I admit it. I’m a Wordless Wednesday rule-breaker. I always say too much. Today, let’s talk dog harnesses. The one Lilly is wearing here is actually Ginko’s (scaled down badly). I need to find a good one for Lilly, so any and all recommendations welcome.
After more than four years blogging about real life with a fearful dog, I’ve learned a lot and made oodles of mistakes. When Caring 4 Creatures, a rescue group based in Atlanta, Georgia, asked me to write a guest post, I summed up several important lessons for anyone who adopts a fearful dog.
I hope you’ll pop on over there today to see what I have to say in the guest post called “Adopting a Fearful Dog,” including:
So, I spent a little time, just a few minutes, working on HOW I might teach Lilly to wag her tail on cue. We’ll have to keep working on it, but I plan to treat the the wag / no wag a bit like an on / off switch. Here is my 5-step plan for teaching this dog trick.
The challenge of working 10-12 hours every day for weeks (possibly months) on end is that the pace leaves little room for much more than survival. That means, other than the usual daily dog training cues and rewards, not a lot happens. So, to keep myself on track and to renew my commitment to all of you who follow our dog training tales, here is a recap of what’s currently on our dog training dock / dog training wish list.
Despite having ZERO time to read for pleasure lately, I’m making my way through a sheepdog book that our herding trainer recommended. It’s called Talking Sheepdogs: Training Your Working Border Collie (by Derek Scrimgeour).
While the book primarily deals with training a working / herding dog from puppyhood, I figure its good to know things from the ground up.
I still have a lot more reading to do (even though it’s a short book, just 128 pages, with lots of illustrations and diagrams), but here are two things I wanted to share.
Thanks to Kim Sporrer, media maven at Humane Society of Boulder Valley, a few newspapers have mentioned Never Shock a Puppy in articles about the humane society’s No-Choke Challenge. The most recent of which featured a mondo picture of me and Lilly. OMG.
I sometimes wonder if I’d ever deliberately adopt a truly fearful dog again. Truth? I didn’t know what I was getting myself into with Lilly. Still, I cannot imagine missing out on all the amazing things she taught me about not just dogs and dog training / dog learning theory but also about life and love, relationships, and finding (perhaps) my true calling.
Lilly has been off the xanax for a month now. While at first report, she showed no ill effects, drug withdrawal, or behavior problems. Things may have changed … and NOT for the better. Lilly had a rough few days last week.
We’re suffering a long, cold, windy start to the year here at Chez Champion of My Heart. Thanks to strategies we learned at a recent American Treibball Association event, however, we’ve been playing with the sport of ball herding.
Most nights, we work at home in the basement with a clicker and high value treats, but we also gave it a try outside in the “middle pasture” this week. This Remedial Treibball Video below shows our results.
Last Sunday here in Colorado, the American Treibball Association held its Winter Games. Now that I’ve seen how it’s taught and what the full game looks like, I’m happy to share insights.
Thanks again to all of you who contributed money during our Never Shock a Puppy campaign last fall. The funds raised by the entire coalition actively supports the Humane Society of Boulder Valley‘s No-Choke Challenge, which launched January 15, 2011.
Because that’s where we adopted Lilly in October 2004 and because Boulder Humane is truly one of the most progressive animal welfare spots in the country, we could not be MORE thrilled to support their efforts … first by raising money through our Be the Change campaign and now by spreading the word about the No-Choke Challenge.
Pals Edie Jarolim from Will My Dog Hate Me and Amy Burkert from GoPetFriendly.com teamed up on this Pet Blogger Challenge, where they urge folks like me to ponder some of the bigger questions about why we blog.
Years after we tackled the Relaxation Protocol ourselves (both the one by Dr. Karen Overall and the one our own behaviorist prescribed), it remains one of the top reasons people come to Champion of My Heart. Pretty neat, huh? So, I decided to revisit a couple of the common questions I get about our Relaxation Protocol work.
If you are new to our site, please check out the MP3 audio files to make doing the Relaxation Protocol easier.
Dear Sam (and others who are longing for dog training news), I wish, wish, wish I had the time/energy to work on new things with Lilly, but I just don’t with all the family medical dramas that have been brewing non-stop since summer 2009. We have high hopes for spring 2011, though. So, don’t give up on us yet. While I called it an update, it’s more like a wish list.
As Dog Geek reminded us recently, I am NOT Crazy. So, no … there are no new dogs at Chez Champion of My Heart, but I wanted to tell you about a new piece I wrote that went live last week on the pet health section of WebMD on this very topic of how best to introduce a new dog or puppy to your current canine pals.
Much of the advice I got from experts mirrored things we did when we nearly adopted Lilly’s best-best dog friend, Katie, the borzoi. We had to re-introduce Ginko and Katie because he pretty much tried to kick her butt the first time they met. When we gave it another go, we tried things like:
