The Site May Be A Mess While I Move It is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

I think somewhere in those old boxes there may be some of the dog stories I wrote a few years later. I love it that my mother used to write down my comments when she dated the drawings. (I found this because I am taking a digital scrapbooking class and this month’s assignment is the years before school.)

My Enthusiasm for Dogs Showed Up Early is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

In the dream my Rottweiler Lola was reaching up to take something off a table. I said NO and she stopped immediately, turning to look at me. I said “Good girl! What a smart puppy!” (Even though she is six years old.) And I rubbed her chest.  Then I turned to a couple who were with me, beginners at understanding how dogs think, and I said to them that in this case the word no wasn’t really negative in any way, as it was simply conveying information to the dog… that the object she was interested in was a people thing rather than a dog toy.

Well, I could probably stop this blog post right there and you’d get the point. But I will expand it a bit. I have known some people who don’t feel that they can tell their dogs NO. (Some of them have trouble, for the same reasons, telling their kids NO. Dog training principles fascinate me partly because they help me understand how human minds work as well.) But in fact, NO is a very useful word between you and your dog.

It succintly conveys “Oh sweetheart, that is something of mine  and I  want you to leave it right there.” I’ve heard people tell their dogs things like that, no doubt have done it myself, but nowadays I prefer the short and simple NO. With no judgment, no scolding, just pure information. And followed up with positive reinforcement of praise and some petting or a treat.

By the way, that photo of Lola was taken when she was about a year old and we lived in Mexico. Lola learned to let herself into the house by pulling on that rope attached to the screen door and then going into the house before the door swung back. (We had a securely fenced yard so we could leave the door unlocked when we were home during the day.) LarryDog never did figure it out!

Now why did I dream about saying NO to my dog? Ah, that’s another topic altogether! The short answer is I dunno! But it did give me a subject to write about here.

When Saying NO is Positive Dog Training is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

In the course of working with many pet owners as they made the decision to euthanize, she discovered that many owners went through a great deal of anguish that could often be assuaged by providing them with more information. This book is the outgrowth of that discovery. Having had two of our dogs euthanized over the years, and closely monitoring two others who died naturally, I wasn’t sure if I would learn much. But I did. With LarryDog now sixteen, when I read about  this book in an email from Dogwise, I immediately bought the ebook version and read it.

Here is how she describes the purpose of the book:  ”I spent a significant amount of time pondering why a veterinarian can make end of life decisions for her personal pets with less misery and suffering then the average pet owner. This difference resides in knowledge and familiarity. I have been trained to recognize animal pain, I understand when no further medical options exist for a disease, and I know the procedure and drugs of euthanasia. I cannot provide you a veterinary degree in this book, but I can provide you the comprehensive information on the process of euthanasia that you deserve as a pet owner.”

The first chapter discusses how dogs and cats don’t share the human fear of death. Dr. Reck tells some interesting stories of how dogs and cats have reacted to the death of other pets in their households when she has been present. That reminded me of when our dog Cider was euthanized by our veterinarian on  her bed, on our living room floor, and how our other dog Teddy Bear sniffed her once and then ignored her body. Seemed to us that he understood she wasn’t there.

Next, she explains the euthanasia procedure and some options in how it can be done. I learned a couple of things that could be useful, but the main benefit to me of this book was the following chapter on animal pain. She says dogs and cats do fear pain, and she also emphasizes how they are programmed to hide their pain from others. This chapter spells out in some detail how to be alert to cues — subtle and not-so-subtle — that your pet is experiencing some pain. Based on this, I am quite confident that good ol’ LarryDog is not in any significant pain. I didn’t think he was, but I found it useful to go through her list. He eats with total enthusiasm, he still runs some on his morning walks, and on down the list. He barks about as much as ever (quite a lot), he doesn’t limp, we can touch him all over without his flinching, and so on.

This was all the more impressive when I saw her charts of dogs’ ages and sizes and how those translated into human years. Seems LarryDog is around 100 already, in that way of thinking! But what surprised me was that Lola, a Rottweiler at six and a half years, would count as 65 human years.  Yikes! She is still our baby. Kelly and I decided that LarryDog seems more like 90 to us, and Lola maybe 50. But then we don’t feel our ages either! Our cats on her chart would be about 65 and 44, and that actually feels about right.

