Category: Uncategorized
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How Successful Dog Trainers are Defying the Economy
The economic mood has shifted. You can see it in the numbers and you can feel it in the conversations. Tariffs, inflation fears, and global instability have consumers second-guessing every discretionary purchase. For families watching their budgets, dog training often falls into the “nice to have” category. And right now,…
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How Reward and Punishment Studies Miss the Point
The problem is, dogs aren’t levers on a Skinner box. They are social beings living inside of social systems, and those systems—family, household, relationship—fundamentally change what rewards and punishments mean.
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Pressure Motivates, Release Educates
Pressure is a term that I use a lot when discussing dog training. The concept of pressure is somewhat central to my system of training and influencing dogs’ behavior, and understanding how pressure works will make anyone a better handler. The most important to remember is that pressure motivates, and the…
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The Relativity of Pressure
Is training with rewards, without the use of physical corrections inherently more ethical than training with which utilizes other tools such as a leash and training collar, or an electronic collar? For a significant number of trainers, the answer has always been “Of course!” I think however if we look…
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If You Aren’t Listening, It’s Just A Lecture
Around this time last year, I coined a term, and a system I called Conversational Leash Work™. The idea behind this approach to leash handling is to utilize the leash to have an entire conversation with the dog, to guide her through her choices and give feedback about those choices…
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Conversational Leash Work and the Future of Dogmanship
Last week I had the pleasure of hosting a couple professional trainers at my center to offer them some education and insight on some of the training programs I offer, and some of the concepts that I have been developing. Let me just start by saying how overwhelmed I am…
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Negative Reinforcement and the Curse of Sisyphus
Sisyphus was the King of Ephyra, and he had a reputation for defying the Gods and being a bit of a trickster. One of his best-known exploits came at the end of his life when Hades, the God of the Underworld, came to claim him, bringing along a pair of…
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The Games We Play
There are two things that are important to understand about nature: First, nature is extremely efficient. Outside of the comfort of human households, calories are not easy to come by. This is especially true for dogs. Ecologists have estimated that among free-ranging populations of dogs, only about 4 to 6%…
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All the Wrong Questions
The day after I posted the video that it included in the post, I started getting Instagram ads from a company proclaiming they would teach you the “best way to train your reactive dog.” As a young dog trainer, I remember finding myself on the grail quest to find this…
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There is No Missing Technique
And there’s no magical “method.” When I look back at the time I have spent over the past year coaching professional dog trainers, there is one thing that stands out above the rest. Trainers come to me from many different backgrounds and many different experience levels. While some trainers are…