Miley is my five-year old Shetland Sheepdog, she’s had a fun career and is a great agility partner. In 2010, we were selected to be one of the teams to compete at the European Open Agility Championship (EO) in the Czech Republic. At the European Open, there are two team runs (one is Standard, one is Jumpers), and two individual runs (one is standard and is jumpers). Her two individual runs were good and we qualified and ran in the Finals. After arriving home from the EO and gathering my thoughts, I decided to work on Miley’s weave poles because

Every veterinary behaviorist’s dream is to have a technician who is certified in behavior. And if you’re a veterinarian in general practice, after you read this article, it may become your dream too. In this Q&A, Melissa Spooner, a licensed veterinary technician (LVT) with a Veterinary Technician Specialty in Behavior, answers questions about how she uses the Treat&Train® remote-controlled positive reinforcement training system during behavior consults to train dogs to settle down and to convince owners that she and the behavior team can indeed help them change their dog’s behavior. Spooner is the Special Events Coordinator at Oakland Veterinary Referral Services where she

Howdy Ya’ll. Today is part 3 of my wonderful tricks and stunts class. Today, you’ll see how I learned how to pull a tissue out of a bag. This was the easiest trick of the Christmas video. Back as a wee young-un, I learned how to pull Kleenex® out of a box in response to a “sneeze” cue.  But how did I learn the Kleenex® trick? First off, I already knew to fetch. If you don’t know how to fetch yet, go here to see how your human can help teach you. In that video, she uses a Treat&Train® but you could just use

        But even if you’re not a black belt in karate, you can still learn a basic karate kick. Here’s how I learned it. The key to this trick for me was figuring out that I was supposed to lift a hind leg. A clicker or some marker word that means a treat is coming is essential. My human had to click while I was lifting a hind leg, but the trick was that I had to be aware that I was lifting my hind leg. Otherwise I couldn’t perceive that the click was associated with that

Howdy Ya’ll! Like I promised, today I’m going to demonstrate how you to can perform one of the death defying stunts as seen on my Christmas Video: A Jack Russell Christmas.  Actually I’ll start with a potentially delicate one that can also be used for household clean-up tasks. You saw in the video where I put a toy and tissue paper back into a bag. This trick is just a variation of my daily chore of cleaning up my toys. Here’s how I learned the trick. First of all, I already knew fetch so the part about picking up an object and

My general rule of thumb is that we should use methods that focus on rewarding the correct behavior, starting with steps the dog can easily perform and quickly moving on to steps that are closer and closer to our goal behavior.