation Travel and I’m getting our kitties used to their carrying crates by feeding in one and having the other in a choice location on my desk, next to my computer. Read the rest of this entry

I’ve just spent the past 45 minutes with a DVD called CLICKER PUPPY (link goes to Dogwise).

It’s a program featuring children and teens (ages 5 to 13) and puppies (as young as 8 weeks to 5 months). The children are clicker training the puppies, and very quickly too. Some very young puppies learn to sit and do a variety of other things in just a few minutes! How much training each puppy has had is mentioned… several had had none beforehand.

Given the nature of the participants, the program is very spontaneous and appears more like a good quality home production than a slick professional program. This is much of the charm of the program for me.

To my mind, the best use of the program would be showing it to children as part of helping them get the basics of clicker training. I’m sure any dog-loving child would want to try it themselves!

Clicker training puppies is arguably the best way to train them, and this program should help with that. I think it would be a bit basic for adults… or is it just that the kids make it look so easy? Read the rest of this entry

I am making two New Year’s Resolutions for my dogs, and I invite you to make your own versions of these.

1. To appreciate and cherish my dogs every single day.

2. To do more fun things with them, and to work training into that.

Now, people don’t always keep their resolutions, and of course I am no different than anyone! But I do have an advantage… I used to teach time management classes, and so I am not just making resolutions, I am also making plans.

Actually I already do #1, but I want to be sure to express my love fully to our dogs.  Recently our Rottweiler Lola has developed a habit that helps with this. When she hurt a front paw a few months ago, I got down on the floor with her each evening and gave her a  massage, specially focusing on both front legs — the one she wasn’t using much and the one that had extra work to do as a result.

Well, after about three days, she had stopped limping. As my husband and I sat watching television, I didn’t have dog massage on my mind. But Lola got up from her bed and came and sat directly in front of me. She stared intently into my eyes.

I got the point… and so began a regular habit of giving both dogs massages every evening. I plan to keep this up throughout the new year. Some evenings more, some less, no doubt.  I think I will pull out my excellent DVD on Bodywork for Dogs — that link goes to my description of it.

More Dog Training… in the Datebook!

My dogs are generally well enough trained that when I get busy, I don’t always keep up with training new things. But we all enjoy it so much when I do, that this year I am putting into my datebook for Saturdays:  SOMETHING with the DOGS! Since I use a computer program for keeping track of things, it just took me a moment to write it in all 52 times.

Actually, I sometimes recommend that if you get my weekly newsletter which comes out on Tuesday mornings, that you can use that as a reminder to do SOMETHING with your DOGS.

Whatever you do, happy new year!

And here’s a fun video from youtube that may inspire your training:

You may hear a lot about dogs’ dominance these days, depending on what television shows you favor. I’ve been working up to doing an article on dominance and how badly the concept is misused generally. Luckily, two top websites beat me to it so I will just link to them today.

The Association of Pet Dog Trainers is an organization of dog training professionals who advocate and use positive, pain-free methods. I am a member, and you can see their logo and my blurb about the organization at the bottom of every page of this blog. The renowned Dr. Ian Dunbar started this organization some years ago

Well, the APDT has recently issued a position statement about dominance and dog training.  I just went looking for a sentence or two to quote here but really the whole thing is so good that I suggest you go read that wolf are not organized according to dominance, that dogs are not wolves anyway, and much more.

And here is another really interesting article, a blog post with quite a few comments from readers as well: How Dominance Can Make You Dumb.

Happy reading! I welcome comments here, and will approve ones that don’t agree with me only if they are well written and don’t use namecalling. I’ve gotten some of those before, when I blogged about CM. But since I didn’t use his name here, I should stay under the radar of his more rabid fans.  Do I disagree with him completely? No. But significantly. Oops, starting a rant… do read those articles!