Life can be rough for shelter dogs. Thousands of dogs enter shelters every day, many because of behavior or training problems that could have been fixable. Marine Mammal trainer Chris Dignan is on a mission to help shelter dogs by educating pet owners and promoting positive training methods. Life’s Ruff is an entertaining and very […]
Dog Training RSS feed for this section
Dogs, dogs, dogs! In this section, you’ll find lots of great dog training stories and tips from my adventures training my own dogs, my foster dogs, and the dogs of my clients.
Ginger works on Fetch!
How hard should it be to teach a dog to fetch? Right now, Ginger thinks dog toys are for chewing, tugging or chasing. We’ve never bothered to teach her to bring them back. Of course, Ginger is perfectly capable of fetching, the issue is communicating to her that this is what I want her to […]
Ginger’s Snow Day (pictures and video)
Actually, all of last week was kind of Ginger’s snow day. We’ve been having some NASTY weather in Texas, and poor Texas is not prepared for multiple days below freezing with snow and ice on the ground. In any case, the university was closed Tuesday through Friday last week, so I got a few extra […]
Teaching Targeting to a Blind Dog
My friend Miki over at Blind Dog Training recently posted a video tutorial that I really like. In the video, she explains how to teach a blind dog to target your hand. Here’s two reasons why I really like this video: 1. Clever use of cues. Miki first snaps with the target hand so that […]
Teaching a dog to match using clicker training
This week in ORCA we watched a really neat video of a dog learning to match objects. We often don’t think of matching as a complex skill because we are very familiar with matching and have had a lot of practice with it. However, it’s pretty complicated! Matching can also be a hard skill to […]
Shaping Ginger to Lower Her Head
Clicker training isolated muscle movements can be great for improving your shaping skills. One behavior that ginger and I have been working on using clicker training is teaching her to lower her head. With shaping, we don’t try and teach the whole behavior at once. Instead, we split the behavior into small approximations toward the […]