Dog Book: Bringing Light to Shadow by Pamela Dennison

I’m never sure how to feel when I find books like this at the used book store. I’m happy that I now have the book! But how did the book get there? Did the previous owner resolve his or her challenges with a reactive dog? Or did that person seek out other types of training or give up on training?  I don’t know.  Right before Christmas, the store had a pile of books on  positive type training books for reactive/aggressive dogs.

I’ll admit I haven’t read this book before!  And it was completely different than expected. Even with the subtitle of “A Dog Trainer’s Diary”, I didn’t expect that to literally to be the contents of the book. It’s pretty much reads as excerpts from the authors training notes, covering the ~18 months from the time she adopted Shadow to taking the Canine Good Citizen test. The additions mostly seemed to be definitions of training terms. The book was published in 2005. I’m not sure how long before the events in the book took place. It’s amazing to see how different dog training is now compared to the time when this happened.

Nothing to do with this post. Isn’t he cute?

The author is very much respected as a dog trainer and is fairly well known for the work she does (especially R+ competition obedience and working with aggressive dogs) and she is known for the many books she’s written. This book is special because it was an early book on the topic of R+ aggression problem solving and especially as a success story.

I enjoyed the email exchanges with Ted Turner*. The font was hard to read for those portions, but the content was very helpful. Some of it was surprising, some of it wasn’t. Any pieces of information from someone with his training experience is incredibly valuable. Reading his continual input on this case was absolutely fascinating.

Is this a book I would recommend? I don’t know. I enjoyed it, I read it in just a few hours. It may be inspiring for students and highlight the sheer amount of work needed to make large amounts of progress. It may give new dog trainers a realistic idea of how much time training can take. But the specific training tasks can be somewhat outdated, with more elegant training options available.

I love reading training steps and processes and the successes (and not) and modifications. My favorite dog training blogs are similar to this book, ongoing records of what happens with the training and how it changes over time.

The internet and popularity of blogs has made this sort of thing more readily available.  CleanRun has run a series of articles following a puppy and his experienced handler for a year. Susan Garrett has recorded the first 12+ months with her youngest dog. She used video and text to share his training process. I want to hear more!

I also feel like I should share more.  When my blog was separate from my business website I spent a lot more time talking about training with my dogs.  Now that it’s all together, it seems a little less appropriate to be sharing the day to day training activities, exercises, problems, solutions, and whatever else.  Ever since I read this book last month, I’ve been trying to decide if I should separate my blog or run a separate one specifically for my training records.  I keep detailed training records for myself, but maybe some of it would benefit others.

*Ted Turner worked with marine mammals and used to do a -lot- of speaking, I’ve seen some video tapes of his seminars but haven’t actually seen him, or heard of him speaking in the last few years. A quick google search didn’t turn up any results as far as recent seminars.