Kelly Gorman Dunbar

Never have I seen an activity that benefits such a wide variety of dogs, and by wide variety I mean just about every dog on the planet and their owners too. Nose work teaches people to appreciate their dog's innate olfactory and hunting skills. It allows dogs to be dogs and it's really a beautiful thing. I've extolled the virtues of fun nose work for dogs over on the fab local mag Bay Woof, but it bears repeating so here's the link to the article. Sniff, sniff hooray!

Today is day three of a four-day K9 Games® workshop hosted by Animalin in Aurimont, France. Aurirmont is a tiny village about 40 minutes from Toulouse, so we are really out in the French countryside. Many of the workshop attendees are camping on-site because Animalin is a wonderful facility for dog events, rolling fields, lots of different fenced areas for training, agility equipment, and even sheep. It’s really very nice.

Right now I’m sitting outside in the main training field watching the four teams practice for tomorrow’s K9 Games competition. For the past 2 days they’ve been learning the foundation skills for the games, as well as the games themselves and tomorrow is the big day when they get to put it all together and show what they’ve learned.

I have a pet peeve about dog training. Okay, actually I’ve got a few peeves about dog training; you caught me! I’m only going to mention one of them today though. It’s when people transpose the words “treat” and “reward” when talking about reinforcing a dog’s behavior. As in, “When the dog sits, give him a treat.” Or, “Reward the dog for not jumping up.”

Actually using either of the words above in a training scenario isn’t totally accurate; the word “reinforce” is the one that best suits the action and intention when acknowledging a dog’s correct response in an exercise in an attempt to increase the likelihood of a behavior.

Let’s look at the definitions of these words. All can be used as nouns or verbs; I’ve chosen the definitions of the words used as a noun, something you give to a dog.

I recently read a blog post by Dino Dogan that asked, “Do we need animal shelters?” His question was, “what would happen if we were to let dogs roam free?” The premise being that dogs and humans have successfully coexisted for hundreds of thousands of years and that our modern arrangement, including animal shelters are only a few hundred years old, so clearly dogs did okay before they hooked up so intimately with us. Dino then lists several arguments and counter arguments to give food for thought. And thought-provoking it is!