In my post, Does your dog trust you?, I discussed the importance of developing trust to most effectively train your dog. If you want your dog to do as you ask, no matter what, your best bet at success is to have earned a strong degree of trust from your dog. But how do you do [...]
One of the biggest points I try to get across to people is that training dogs effectively is really about creating a partnership, learning to work together, and learning to communicate effectively with each other. It’s not about “teaching the dog who is boss” or establishing “dominance” because if that’s your main goal, you’ve already [...]
When I ask clients about their biggest difficulties in training their dogs, one of the most common answers I get is “distractions.” Their dogs might be doing great at home or in places with very few distractions, but as soon as the dogs are distracted by something else, all that training seems to go out [...]
During my recent Sunday evening Polite Pooches in Public Class, we met at Clement Park in Littleton and walked around the lake trail. This gave us plenty of opportunities for our dogs to practice dealing with distractions such as walkers, dogs being walked, bicyclists, skateboarders, prairie dogs, trash on the trail, and various other distractions. [...]
