In the past month, I have been inundated with images through my email box and Facebook pleading for help to find a recently lost dog.  If I think that it will help, I share the image on my personal page and on my business page. 

Uh uh. Huh uh. Oh, oh. Wrong. Try again. What do these five phrases have in common and what do they have to do with dog training?

For the past twenty years, I have offered a program I call the Good Dog Program for good dogs who have big problems.  Every month, one or more student manages to pass their dog through the program and into our regular obedience class. 

Last time I talked about talking to my dogs. This time I want to talk about listening and more importantly hearing what they have to say. Dogs are non verbal species. This means that they can only tell us things by their behaviour.

In many respects, dogs operate much like toddlers do. They pick up common phrases and integrate them into their daily activities. They learn that specific words mean specific things, and they learn what activities predict what other activities.

Your dog is a member of your family and you want to make sure that he is confident about everything he will encounter. The following tips will help you to make your dog’s experience of Canada Day as good as yours!

As dog trainers, we have both hopes and expectations for our dogs when we train them.  The problem I am seeing is that people are satisfied if Fido is willing to sit after several prompts, a treat on the nose and the cue repeated fifteen times in a row. 

So what does it mean when a dog growls?  Growling is one of the behaviours that precedes a bite.  In fact, there is a whole sequence of behaviours that usually happen before the dog actually bites. 

As a behaviour consultant, one of the most important skills in my bag of tricks is my ability to suss out what a dog is doing.  I am not talking about why a dog does a behaviour, or what drives it, but what a dog is doing. 

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.

One morning this week, one of our puppy clients went to the park with their young dog… A few minutes into their play, along came another car, which stopped… the driver opened her door and two big dogs leapt out and immediately charged and grabbed the puppy

Stress and anxiety in puppies and dogs is something that we often see and many fail to recognize. 

Here are my top 9 things to teach a puppy to ensure he will be successful regardless of what might happen later on.

When I go to the vet, I have some things I do to make the visit as successful for everyone as I can. 

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.

So just what does a normal dog to human greeting look like? Normal greetings may be enthusiastic but they should not be frantic.

Every day I see stunts around me in the name of training. Doing an off leash heeling routine in a public square away from traffic is one thing, but doing the same thing through traffic is another.