For the last two days, Willie has been acting abnormally. He regressed back to sleeping in the bathroom, instead of his dog bed beside my bed. He took his stuffed Kong in the morning to his usual place, but then wouldn’t eat anything out of it. He came into the office this morning and lay…

Earlier I wrote that you “can’t reinforce fear” and used a dog who is afraid of thunder as an example.  For so long we have been told that we’ll just make our dogs worse if we try to comfort them when they run to us in fear when the skies rumble and the rain falls.…

I promised I’d write more about treating thunder phobia in dogs, beyond the earlier posting that it won’t make things worse if you try to comfort them. It’s such a serious problem for some dogs (and their humans), and everyone who has a dog who suffers from it deserves some help (or just support!). All…

It thundered last week during a rain storm, and it reminded me how much trouble a storm can be in the life of a dog (and for those of us who love them.) Since thunder season is approaching, this seems like a good time to talk about one of the oft-repeated, and ever-so-inaccurate pieces of…

5 AM. I wake up to Lassie’s nails clicking on the floor (wasn’t I going to trim them last night?) as a boom of thunder shakes the farmhouse. Damn.  Why is it that Lassie’s slight discomfort of storms has become more serious as her hearing degrades?  Surely it should go the other way around. We…