When you live with an adolescent dog, there are some days when you wonder if s/he will ever mature. I certainly have had those thoughts about Romeo some days. (July 2011) One of my objectives with raising a dog from puppyhood was to build great social skills so that he could assist me in my [...]
I spend much of my “spare time” thinking about dog training and the dogs with whom I work. The time I invest in the dogs with whom I work is not limited to the actual time spent with them. So it’s no surprise that as I was driving to class the other day, I was [...]
While not everyone uses crates, most of us do when our dogs are puppies or adolescents. Providing too much freedom in the house unsupervised during these stages of development can set our dogs up for trouble. Crates can be great tools in this process. But they should be temporary tools that we wean our dogs [...]
During the critical development stage for puppies, it's important to expose them to as many new and different people, animals, places and things as we can. It's just as important to expose them in a safe and positive way, though, as a bad experience can sometimes be worse than no exposure to something at all. [...]
In a previous post, I discussed testing off-leash readiness with our dogs. As I described in that post, I am working toward off-leash reliability with Romeo, my Vizsla. At that time, he wasn't quite ready for the freedom of off-leash walks. This past week (May 2011), I have been re-testing his off-leash reliability. I'm happy [...]
