The Dog Blog

There is one thing I tell my clients on a regular basis and this is to have a training plan.  Don’t just blindly find yourself in situations where you’re supposed to be training your dog, without first thinking through the possibilities for distraction, reaction, reward, and an all important emergency get out clause, if things get too much for either you or the dog. 

The challenge had been set, to get my teenage puppy Guinness to stop cocking his leg on everything and anything his testosterone filled body declared worth peeing on.  You may all be pleased to hear that on day one, this exercise resulted in a major failure on my part.  I would love to tell you all that as a trainer, I do everything one hundred percent correctly, one hundred per cent of the time.  But of course I don’t.  Last week was a great example of what can go wrong.

I am a huge advocate of neutering.  It’s very difficult to find a dog person who comes from a rescue background as I do, who isn’t vehemently pro-neutering.  Indeed, I generally advise clients that with a few exceptions, neutering will result in a dog who is easier to live with and healthier in the long term.  So why did I make the choice to leave my current male dog intact for a year, when all my other dogs would have taken their trip to the vet for ‘the chop’ by now?

As a trainer who’s been around for quite a while, it’s easy to give the same old answers to the same old problems.  This is especially true if those problems are likely to be solved by castration (humping, scent marking, some aggression issues, recall challenges around other dogs).  Now what if the client in question is just as against castration as I am an advocate of it?

I’ve been doing various sorts of dog play groups for over ten years. But conducting play groups in the shelter environment is a much more challenging prospect. Having worked through some of those challenges, I’ve decided to share my solutions in an upcoming seminar, Beyond Socialization – Using Shelter Play Groups for Training Assessment. Not only will I be talking about challenges and solutions, but also the potential pitfalls of shelter play groups and how play can be used to better serve the dog and the adopting public.

Here’s an overview of some of the challenges I’ll be discussing:

This January we celebrate the 30th birthday of off-leash puppy classes. Happy Birthday SIRIUS® Puppy Training! It’s hard to believe that I taught the world’s very first off-leash, puppy socialization and training classes thirty years ago at Live Oak Park in Berkeley (where SIRIUS classes are still held to this day). Basically, I started SIRIUS simply because I wanted a local puppy school for my Alaskan Malamute puppy, Omaha. After ten years researching dog developmental behavior at UC Berkeley, I was well aware of the critically important and permanent effects of early socialization and of science-based training techniques and I certainly didn’t want Omaha’s schooling to be put on hold until he was an adult. Little did I know that SIRIUS puppy classes would change the way that pet dogs are trained worldwide.