Dog training really boils down to influencing your dog’s behavior. Reward your dog for doing the behaviors you want to increase such as sit, down, stay, walk and come, and punish and or manage behaviors you want to decrease such as jumping, barking, stealing, digging and biting. Some dogs seem to be easier to train…
Do you remember as a kid when your Grandmother would tell you that you had to finish your vegetables before you could have any ice cream? If your Grandmother or anyone else has ever said that to you, then they were using the Premack Principle, also known as Grandma’s Law. Basically, the Premack Principle is…
Just last week I was working with a very nice lady that had a jumping problem with her dog. She badly wanted her dog to stop jumping and pretty much didn’t care about anything else. I explained why jumping happens, what she needed to do to stop it, and to make sure everyone in the…
I had just spent about 20 minutes trying to explain dog behavior to a very angry person. This person was upset with his dog because every time he leaves his house his dog destroys something. Today he was especially angry because his dog ate the TV remote. Add to this that his dog already destroyed…
I could hear my Mom’s voice: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Easy for her, she was on her way to becoming a Catholic nun before she met my Pop on a beach in Connecticut. She is hard wired to always be nice. Anyhow… I was sitting at…
A few years back a very distraught lady walked into my dog training studio. When I looked at her I thought she was recently assaulted. She sat down and started to cry. I offered her a glass of water and waited. When she calmed down a little she started to explain that the two black…
There is an old saying among dog trainers that goes: “The only thing two dog trainers can agree on is what the third one is doing wrong.” There are basically two schools of dog trainers. On one side you have the old school dog trainers that believe training is done by using a choke chain…
Have you ever heard the term “Catch 22?” The phrase became popular after the novel of the same name written by Joseph Heller in 1961. Wikipedia defines the phrase as: “Catch-22” is common idiomatic usage meaning “a no-win situation” or “a double bind.” Here is one example from the book: The Texan turned out to…
Just last week, I was working with a woman that had a jumping problem with her dog. She badly wanted her dog to stop jumping and pretty much didn’t care about anything else. I explained why jumping happens, what she needed to do to stop it, and to make sure everyone in the house is…
I would be on drugs. There would be no doubt about it. If I was in high school today some guidance counselor would have suggested and strongly recommended that I be put on some type of drug therapy to get through high school. You see, I barely, and I mean barely, squeaked out with a…