Lately a few of my students have been struggling with very intelligent, high drive dogs who enjoy pushing their person’s buttons. If you say sit, they lie down. If you ask for got to mat, they offer a trick. If you send them to fetch up a dumbbell, they go out, turn and face you and sit.

Regularly I get students in my classes who tell me that they want other family members to attend classes so that everyone will be consistent. Consistency is important in training, but what I mean by consistent and what my students often mean by consistent is often different.

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. 

At Dogs in the Park we run a drop in gym style program where students can come to 11 classes a week with their dog and learn about dog training. When they have passed enough basic exercises, advanced classes open up to them. When dogs come to training classes we always tell people to practice their skills regularly and often.

Once upon a time, I was a svelte 148 pounds and just a smidge under five nine.  I rode horses, threw hay bales around and when time permitted, I lifted weights.  I liked lifting weights.  In fact, I enjoyed it so much, and was so active that I liked to test how much I could lift once a week.  My record week, I bench pressed 198 pounds. 

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.

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. 

One of the reasons that people have dogs is as a living alarm.  Our dogs tell us when the mailman is at the door, when a guest has arrived and sometimes when the birds land on the birdfeeder.