My eagle-eyed conference coordinator, Katie, asked me to remind you all the early bird pricing (about 10% off) for the Madison Seminar on October 29 and 30th is over at midnight on Friday, September 30th. The host hotel also has a special conference rate that expires on Friday too, and space for the seminar is limited (and registrations are pouring in, wheee!) so if you are thinking about coming, now's the time to act. As always, if you are a blog reader please, please come up and say hi. I always love to meet readers in person. I also should mention that you can get up to 20% for groups of 10 and over, 10% off for 5 to 9. I'm having a ball getting back to working on the seminar now that we are back from Scotland. Have I mentioned how much great research has been done on dog behavior Read More
Inbreeding in Dogs Part II
Wow. What an interesting and informative set of comments in response to my last post, thank you so much for taking the time to write; I have learned a great deal just from reading some of your comments. I wish I had a couple of days to do nothing but research this topic. (But here's the good news: I WILL have time this summer once the new booklet is out, and I'm going to use that time to learn more and substantially revise the section on behavior and genetics in the Advanced Canine Behavior Seminar this October.) I could write for hours too on this topic, but I'll summarize some of my own thoughts here, in hopes that this important discussion continues. Let me address the issue of inbreeding from two perspectives: 1) the resultant lack of genetic diversity caused by inbreeding and 2) Read More
The Value of Basic Training Skills
Here's one of the great lessons Ken Ramirez had for us at the Clicker Expo in Chicago last weekend: The basics aren't really all that basic after all. In his experience, one of the most common mistakes he sees in even experienced trainers is forgetting the importance of some of the basics. Here are some of the reminders he shared, and believe me, I am taking them all to heart. Precision: Yes, we all know it, timing is everything, but no matter how obvious it is, it is often forgotten. This is relevant whether you are using a marker (like a clicker or 'yes') or not, often because we don't do the following: Clean Delivery: Ken reminded us that dropping the treat on the ground or fumbling the delivery can be very aversive to our dogs. Say we are on a roll, clicking and treating at a Read More
Helping Puppy Mill Dogs
This weekend I visited a wonderful woman doing rescue for small breeds, mostly bichons from puppy mills. I had somewhat randomly discovered that she lived close to me, and went to visit in hopes I could help out a bit. I also had a selfish motivation: as many of you know, Karen London and I are writing a booklet on adopting an adolescent or adult dog, and we are always looking for input from people in shelters and rescues. There were 4 or 5 dogs from puppy mills that were terrifically shy; so much so that they ran away from people, even after being there for a very long time. Obviously, this is a very common problem in dogs who grew up in almost total isolation, and was one of the challenges she was facing I hoped I could help with. We had one session, and it looked like it might be Read More
Do Dogs “know” how long we’ve been gone?
How many times have you heard that "dogs have no sense of time"? I've heard it and read it over and over and over again, and always wondered why anyone thought they knew it to be true. Or not. How would we know? I've been asked this question often, and always answered I simply didn't know, but that it seemed reasonable that they had some sense of time, even if it wasn't exactly like ours. So yeah for researchers Therese Rehn and Lindsay Keeling for doing a study, published in Applied Animal Behavior Science, that attempts to answer that question. ("The Effect of time left alone at home on dog welfare," Vol 129, 2011) In brief, they recorded the behavior of dogs left by their owners for 30 min, 2 hours and 4 hours, and found that if the dogs had been left alone for 2 or 4 hours they greeted Read More
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