I haven’t written anything on nosework in a while. As some of our team are moving past the ‘trial’ type of searches into more advanced work I wanted to highlight some of the reasons why some dogs fail to progress as fast as their owners want them too. Stop Helping I know owners hate to…   Continue

We started working on Canine Freestyle and Dance a year ago. It has been a fun journey. Harley and I worked through some of the beginning stages without realizing we were setting up the groundwork for dance. When I started to think about training formally I watched all the videos that were out there. I…   Continue

Look, look at me, or redirects are a common training tool when people are working with nervous or aggressive dogs. But remember that you need to build foundation behaviors. If the dog doesn’t trust you, it won’t leave the ‘scary thing’ to look at you. Teach this behavior to your dog, but if it doesn’t…   Continue

She stood arguing with me. She’d had German Shepherds all her life, but never a high drive dog. She’d only had this one for three months, and had been trying to get it to stop reacting for six weeks. Nothing was working.  It was a smart dog. More than one experienced dog person had taken…   Continue

We had an interesting discussion a week ago. Despite the wolf dog relationship has been disproved for over 15 years the belief in the ‘dominance’ or ‘alpha’ theory is still entrenched firmly in today’s dog training world. I tried to keep emotions out of this article, and relate the research in a way that can…   Continue