A little holiday spirit to bring you a smile. A story of Christmas at our house and a celebration of our lives with our dogs.
Happy Holidays everyone!

Dog people can be passionate. Coming to a new and deeper understanding of dogs and training can be a profound experience. If we are careful, our advocacy for working with dogs becomes a dogma. It’s important to focus on doing better for our dogs and not get hung up on all the “wrong” ways of working with dogs.

Dogs are both wonderfully simple creatures and yet very capable of learning very complex behaviours and concepts. But do we sometimes expect more of them than we should? They don’t think like humans even though the seem to understand us very well. Sometimes it’s best to break things down for them and keep it “Dog Simple.”

I have read a lot and learned a lot about dogs over the past dozen years. Through it all, my best teachers have all had 4 legs and not 2. While we humans are smart about so many things, dogs are experts on…dogs.

We don’t usually think of training our dogs in terms of winning and losing. But I think our dogs do. No one wants to be on a losing team so it’s important to give our dogs enough success to help them feel like winners. It could mean the world to them.

Losing a dog is never easy. Losing a dog in a multi-dog household can be complicated as well as sad. Friend and fellow dog trainer Blanche Axton shares an important lesson that our dogs teach us about living, dying, and going on.

Play is something all dogs need. But we can learn a lot about our dogs by just observing. In our past, we used to do a lot to control how our dogs play. It turns out that they have taught us a great deal when we just let them be dogs and play!

The Dog Whisperer television program has become a part of our cultural fabric in the early 21st century. But divisive debate and harsh rhetoric has transformed it from a program designed for entertainment into a lightning rod for controversy over differing approaches to living and working with dogs. Perhaps the time has come to put The Dog Whisperer back into perspective and see it for what it was always intended to be.

Our dogs can be pretty demanding. Our efforts to just get them to leave us alone and stop nagging might seem to work at the time but they may be working against us. Do we actually create the demanding dogs that drive us crazy?

Some dog trainers might say my dog isn’t perfect. She doesn’t always come when called. She can sometimes take a little too long to sit when I ask. She pulls on her leash on walks. But for all of her imperfections, she is perfectly Tiramisu – the dog I trained and love. Maybe “perfect” isn’t really what I wanted in a dog at all.