I specialize in working with “difficult dogs”. Dogs who bark a lot. Or who lunge and bite. Or who dig up the garden, or chase cats, or toilet in the house. I work with families who have dogs that most people would find difficult to live with. I also work with dogs who are anxious and fearful, or who really don’t have very good self control or resilience.

A professional dog trainer sees a lot of stupid mistakes over the years, but probably the most common one is the mismatch of dogs and people.  On a friend’s Facebook page recently, I got into a discussion with a rescuer who insisted that any dog slated to die was a better option than a well thought out, carefully placed and carefully researched puppy. 

It would seem that we are the proud owners of our very own, nine week old dragon.  At least that is the joke in our house.  She is endearingly sweet, fluffy, and wickedly smart, but she is a dragon none the less. 

One of the most frequent questions I am asked at social functions is “How do I choose a really smart dog when I am looking for a puppy?”  This is a loaded question that really reflects how little people understand what they are looking for in a dog. 

When we get a puppy, we are happy and looking forward.  We look forward to the times we will spend in the company of our adult dog, and all things we will do and all the fun we will do together.  We realize that there will be work along the way, including taking the dog to the vet, training and cleaning up after him, not to mention the dust bunnies and other household reminders he will leave in his wake. 

I just got an email from a lady who described her 4 year old dog as a puppy, and she wondered if he was old enough to start coming to school because he was driving her crazy.  The problem is that her dog is not a puppy.  The term puppy is roughly equivalent to the human term infant or baby. 

Just what do people mean by active when they talk about active dogs?  Everyone seems to want to be more active these days. If you are an athlete, you want to reach that level of fitness just beyond your current ability and you push yourself to do that.

With our new puppy program we have been hearing from more and more puppy owners and a surprising number of them are bring home their pups at six weeks of age, often without their first set of shots.  Puppies from pet stores may be older when you meet them, but may have been taken from mom as early as four weeks of age. 

Late last night, at the end of our business day, at around 10:30 in the evening we picked up our business messages. One of the messages came from a new puppy owner who was obviously frantic. “Call quick” the message said. “We don’t know what to do!”

Probably the toughest question you get as a dog behaviour consultant is “why does my dog have this problem”.  Regardless of the problem, aggression, anxiety, fears and phobias, separation anxiety, everyone wants to know why THEIR dog has a behaviour problem. 

As a trainer I get to see a lot of different uses of dog names. People sing their dog’s names, they shout them, they punctuate them, they whisper them and sometimes they just use them over and over again like a broken record. Fido sit. Fido down. Fido come. Fido stay. Fido mat.

Everyone I talk to who doesn’t own a dog has strong opinions about having dogs in apartment buildings and an awful lot of shelters and rescues won’t adopt out unless you have a fenced yard. 

I am getting a lot of inquiries these days about teaching dogs and puppies to ring bells to ask to go out in the yard to toilet. I have taught several dogs to do this, and it really isn’t difficult.

People have a variety of reasons for holding off on getting their pups, and most often we hear that they don’t want to go through the early puppy training. 

Puppies change dramatically between 8 weeks when we get them, and 10 weeks when we start taking them into the wider world and 12 weeks when they are most like what people think a puppy will be like.

There are now thousands of different toys on the market to choose from and it can be difficult to determine which toys are safe and which ones are not.

I am starting a new section on the blog where I am going to feature people I know who breed dogs carefully and thoughtfully to help people to learn a little more about who breeders are.