Well, it finally happened to me! My dogs got skunked! It was, of course about 9:30pm, and I had just put the baby to bed. My husband was reading the 4-year-old his story and I let the dogs out into my fenced-in backyard.
Twenty years ago when I entered the profession of dog training and began teaching classes, I was hard pressed to find much variety in the methodology and literature. There was a plethora of information about choke collars, leash jerks, scruff shakes, ear pinches, alpha rolls, and of course, alpha roles. There were few, if any, references to the principles of behavior modification, and training with food rewards was often discouraged.
Recently I was listening to a few dog trainers discussing the best way to teach a dog to retrieve a dumbbell. Apparently the owner in question had completely burned her dog out on the exercise by repeatedly working on it in a manner that was very aversive to the dog - although she wasn't using forceful methods the dog was totally unmotivated to learn to take a dumbbell from her hand.
One of the catch-up projects I’ve been working on this month is downloading footage from my video camera to my computer so it can be edited and preserved on DVD. This isn’t just any footage; it features my dogs, wolves, and wolfdogs who are no longer with us. As some of you know, I lost Mojo (my soul dog), Phantom (my soul wolf) and Heyoka (beloved high content wolfdog) all in the past year. So the video project has been a heartwarming yet difficult one.
What is the secret to dog training? As I browse the Internet I keep reading about secrets. Secret techniques. Secret solutions. I even saw a e-book that claimed its secret would "slash my dog obedience training time in half" while another claimed to contain all of the secrets of a professional dog trainer.
