Train Behaviors One Step at a Time

Training your dog one step at a time will help your dog learn faster and retain the knowledge. Breaking your training down into the smallest possible steps will help solve dog training problems which will help you and your dog be happier.

How Dogs Learn

It’s difficult for us humans to understand what dogs think. We can’t actually get inside their heads to see what they comprehend. However our knowledge of brain structure and observations of how dogs learn leads us to believe there are things dogs can’t understand and other things they appear to be very good at.

One [...]

Dogs The Great Observers

I’ve read training articles and general interest stories about dogs, which imply there isn’t much going on in our dog’s brains. I beg to differ. I think that they’re thinking and feeling quite a lot, and learning all the time, especially when they’re young.

Dogs Learn From Experience

Dogs learn from observation, and experience. In the natural [...]

Secure Dogs Are Happy Dogs

We humans are bigger, stronger and arguably smarter than our dogs so it’s our job to be their leaders. Not only because we’re bigger and stronger, but also because we provide their food. In the dog world that makes us the boss. Dogs are good with this system; in fact it’s their system, and their [...]

Doggie Sheriff

You’re the doggie sheriff; so let’s make some rules. Remember these are always rules, and they’ll always apply so think about them carefully, because you’ll have to enforce them. Here are some suggested rules that you can choose from to get started.

No jumping up on people
No getting on the furniture
No soiling in the house
No chewing [...]

Easy as 1 – 2 – 3

You learned in class this week how to ‘sit’ your puppy by directing his head with a treat. ‘Trainer speak’ for this teaching method is “Luring”. It’s called that because your puppy wound up sitting while his nose was following the treat or the ‘lure’. He didn’t make a decision to sit, it happened by [...]

Vision – The Dog Language

Dogs don’t have spoken language capability. They naturally read body language. They can tell if we’ve had a bad day, if we’re stressed, happy or anxious by looking at our faces or the set of our shoulders. I expect they can read tiny changes in our expressions that even other people miss. But we train [...]

Puppy Brain

I’d like to you keep in mind for the duration of our puppy class that your puppy has ‘puppy brain’. This may seem obvious, but let’s talk about it for a moment. How many weeks has your puppy been on the planet? On average it’ll be 20 weeks or less.

Holy COW! When we were [...]

Rocket The Devil Dog

I don’t believe there is any such thing as a devil dog. I’ve always had good dogs, really good dogs. My dogs come when they’re called. They don’t get into the trash or onto the counters or the furniture. I can walk them without dog leashes with good control and recall. I believe in dog [...]

Training Rules

For many of us, learning about dogs isn’t boring or difficult. It comes easy because we’re fascinated by our best friends and competition companions and also want to understand them better. And for many of us, they are a complete mystery – a bit like aliens living among us.

Those Aliens Among Us

Here in the [...]