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When you bring a dog home from a rescue or shelter – or anywhere, actually! – give them space and time! Be friendly and encouraging, but don’t loom or fuss over them.

It may be that when someone talks about volunteering to help animals in a shelter, that the average person imagines herself walking dogs or cleaning cat boxes in a shelter facility. Those are tasks that shelters can often use! But there is literally no end to the ways that people can help homeless animals.

Training a dog in seemingly silly behaviors offers the chance to really connect with and understand your dog and what they enjoy.

Expos are where pet products companies come to set up elaborate booths to show what they are making and selling these days. All the pet food companies, gear makers, and veterinary pharmaceutical companies will be there with gigantic, elaborate booths.

I agree; all dog owners, but especially people who own large, strong dogs should know what to do in case their dog attacked someone (or themselves) and be capable of doing it.

Most of the dogs in the U.S. are overweight, their owners don’t know it, and their veterinarians don’t feel comfortable talking to their clients about it.

In my neck of the woods, we still have a huge ongoing mess to sort out with trying to reunite animals with their people following the devastating Camp Fire. Currently, there are three temporary emergency shelters that are caring for hundreds of dogs and cats (and other animals). It's hard to get exact figures, but more than half of the animals have not yet been identified by any owners, for many reasons.

I felt strongly compelled to make the journey to Memphis to see Pat honored in this way, because she's been extremely important to WDJ from day one and remains so today. You can read more about her professional accomplishments in this press release from the APDT, but if you don't mind, I'd like to tell you about why I appreciate Pat Miller.

WDJ Training Editor Pat Miller wrote an article for the June issue of WDJ about unconventional or unintentional cues - things that people taught their dogs that are far from the ordinary sit, down, stay-sort of behaviors. In the article, she and other trainers describe how they taught their dogs things such as locating a pile of poop that needs to be picked up, standing in a certain place and a certain pose that's convenient for grooming, and coming when it's time to take a daily medication. My favorite was, "You're not going!" - which is what Pat taught her Kelpie, Kai, to indicate he shouldn't get excited about going for a car ride, because he's not invited on that impending trip. Pat asked readers to send in descriptions of the unconventional cues and behaviors they had taught their dogs. I'm going to post some over the next couple of weeks; we're getting a lot, thanks! You guys are an unconventional bunch, apparently! And Pat will be selecting one – perhaps by random, because there are so many great ones to choose from! – to win a prize.

All day, every day, front-desk shelter workers are confronted with people who are sad and upset and/or angry and frustrated.

WDJ’s authors have previously cited a widely reported statistic: 80% of dogs over the age of 3 years have active dental disease. The odds have finally caught up with me and Boone.

After spending a couple days in the heavily dog-populated San Francisco Bay area recently, I found myself wondering: Why is it so hard for people to walk their dogs on a leash?Dogs are so numerous in that area that I'd estimate I saw at least 300 human/dog pairs or groups out walking. (I had my young dog Woody with me, and so I was out walking him, too. And on the last day there, I picked up my son's dog, Cole, and we stopped at a large, well-known off-leash area for dogs, Point Isabel, where one can observe at least 100 dogs at any given time of day.) I'd guess that a full 85 percent of the dogs I saw were either pulling or dragging their owners down the street. About half of these pulled steadily ("Come ON, let's GO!"), and the other half pulled intermittently ("Wait, I need to sniff this! Okay, let's go! Wait! I need to sniff that! Okay, let's go!").