I love to read – mostly nonfiction. Most of my reading consists of dog training and behavior books, other dog related topics, or books about human behavior. You’ll see what I mean if you search under the category “Book & Product Reviews” for prior posts. So it’s probably no surprise that I would read My [...]
In my posts from December (2010), I quoted Murray Sidman's Coercion and Its Fallout on the effects of punishment. I want to continue with some of the points in his book, namely the potential side effects of the use of punishment. As I mentioned before, this book is about human behavior, not about dogs. However, [...]
An ongoing debate among dog trainers is the use of and need for punishment. Some trainers use primarily punishment to train dogs. Some use primarily positive reinforcement and try to avoid using any punishment. Most fit somewhere along the spectrum. Some say you can have a highly trained reliable dog without the use of punishment. [...]
Following is an excerpt from Alexandra Horowitz's Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. (If you want to learn more about how dogs experience the world, I highly recommend reading this book.) "The sniff begins with muscles in the nostrils straining to draw a current of air into them--this allows a large [...]
I have just started reading a book titled: Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals by Hal Herzog. He is a professor of psychology and one of the leading experts on anthrozoology, the study of human-animal relations. He touches on many human-animal relations topics [...]
