In parts 1 and 2, I talked about how comfort and play can help reduce your dog’s emotional distress during a thunderstorm. I have excluded more canonical forms of counterconditioning and desensitization, like the use of food or recordings that replicate the sounds of storms, because they are well...

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In part 1, I discussed using calm, consistent tactile pressure to comfort your dog during a thunderstorm. (Read it here.) Now, let’s play. Play can alleviate distress for a sizable subset of storm phobic dogs when done appropriately. Not all play is equal I lump most play with our dogs...

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Comfort your dog There are a lot of comprehensive articles about how to help an anxious dog cope with thunderstorms (and fireworks and the sound of gunshots and so on). Rather than duplicate the efforts of my colleagues, I want to give an overview of the considerations and practices that I’ve...

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“What should I teach my dog?” or some form of that question tends to come up in early conversations with clients. My answer is always the same: “I don’t know.” Part of my reason for saying that is the shock value; a client isn’t expecting to hear that sort of response when they’ve hired me...

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If you are like me, you think “what a beautiful animal” when you see a photo of a wolf. But when you look at a photo of a dog you are more likely to think “what a cute dog!” especially if the focus is on the dog’s face. Researchers recently published a paper in the Proceedings of the National...

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I love dog sport heeling. I love watching it, and I love teaching it. However, it requires a lot of time since the dog needs to be comfortable, engaged, athletically coordinated, joyful, and more! Many things are like that in dog training; success takes time. I’ll give you another example: ...

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