Training

one
can shape a new trick."

Dogs who struggle to focus on their owners when away from home usually do so for one of two reasons – either the dog is too distracted by the environment, or he's under the influence of anxiety or fear. With anxiety and fear, the dog's body language tells a powerful story. His posture might be slinky – head low, tail tucked, ears pinned back. His pupils might be dilated, with the whites of his eyes visible.…

Most of the time, when dogs do something we don't want them to do (such as stealing our socks or jumping on our elderly...

The "search me!" game uses lots of energy and can tire out your very active dog, and offers very practical applications as well. Start with treats, since most dogs will happily look for food. You can eventually ask him to look for hidden objects (favorite toys, your lost keys) and even hidden or missing humans!

The cattle dog-mix races across the turf, his claws digging into the ground, pushing hard into his next stride, building momentum, faster, faster, faster. With a final turbo blast powered by his rear legs, he pushes off the ground and vaults into the air, seemingly weightless as he stretches his neck into the sky. A sudden twist of shoulders propels his torso and hips 180 degrees as he changes direction midair and snatches the prize from the air - a simple, round plastic disc. Eyes alight with the thrill of the chase and the kill (catch), he lands nimbly and races back to his handler. Can we do it again? Can we, can we? Yeah, we can. This is the sport of disc dog. It's been around since Frisbees became popular in the early 1970s and the players' dogs chased the players' errant tosses. When a bad toss resulted in a disc rolling on its side, that was fine by Fido.

If your dog will exhibit calm relaxed behavior when needed, it can help reduce stress and make everyone’s day smoother. When our dogs act calm, they will actually become calmer. Gradually, this state of relaxation will develop to match the outward behavior.

A dog training clicker is a small low-tech device that makes a distinct and consistent clicking noise. If you consistently follow its use with a food treat (or other salient reward), the dog will quickly learn that the noise predicts a treat, and that he can make the noise and treat return by repeating whatever he was doing at the moment he heard the click.

With this “leave it” training method, the thing you want your dog to leave alone or stop obsessing over becomes the cue for him to look at you.

bonding

Many medications can be compounded into flavored chews or liquid suspensions, but others cannot. For these wrapping the pills in a treat or a pet piller that keeps your hands free of your dog's mouth provide an alternative.

In a perfect world, the lion really would lie down with the lamb (or the wolf with the rabbit), but our world isn’t perfect,...

Current research has demonstrated that many species, including our beloved canines, share brain circuitry very similar to the human part of the brain that controls emotion – the amygdala and the periaqueductal grey. While there's no doubt among most dog lovers that dogs have emotions, this concept is still being discussed in the halls of academia. Some insist that even though animals show emotional behaviors that we can observe, we can't assume the behaviors mean the animals who display them have emotional feelings. (I don't know how anyone can think this, but some scientists really do!) Others, such as the esteemed neurobiologist Dr. Jaak Panskepp of Washington State University, argue that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck – it's probably a duck!