Eric Goebelbecker

This month Veterinary Pet Insurance (VPI) awarded their second annual Hambone Award. The award is given for the most unusual insurance claim. Nominations are submitted and then people have an opportunity to vote for the finalists. This years winner is Ellie, a Labrador that ate a beehive.

Last weekend I attended the first Best Friends Forever Conference. The conference was organized by Dana Crevling's Dogs Of Course as a fund raiser for St. Hubert's. It was an outstanding educational opportunity for dog people of all types.

St. Hubert's is, of course, a cause near and dear to my heart. It was there that I "discovered" dog training and then apprenticed and became a trainer myself. Under the tutelage of Pia Silvani and the amazing staff of St. Hubert's Dog Training School I learned about effective dog training and have made some lifelong friendships.

The lectures at the conference were nothing short of amazing. Two lectures were given during each timeslot, and oftentimes I would see people in the hall, having a hard time deciding which one to go to.

My post last week on Dog Parks caused quite a stir, with 47 comments, a rather bizarre swipe of most of the post by someone who lacks the courtesy (or the courage?) to link to what he parodies, and more retweets than I could count.

The incident I had heard about on twitter that lead me to write the post also became a blog post itself.

A few people got caught up in the particulars of what I listed as potential problems, so let me summarize: my main objection is that oftentimes you don't know what you will encounter in a dog park.

Yesterday on twitter there was a brief discussion of dog parks among a few of my friends. The story that triggered the discussion was familiar: there was a fight at a dog park, one owner was redirected onto trying to break it up, the other was unhelpful because the fight was "not his dog's fault."

I'm not a fan of dog parks. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a trainer that is.

The idea behind dog parks is laudable. Who can argue with a place where dogs can run free and play with each other? Even in suburban areas, space is at a premium and many people lack large fenced-in yards where their dogs can safely play.

I have been having a terrible time recovering from my knee surgery. It seems like every time I head in for physical therapy there's a new ache or pain in a newly discovered part of my right leg. The doctor tells me it all boils down to one problem: I'm not being consistent with my exercises. Without that consistency, I won't just fail to make progress. I'll continue to regress.

There's no secret to dog training, but there certainly is a key: consistency.

I often refer to dogs as "pattern matching machines." I'm being facetious – of course I think of dogs as more than machines – but dogs are very good at recognizing and storing patterns. It makes sense too: predators and scavengers that can quickly recognize where prey or food might or might not be are rewarded by nature.

This year National Dog Bite Prevention Week is Monday May 17 - Sunday May 23.

The CDC has some interesting information on their site.

As I have discussed before, children are the individuals most at risk for bites. But according to the CDC, men are bit more often than women. Interesting, especially given my post last week.

They also include a great list of tips for children. Here are a few of them.

Over on my blog I have started a series called "The Real Man's Guide to Dog Training." The intent of the series is to use how and why I began a dog trainer as a way to explain basic training concepts, juxtapose them with many common myths about dogs and dog behavior, and hopefully attract some men to dog-friendly dog training.

In the first chapter I brought up the fact women far outnumber men in the dog training field and how I find this rather puzzling. This question was interesting enough that one commenter expressed disappointment that I didn't try to answer it in the second post.

Problem is, I don't have an answer!

I made a mistake last week. This isn't really news. As a matter of fact I probably made a mistake every day last week, so I should probably say "I made a mistake last Sunday" or maybe even "I made several mistakes last Sunday night around 11:00PM and I'm thinking of the third or fourth one right now."

Anyway, I was asked to answer an e-mail interview (man I hate that picture) and one of the questions struck me funny. Funny enough that I outsmarted myself. Again, not news — I'm an engineer and experienced in outsmarting myself. (Ask me about the SSL redirector and CPU utilization sometime over beers.)

The question was : What are your views on negative reinforcement? What do you think about dog owners using spray collars and even shock collars?

BlogPaws 2010

I attended the very first BlogPaws conference this weekend. I had a fantastic time and learned quite a lot. The conference was very well organized. The panel discussions were very informative and there were three great keynotes from Andrea Arden, Dr. Larry McDaniel and Elisa Camehort Page.

It's popular — and pretty easy — to complain about our modern culture of instant gratification. Almost everything;  the credit crisis, the obesity epidemic, the popularity of certain dog training TV shows, can be tied to our desire to get everything now-now-five-minutes-ago.

But instant gratification has a far uglier and more dangerous cousin. You don't see this cousin on TV or in big box stores - you see it at the office. It's "More With Less."

More With Less is the idea that a group or process is somehow inefficient and if we remove the excess...whatever...we won't just get the same results for less, we'll somehow get more. This idea is rampant in business, rampant enough that it was beautifully satirized in "The Wire" on HBO (and most likely watched by people that later went and tried to implement it at their jobs while believing the show didn't apply to them.)