Reward based training methods are slowly gaining in popularity among dog professionals including: trainers, veterinarians and behaviorists. But popular beliefs about the value of punishing for so-called ‘bad’ behaviors still run strong. In a society where we justify scolding, handing…
As dog lovers it’s quite obvious that we communicate with our dogs. At the very least, they react to our body language and emotions in ways that indicate they understand our intentions and moods. How much and what we actually…
‘Do you want to go out for a walk?’ ‘Sit, sit, sit, I know you know how to do this, SIT, good boy, good doggy’. ‘Did you take my shoe? Rover, fess up! I know you did it!’ ‘Stop jumping…
Until recently, it was believed that animals didn’t feel pain or that they felt it differently than we do. In the past decade, research has shown that this simply isn’t true. Our pets definitely feel pain! We have stress when…
Puppies are like gremlins. They bite everything in sight, including our hands, pant legs and favorite shoes. They pee all the time, chase after every moving object, and just like human toddlers are a ton of work! Yet, for some…
There are few things more exciting for a trainer than working with a dog on shaping a new behavior through clicker training. From teaching the dog to lie down on his bed, to retrieving objects, or flipping a light switch…
Teaching a dog good potty habits as well as house manners in general, is about making sure he’ll develop the habits of behavior that we’re looking for(the opposite approach of ‘housebreaking’ uses punishment). Building strong habits is no different than…
Behavior issues are the primary reason why owners give up their pets. We’re all talking about the latest behavior modification technique, and often blame poor handling or inexperience, but at the core of many behavior problems lies a basic genetic…
No matter where we stand on the training spectrum, from purely positive, to balanced or traditional, we all want the same thing: enhancing the behaviors that we want and decreasing those that we deem problematic, for the benefit of both…
Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare surprised me the other day with the drawing they had published in their book ‘The Genius of Dogs’, about one of the experiments I had worked on with the Geneva University in Switzerland (fig.1). I wanted to write about those experiments for…