Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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How to Stop Dog Owners from Sabotaging Their Progress.
One of our biggest challenges as dog trainers is keeping our clients from standing in their own way. There are a hundred variations of how this can manifest, and in this post, I will be discussing two recent situations that were brought to me by trainers that I coach. The…
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The Home Page Hack
There is one thing thousands of dog trainers have in common: They do not like sales and marketing. The good news is that all of us, even those who work alone, have at our fingertips a salesperson who has the potential to be highly effective. That salesperson is your website. …
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Natural/Unnatural
The essential task of the modern dog trainer Teach the dog how to behave naturally In an unnatural environment Master this The rest is easy
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Is Negative Punishment Really More Positive?
I am the proud father of two. A daughter whose age at the time of this writing is measured in weeks, and a son who is roughly two and a half. Like most toddlers, my son experiments with many different behaviors, often to see what he can get away with.…
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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…
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He Just Wants To Protect Me…
“I know he’s just trying to protect me, but I don’t know why” This is a common sentiment among dog owners bringing their dogs into our training center for help. If you have owned multiple dogs, there’s a decent chance that at least one of them has displayed over-protective behavior.…
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The Problem With Averages
“Scientific education is based in the main of statistical truths and abstract knowledge and therefore imparts an unrealistic, rational picture of the world, in which the individual, as a nearly marginal phenomenon, plays no role. The individual, however, as an irrational data, is the true and authentic carrier of reality.”…
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Self Discipline
This is a re-post from several years ago: When I was roughly 5 years old my mother asked me if I would like to take karate classes. My answer was flat out “No.” About 6 months later I saw the movie “The Karate Kid,” and suddenly I had a…