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:

• 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.