The Dog Blog

There's a lot in the news about today being the 200th birthday of 16th U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and that is all good and well and Happy Birthday to you to, Abe. But what a lot of people don't know is that on that same day in 1809, across the pond from Lincoln's birthplace of Hodgenville, Kentucky, over in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England, Charles Darwin was also born. The stars must really have been aligned that day for two such amazing men to have been born, their passions and life work still resonating two centuries later.

Darwin's path led him to become the most highly respected naturalist of the 19th century. He was a devoted family man (he and his wife Emma had 10 children, although not all of them lived to adulthood, common in those times), and, contrary to other Victorian era country gentlemen, spent inordinate amounts of time shaping his children's thirst for knowledge.

It often is the case that "bad" behavior is punished. Example:
A dog gets angrily put in a crate for getting into the trash (I say shame on you for leaving the trash accessible and NEVER use a crate to punish, only manage).

The 4th grade kid who acts out in class gets punished by losing recess privileges. Instead he gets to sit somewhere to think about why he lost recess, often near the Principle's Office.

In both the examples above, these things actually INCREASE the "bad" behavior. A recent study published last week in the Journal PEDIATRICS indicates that children who received even 15 minutes of recess scored better on behavioral ratings scales than the children who did not. Duh.

Well we have just finished our 4th week of our new Daycare service and needless to say it is going extremely well. Tara and I put a lot of thought into how the whole thing would work and we are very happy with how it’s all coming together.

Firstly, I want to put Daycare in Ireland in context. Up until now Daycare of the kind that is seen in the U.S. did not exist here. Yes there were some kennels offering a “daycare” service but ours is the very first of it’s kind in the country. The economy however has joined ranks with the rest of the world and has plummeted into the depths of a recession. In under a year predictions are that we will go from almost full employment to an unemployment rate of almost 10%. The financial times are scary to say the least.

Over the years I have traveled in many a dog circle. One of the biggest complaints that I have heard from urban dog enthusiasts is the lack of tracking fields available for training. For many of our rural dog owning friends this seems unheard of; no place to track, why that is silly. However, for many of us city types a drive over an hour, sometimes many hours to go tracking is the norm.

Along with my training partners Amy and Ron we developed a structured class curriculum that brings detection style training to those folks looking for something different to do with their four legged companions. We tested our first class in Long Beach in the summer of 2006. At that point, we didn’t realize how quickly folks would get hooked.