One of the best parts about being a part of a strong network of animal behavior professionals is that I get to learn about interesting experiences with animals, clients and behavior products from a completely different perspective. For instance, last month at the North American Veterinary Conference, I met up with Dr. Lisa Radosta, a board certified veterinary behaviorist who lectures extensively and runs Florida Veterinary Behavior Service.  I don’t have any human kids, nor do I want any, but Lisa does and, as a result, she was able to make a statement about the Treat&Train®, the remote controlled reward-based dog

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.

A vet who knows how to handle their patients in a calm, gentle manner is a vet who will earn the goodwill and loyalty of their clientele.