We’ve had all kinds of exciting things happen over the last 3 weeks. Last weekend we went to a tracking workshop presented by someone who owns some of Griffin’s relatives. Her dogs have been very successful in AKC tracking (following the scent of a person over varied terrain). Her presentation Read more…
Yesterday we found some places for quick walks and training between teaching puppy class at Viktor’s vet and afternoon lessons with a family of awesome aussies. We first went the Heath Community Park/Geller Park. When we pulled in the place was deserted but there was a huge “no dogs” sign Read more…
I knew of Jane from her older book on dog training When Pigs Fly: Training Success With Impossible Dogs (though I’ll say it’s mostly just dog training, appropriate for all kinds of dogs!) I knew of her Puppy Culture DVD/program, but was not very familiar with it.I have an unscientific Read more…
Recently I read a training article that compared a beginner perspective (try something until you can get it right once or twice) to the perspective of someone more experienced (keep working until you don’t get it wrong). We’ve been talking about this in most of our training classes recently – Read more…
I’m not as particular about dog food as many people – what dogs eat does definitely matter, but as a consumer it’s hard to make sense of what the companies are saying and verify many of the claims about quality of ingredients or the quality of the production process. I Read more…
Socialization is a frequently misunderstood concept in dog training. It’s more (time) critical with puppies, but even for adult dogs we need to continue to provide good (not bad, and not neutral) experiences with the world. For dogs who are genetically more stable/resilient, we don’t need to work as hard. Read more…
In the past few months I’ve had quite a few people ask me to help them find a purebred dog through rescue or breeders. There’s a lot of ways things can go well and result in a great match. And many more ways the search can go wrong to end Read more…
We’ve had some less than stellar trial days in November and December – sometimes fast but poor control, and sometimes great teamwork but Griffin doesn’t seem to be trying hard. As a result – we’ve not be en entering as many trials as we try to figure things out. His Read more…
We’re in early December and it’s already too cold! Tonight I took Viktor to a pet store to exercise him by walking and training indoors. I expected more activity for 5:30pm but we only saw a few customers and employees. The only dogs there were in a training class. One Read more…
Last weekend we hosted what we think is the first Companion Dog Sport Program (CDSP) trial in Ohio. One of our instructors and I (not knowing each other!) went to a seminar about it 9-10 years ago, but it seems nothing came of it at the time. This is a Read more…