I had a great time chatting with Elissa Looney and Whitney Taylor from the Canine High Jinks podcast recently. During our talk, we got into: what obedience looks like. the types of behaviors you and your dog must know. some of the common mistakes people make in their...
I was happy to sit down and talk with Jo Laurens from the Hold The Line podcast recently. Our conversation was centered around: Food motivation – and how to work with dogs which lack it (especially in the field or in high arousal situations) The importance of...
Adding distance to a behavior is one of those things that sounds simple on the surface, but can get sticky in practice. Intellectually, you know that the secret (which isn’t really a secret) is to gradually increment the distance, reinforcing your dog for performing...
This is going to be geeky to the extreme, and I am completely unapologetic! Beautiful heeling is a highly subjective thing. Everyone has their own aesthetic sense of what “beautiful” means… their own picture in their mind of perfect heeling. And that’s totally fine!...
Earlier today I was working on Rugby’s hold portion of the retrieve behavior, specifically looking to build a strong hold on the glove. He’s got very terrier tendencies (as expected), and has a high frequency of thrashing and shredding soft materials. So I...
Question: Does breaking down a behavior and teaching individual components take longer than teaching the whole thing in big chunks (*coughcough* lumps)? Answer: Nope! Not at all. (or not if you’re doing it right.) Most people will agree that breaking down a...