The last part of the book is an excellent discussion of how to come to a decision that you can live with regarding euthanasia. There was a moving discussion of young pets that would be very helpful to someone with a young dog or cat. It was informative to read about how young animals, with their more vigorous life forces, can overcome surprising difficulties. But not always,  and in this section, as throughout the book, she writes with compassion and facts blending well together.

To find out more, go to Dogwise, publishers of this book: FACING FAREWELL – MAKING THE DECISION TO EUTHANIZE YOUR PET

Thinking About Euthanasia and Pets is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

Dogwise is cleaning house and getting rid of hundreds of slightly shopworn books and older editions… many of them at 70% off. That link takes you to the page which lists them all, so it may be a little slow to load if your connection is anything like mine out here in rural Colorado.

I got seven books for just over $60, and the list prices of those books were in the upper teens all the way to $35. I got a book on dog agility, which I have never done, a couple of books on dog health, one on living more ecologically with your dog, and some dummies books. I was tempted to get some of the many breed books they have on the page, but I don’t really need them so I didn’t.

Shopworn… as a librarian who’s worked in public libraries, I know shopworn! People eat chocolate when they read fiction. They leave books spread open at the page where they stopped reading. They… well, I will spare you.

What Dogwise is calling shopworn is just barely noticeable. One book looks like someone may have browsed through it for ten minutes. That’s the worst! Others are very slightly dinged up on their corners, for a quarter of an inch or so. I couldn’t find anything the matter with two of them.

Take a look… here’s the link to the sales page again: Dogwise

Bargain Books on Sale at Dogwise Now is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

For example, for many years I have taught all my dogs that they have to hear me say “Okay!” before they can eat their meals. They have to sit and stay before I say okay. Eating the meal is such a strong reward that every dog has quickly learned this sequence of sit, stay, and wait for the magic word. I don’t even have to ask them to sit with a word. Often they sit before I can say it or even glance at them.

So… recently Lola got an abcess on her belly, and it began draining before our vet saw it. The veterinarian gave us an antibiotic cream in a small tube, which we were to poke into the hole in her skin and squirt a bit, then rub some into her skin. When she said to do it twice a day, we decided it would be easiest to remember if we did it before meals.

Lola didn’t much like being messed with that way and at first we had to chase her around the house. But by the third day, she was staying in the dining room as I got the food ready before I did the ointment. The next day, she started lying down and even presenting her belly for her treatment, and so it continued for the week we had to do the procedure. It didn’t matter whether I was feeding or my husband was, the routine was the same.

The week passed but I’m sure you can see what’s coming… we now have a new part of the meals ritual! Lola presents me with her belly and I rub it.

Who’s training whom? This is not the first time that I have wondered that, and it’s a great reminder of the power of back chaining. I would have to say that Lola has taught me the belly-rub part!

Through Backchaining, Our Rottweiler Teaches Me to Rub Her Belly Before Meals is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

LarryDog, who is now 15 and a half, has recently taken to following me from one room to the next. This is new.

If I’m cooking, he’s underfoot in the kitchen–a logical thing for a dog to do, but something that’s new for him. If I am in my home office, he’s usually on his pad but the other day he noticed that he can fit under my new desk right next to me when I’m working on my laptop. If I go to the bedroom, he has two favorite places to lie there–one blocking access to the door and the other on a softer rug. Oh, actually, he has a third favorite spot in there: when I’m in the bathroom, he lies by its door in the bedroom.

And so it goes. The other day I stopped counting at a dozen times that he followed me, and that was around noon. What does he want when he does this? Mostly, it seems he just seems to want to be close. Other times, he comes and puts his face up to me. I pet him a little or scratch behind his ears, and he is satisfied to move away.

He still has most of his vision, but he is getting quite deaf. So maybe he is relying more of his vision and is keeping me closer for that reason.  It seems to me that in many of these moments, he is doing what he has always done as a dog: he is bringing me into the present moment, sharing a bit of love. But is there also a bit of preparation for the long goodbye that will be coming up sometime down the road?

A lot of people wouldn’t go for that idea, but I do keep wondering. He is still enjoying going for walks, eating his meals at top speed, and hanging out with us. There is still quality of life for sure. And all these little moments together add to it.

