The American Kennel Club (AKC) has been creating more new programs over the last few years. Part of this is to provide opportunities for people with varied interests and dogs with different strengths. (And part of it is suspected to be for financial reasons…) One of these new programs is Read more…
Way back in 2001 when Blaze was a puppy, I did a lot of reading online about dogs and training – very quickly I learned about dog sports/activities – including competition obedience. For many reasons (dog health! behavior challenges! rules at the time prohibiting mixed breed dogs!) I just wasn’t Read more…
Griffin does not do well with nose-related-activities. It’s been very hard to train him those kinds of tasks and it’s one of the reasons our obedience trials are on hold. We’re part of a group that holds nosework trials through the UKC program. There are 5 (maybe more?) levels of Read more…
Last fall we attempted a retriever certificate test. We didn’t pass -but it really truly seemed like bad luck vs a specific training challenge. He did really well despite having very little training for that type of event and it seemed like it might be realistic to do AKC style Read more…
The first time we went to Minnesota was in 2014 – with just Griffin and Blaze. Now I’ve made the trip many times, with many different dogs. The initial trip was very stressful – I was worried about getting there in time for our appointments and getting back in time Read more…
On Monday we had one of our many trips to visit the rehab vet that keeps Griffin and Viktor as well as possible after past health challenges. For both of the dogs it was a recheck and hoping that nothing new would be discovered. We now have a board certified 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…
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…
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…
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…