As it’s ringing, I pick up the phone almost mindlessly only to hear a female voice speaking at 1,000 miles an hour with little room for intervention on my part. I try to interject now that I realize this is a telemarketing type of call by saying that I am not interested in this conversation…
Life is really an ongoing set of evaluations and negotiations affecting those that are part of our lives, be it a child, friend, parent, and even our pets. If reaching a consensus where all parties get something they want or need is difficult, imagine when there is one silent partner “sitting at the negotiation table.”…
Resource guarding of anything that a dog considers valuable is normal dog behavior. It goes back to- you guess it, evolution. Dogs are opportunistic feeders and scavengers. In other words, in the wild, dogs do not know when their next meal will appear so they eat when food becomes available. In addition, they are scavengers…
Hello Pet Guardians, Going, going, gone! If you are thinking about joining the Playing and Teaching Boundary Games dog training class, do so now! Registration closes soon and there are only a few spots left! Watch the video on YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umxjhRm9gKU Learn more here: https://chacodogtraining.com/event/playing-and-teaching-boundary-games/?instance_id=5667&fbclid=IwAR3mcEF_Om1_RtBe4w8iRxWr0zg53-GZb6cePaV2sfBpqUOaX08GnO_F-pU What do your dogs do when the doorbell rings? Or…
Dogs notoriously make sense of their environment by predominantly using their sense of smell and sight. Their top priority always being the one of safety – of being safe. Their world is basically divided into two categories: safe and unsafe. After the dog has decided that a certain thing, person, etc. is safe, their next…
When we’re slowing down, it has many benefits. It permits us to enjoy what is in front of us- begging for our undivided attention. It allows us to make better decisions, it calms frail nerves and it splendidly reminds us that while the clock is ticking we can choose to show up to live our…
I am stretching on my yoga mat, and when I do, I really have to work hard at not interacting with my dogs. Perhaps it’s that they can access me in a different manner as I am now more at their eye level or it might be that I am doing downward dog and they…
A few months back I wrote about the “why” questions: People love “why” questions. Perhaps because we are curious, because we think “why” questions help us understand our own dog better (which sometimes they do, of course!) but most of the time it’s because we’d much rather our dog not do something and we think…
I am reading an article in Outside magazine titled “The Metric System” about exercise gadgets and studies as to why most people abandoned the gadget altogether. One of the reasons why this happens according to John Bartholomew, professor of Health Education at the University of Texas at Austin, who specializes in exercise psychology, is because…
I was recently quite frustrated with the fact that my dogs had no interest in going after the thrown less-than-perfect Frisbee, that I had to introduce changes in their playtime. The changes that I introduced in our following Frisbee sessions are all based on principles of animal learning which everyone wanting to work with animals…