It’s a new year! It’s a new month! It’s Train Your Dog Month! Every January, the Association of Pet Dog Trainers hosts Train Your Dog Month since, as long as people are making resolutions, they might as well resolve to spend a month thinking about the “importance and benefits of training dogs to become … More Wanna Watch? – Positive Pet Training Blog Hop
Puzzle toys are like books for dogs. They serve a lot of the same purposes–they amuse and entertain, they exercise a dog’s brain and increase her capacity to think, they tire her out, they amuse her when she’s all by herself. When I first adopted Nala, I knew that I wanted puzzle toys to be a … More How Nala Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Kong
I’ve written about loose leash walking before–in fact, I did so for my first ever post for this blog hop! But it’s an inexhaustible topic. It’s a notoriously difficult task to teach for so many reasons–it’s boring, frustrating, and has the kind of “I know it when I see it” criteria that spells disaster for dogs and handlers alike. Here … More Troubleshooting Loose Leash Walking: Positive Pet Training Blog Hop
You know what I really, really love? I love the side effect profile of using food to train your dog. I don’t feel like writing a post against the various upsurges of fear-mongering and misplaced antipathy toward training with food. There are lots of excellent articles by more qualified people than I that undo those … More Side Effects May Include
For once, this post isn’t about how Nala can be a worrywart. Instead, it’s about something that’s been worrying me lately. Namely, what if my insufferable paranoia is all that has been keeping Nala from enjoying the pleasures of off leash walking? After all, I can think of a host of reasons, some of them … More On worries, trust, and off leash aspirations
This past weekend for Labor Day, the pup, the partner, and I took advantage of some extended time off to take our first ever short road trip together. It was…revealing. Mentally, I tried to prepare myself for the worst. I knew there was a possibility that Nala would be too overstimulated by being in a new place … More What We Learned on our First Road Trip: Positive Pet Training Blog Hop
Last week, I talked about how Nala’s sweetness, smartness, and sensitivity is a blessing and a curse. It’s easy to be glad that she’s so sensitive when Nala is sympathetically cuddling me when I have a migraine. It’s harder when I’m worrying that adding a collar grab to her recall will poison the cue because she’s so … More Sensitive Dogs II: Games for Body Pressure
Sweet, smart, and sensitive. They’re great traits in a dog, right? But if you’ve lived with a sweet, smart, sensitive dog before, and particularly if you’re kind of a pushy training nerd like me, you might know that that isn’t the whole story. Sensitive dogs can really challenge us as trainers, and they freak out … More On Sensitive Dogs
When I saw this month’s positive pet training hop topic–success, strengths, and improvements–I got all in a kerfuffle. Honestly, guys, I’m not that great of a trainer. Most of my successes with Nala have been in the area of classical conditioning, and I can only tell you guys about so many situations where I stuffed … More On Disbelief, Splitting, and Not Killing a Critter: Positive Pet Training Blog Hop
nala the wonder dog 