It’s one thing to show class participants how to perform certain exercises and to have them practice in class but providing an opportunity to practice them in the context closer to real life using games and prizes turns a regular class into a spectacular event! We did just this in our first ever Learn to Earn Scavenger Hunt at my house last week, which was week five of a six-week beginning dog training class. The class was comprised of first-time dog owners, experienced dog owners, as well as humans who foster dogs for shelters and rescue groups. What the Learn

     Training dogs to say please by sitting for everything they want seems simple, but the concept is so new to most dog owners that they frequently continue to reward exactly the opposite of what they want. Our class of beginning dogs is doing great overall. They have good focus outside and can walk on loose leash but we know they can improve even faster if they are diligent about their own and their pooch’s behavior in the house. So tomorrow we’re holding most of the class in a real-life home situation and playing the Learn to Earn Scavenger

Have you ever gone to a dog training class or taken a private lesson and left with your head swimming?  With so much information, the main messages can sometimes get lost among the more intricate details.  Here are some take-home messages that I use to guide my every-day interaction with my patients as well as my own pets. Every interaction you have with the animal is a training session. So it’s important to be aware of what you may be doing to reward inappropriate behaviors throughout the day especially when you are not having planned training sessions. Animals care about

Have you ever had a leg injury that was mild enough so that you didn’t limp but serious enough that you had problems during intense sports? For instance, you could run fine in a straight line but favored the leg when making sharp turns or when you had to jump. Luckily as humans we can identify the ache and tell a doctor, but when the problem is with our pooch how do we figure it out? Sometimes the hint can be in their gait. Last month at the American Veterinary Medical Association’s Annual Conference, I attended a lecture given by

Summer conjures up images of shorts and bikinis, but for dogs, at least those in California, the “in” piece of petwear is protective headgear. Not protection from crashes or spills related to athletic play; protection from those pesky grass awns called foxtails. From afar, these awns look like wheat but close up they look more deadly. The awns fall into ears, eyes and get sniffed into the nose and once they have a foothold, their shape ensure they travel only one way—in deeper and deeper. For dogs in California who like to go on hikes or into yards and parks where

My suspicions were confirmed the day after Christmas at the Metreon Theater downtown. As the youngest in the family, my job was to wait in line and knowing this, I went prepared—with a scientific article called, “Do dogs respond to play signals given by humans?”  The research, lead by Nicola Rooney at the Anthrozoology Institute in Southhampton, U.K., starred 21 owners who were videotaped playing with their dogs. In what surely would have been billed as a comedy, owners patted, the floor, barked, bowed, shuffled their feet, slapped their thighs, crawled on all fours, anything to get their Rovers to