It's Time!

I’ve been away from this blog, not because I didn’t have things to share, I took a break because I feared I was becoming a grump. Every day the dog community, retailers, trainers and other professionals put out information and products that at best are just a waste of our time and money, and at worst contributors to the failure of an owner to find a solution to the problems impacting their willingness to continue living with a dog. I’ve been called close-minded because I refuse to suggest and endorse products and training methods that have provided no evidence, other than anecdotal, that they work. Some have even been tested and found not to work, yet remain in the mainstream of dog medical and behavioral health.
I understand how hard it is to know what the right thing is to do, the right path to be on. We put our trust into the supposed professionals and experts in the training and medical fields to guide us. Unfortunately this has turned out to be, in too many cases, like trusting the banking industry to do what’s best for your bottom-line. It’s not easy to live life as a skeptic, to be constantly questioning and trying to follow the logic of those who are content to keep repeating their misinformed ideas, and supporting it with bad arguments.
The goal of this blog has always been to provide information to help us work with the most vulnerable dogs among us, the fearful, the anxious, the shy, the abused, the neglected. Along the way I’ve made missteps. I bought into the arguments made by nice (and some not so nice) people, for products and techniques that did not provide what they said they did. I learned and continue to learn more about how behavior works and know that we have the information we need to help our dogs, we just need to get really good at doing what we need to do. That is my goal, not to just complain and vent about the daily nonsense the dog blogging community tweets and posts on Facebook (though some is so spectacularly silly it’s hard to resist). I am not arrogant, I am tired. I am angry at the years I wasted filling my head with incorrect information and making rubbish make sense. I am embarrassed by what I fell for.
What I am proud to do is offer seminars, workshops, consultations and webinars to help further the use of evidence-based training methods for all dogs. Join me in New Orleans at the Louisiana SPCA on October 15, 2016 to learn more about how fear impacts behavior and the most humane and effective ways to help dogs.