About a month ago, I wrote about Gracie, one of the mares at the horse rescue where I volunteer. Gracie’s a smart mare, but extremely skeptical of people. (And she has reason to be–she’s got scars on her body that were most likely human inflicted.) I’ve spent time with Gracie once or twice a week […]
Aggressive Training Methods and Aggressive Dogs
How do we train our dogs? Do we need to be the alpha dog, the most dominant member of the pack, and insist that our dogs obey us, even if we must use force or punishment? This is the view still advocated by many trainers, but is it a scientifically sound way to train our […]
Equine Artists
I love positive training methods and clicker training because it opens up a whole range of new behaviors we can teach our animals that could never be possible with traditional methods. I’ve recently found a new blog that I love. Cheryl, the woman who owns the website, has taught all four of her horses to […]
Dog Training Update
Here’s a video of Ginger and I playing from about a week ago. It shows a handful of the things we’ve been working on recently. We’ve been working quite a bit on targeting type behaviors, including touching my palm and touching the end of a targeting stick. (More information about target training.) She really understand […]
ORCA: Part 7. Kay Laurence
These are my notes from the ORCA Great Minds conference at UNT in March 2009. The Great Minds conference brought half a dozen top trainers together to talk about animal training, clicker training, operant conditioning and the future of training. This is the seventh post of my thoughts and notes and the second post about […]
ORCA: Part 6. Kay Laurence
These are my notes from the ORCA Great Minds conference at UNT in March 2009. The Great Minds conference brought half a dozen top trainers together to talk about animal training, clicker training, operant conditioning and the future of training. This is the sixth post of my thoughts and notes and the first post about […]