Helping fearful dogs

"It has already been demonstrated that an essential element of organizations is the willingness of persons to contribute their individual efforts to the cooperative system…the contributions of personal efforts which constitute the energies of organizations are yielded because of incentives. The egotistical motives of self-preservation and of self-satisfaction are dominating forces; on the whole, organizations can exist only when consistent with the satisfaction of these ...

I was talking to a friend who recently went to meet the person she had been communicating with for months via phone & email. They'd never met in person but both had built a lovely fantasy of what their life together together would be like. They had much in common, respected the paths each other had taken in their lives and found each others pictures ...

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. ...

I'm thinking about the comments I read or hear from people criticizing trainers as 'cookie pushers' or some other derogatory term they've come up with for reward-centric trainers. It dawned on me that if you don't know what you are looking at, you might very well just see someone feeding dogs treats. But as with anything else, the more you understand and learn about something, ...

One of the challenges for people working with fearful dogs, especially dogs who have suffered from confinement or restraint during their early development, is getting these dogs to offer behaviors for which they can be rewarded. Do not confuse this with trying to change how a dog feels about things using counter conditioning and desensitization, for that we can reward the dog for doing nothing ...

I often wonder why people are so quick and ready to choose coercion* as a method for dealing with their dogs. Perhaps we believe that they are not smart enough to learn any other way. But I think that one of the main reasons is because their behavior often makes us angry or frustrated. When I walk a dog on a leash who pulls it ...

As much of a pain as it was to find myself with a project instead of a pet, I not only adore my fearful dog Sunny (who I am upgrading to my 'super cautious' dog Sunny) I am grateful to him for bringing the joy of inquiry back into my life. As a kid the world was full of endless discoveries and questions; certain types ...

Daily I head out with the dogs for a walk through the woods on trails not far from our house. Old carriage trails, built by the farmer who had his homestead at the top of the hill to get down to the river road and into town, wind through what were at one time pasture land. Now forested with pines, oaks, maples, ashes ...

Sometimes I have the fun of confirming for an owner that the dog they have recently rescued is a star. I had initially dreaded meeting McGregor, but he quickly became one of those 'other people's dogs I wouldn't mind having as my own'. A friend had recommended that McGregor's owner bring him by for an evaluation to see if he could board with us. The ...

I spent 3 days at a workshop with Suzanne Clothier focusing on the treatment and handling of fearful and reactive dogs. The fabulous Deborah Flick of the The Boulder Dog Blog came out and joined me and I can't imagine a better time. One of the questions asked of Suzanne was- when was it appropriate to 'correct' or 'punish' a dog. Her response made me ...