I'm going to break the rules here and start by saying what this post is not: It is not a post about how to deal with an "impossible dog." Or one who is "dominant." Or one who is "aggressive." Rather, it is a forum for us to have a good laugh about all time times any of us, whether knowledgeable pet owners, dog trainers, behaviorists or veterinarians, have been asked difficult dog training questions in impossible situations. I was motivated to write this by, ironically, a wonderful question from a wonderful dental hygienist, who asked me a good, simple question and gave me my mouth back so I could answer. (For the record, her question was "Is my dog really being dominant when he puts his paw on my arm?" Apparently many of her friends had told her that her sweet, soft, loving and benign Read More

This is Maggie asked to sit and stay beside her overflowing toy box, the one I promised to clean out over the holiday break.  (You can see how well I did.) In spite of having two overfull bags of "toys kept away from Maggie to re-introduce at a later time," the toy box in our living room has gotten out of hand. I will clean it out soon, I will I will I will, but it got me thinking about what is new in dog toys and, heaven help me, what I should be looking for in new ones. Primary on my list is safety, of course, but secondarily I want to buy her new toys from places that are as good to the planet as they are for our dogs.  That got me hunting around on the internet for eco-friendly dog toys, where I discovered all kinds of wonderful things. First, I like this post from Read More

Nothing like the end of a year and the beginning of a new one to cause us to do some accounting--of things accomplished, and things desired for the future. This morning I was doing a different kind of accounting, looking at book sales as much out of curiosity as anything else, and discovered that the best selling book from my website for the last four years is Love Has No Age Limit. It's sold over 48,000 copies in just the last four years. (The Puppy Primer is close behind, at over 44,000.) I gotta say, that made me really, really happy. Dr. Karen London (see her columns in Bark Magazine) and I co-wrote the book as a labor of love for all the wonderful people who adopt adult or adolescent dogs. It seemed to us that there were lots of books on what to do when bringing home a puppy, Read More

I'm still reveling in a holiday break. Seeing friends, working Maggie, learning about writing fiction, cooking, eating . . . Even organized my massive collection of recipes: I also have file as big as your arm of "recipes that I should try sometime." There are so many that I'd have to do little but cook for months to try them all out. Worse things could happen. I thought a fun way to end the year is to list some of my favorites in hopes that they add to your life as they have to mine. I'm counting on you all to add your own and enrich our lives even more. I'm interspersing my list of favorites with some of the favorite photographs that I've taken, not just from 2019, but from years past. I hope you enjoy them. My favorite FACEBOOK PAGE is far and away Frans de Waal's public Read More

I'm taking a holiday break, surrounding myself with laughter and friends and lighted candles. And good food. Lots of that. Yum. Whilst I cavort, I'm repeating one of my favorite posts from the past, ten years ago this month, actually, December 29th, 2009. If you're busy and need a quick oxytocin rush, scroll to the end and watch a video of a dog who had the right stuff--but it took awhile to find it. The Right Stuff: Every Dog Has Her Place Pippy Tay didn’t look much like a purebred Border Collie; I’d bet money that most shelters would have described her as a BC/Labrador cross. She was big, almost 60 pounds, as long as a table, and had a large, square head that had Labrador written all over it. But she was a Border Collie, the daughter of one of the top trial dogs in the Read More