Why Does My Old Dog Follow Me From Room to Room All Day? is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

Dogwise Publishing grew out of a company named Direct Book Service, and it is a small (but clearly busy!) family-run company in Wenatchee, Washington. Here is a little bit from their About Us page:

Dogwise Publishing now produces six to ten new books a year on topics that are important to our customers. Renowned dog experts who are published by Dogwise Publishing include Jean Donaldson, Patricia McConnell, Turid Rugaas, Roger Abrantes, Brenda Aloff, Sarah Kalnajs, Rachel Page Elliott and Pat Miller. Our focus is on creating humane, understandable and scientifically sound information for people who enrich their lives by working with, playing with and loving dogs. Dogwise Publishing has an insider’s knowledge of dogs and serves both the dog-loving public and the dog-oriented professional.

Note that “humane, understandable, and scientifically sound information.” The emphasis is on reward-based methods like clicker training. While their website carry a wide range of dog training titles from many different publishers, the preponderance of them are very much in line with the principles of my website here, looking at training methods that the dogs enjoy. As the old saying goes, you can catch more flies with honey, and it is a pleasure to be involved with the movement towards pain-free, positive rewards methods of training dogs. Dogwise is at the forefront!

The Expanding Ebook Section at Dogwise

Dogwise has been bringing out a lot of their books as ebooks as well as regular books. This particularly pleases me because until they began this, most of the dog training ebooks were very high priced. Here is a link to the homepage of their ebooks section

I usually buy their ebooks in PDF format, which can be printed out, though mostly I just read them on my laptop. They also put their ebooks into the Mobi format which works on Kindles and in the ePub format which works on Ipads, Nooks, and other e-readers. You get all these format for one price, so if you start out with something as a PDF and later want it on your Kindle, you just log into your account with them, go to “My Ebook Shelf” and download the other format. They have help on the download page too.

The Dog Forum and Some Useful Lists

There is an active and friendly forum here, with sections on dog training, general chat, health, wellness, and nutrition, and showing dogs.

Here is a page which is a list of lists created by customers and staff. You can make your own list if you want to add one!

Dogwise has a variety of other lists in their sidebar menu too.

My Relationship with Dogwise

Besides being a customer, and sometimes posting reviews on their pages, I am also an affiliate of Dogwise. That means that if you click through on one of my links to them and buy something, I may earn a small percentage of the sale with no cost to you. It’s a way that Dogwise can reach more people, helpful to them as they compete with bigger websites.  I have been doing this ever since I began training-dogs.com… geez, I don’t remember exactly what year that was, but  it was  in the past century!

I still remember very clearly the  first sale I made from Dogwise. Someone bought Dr. Ian Dunbar’s excellent puppy training DVD–well, it was a video then– Sirius Puppy Training and when I saw that on my statistics page at Dogwise, I burst into tears. Not because I had just made my first three bucks or so as an affiliate, but because some puppy somewhere would have a better start in life. Later, as I watched my stats over time, I was surprised to see that some articles I had done on training deaf dogs had resulted in a lot of sales of a couple of books on the topic.

If you are interested in signing up yourself as an affiliate, go to http://www.dogwise.com/Affiliate/index.cfm to sign up, with the name of your website.

Do Take a Look!

Check them out at Dogwise, All Things Dog!

Positive Dog Training Gets Help from Dogwise is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

I don’t read much fiction–as my father was science fiction writer Cordwainer Smith (link to my site about him), I grew up hearing more than a lifetime’s worth of scary tales. So I had never read a word by Koontz, an extraordinarily prolific and popular author, because I thought his stuff was too horror-filled for me.

But  Amazon has this useful–or tricky–feature where you can download a selection from the start of a book onto your Kindle. (Or your free Kindle reader for PCs or Macs, link takes you to Amazon page that explains how.) So I figured that I could look at the first chapter. That word “Joyful” in the title kinda hooked me. So I read the first chapter, and then on a Kindle, you can just click to buy the book and download the rest immediately. Without a moment’s thought, I did.

I was immersed for hours in the story of how Dean Koontz and his wife Gerda had been so hardworking for so many years that they had never had a dog or a child. But they both loved dogs, and evidently dogs feature in many of his novels. They had been deeply involved in supporting Canine Companions for Independence, which trains and provides service dogs at no cost to kids and adults with disabilities, and they had good friends in the organization. So they mentioned to one of their friends there that they were about ready to get a dog.

She found them Trixie, who had been a service dog but had needed surgery for a bad elbow and couldn’t go back to the person she had been assisting because of regulations about the health of service dogs.

Trixie changed their lives. In SO many ways. I’m not going to tell you any of the stories… Koontz does that so incredibly well. I did cry… several times.

I will comment that it was a tremendous pleasure to read some of the passages, here and there through the book, where he talks about how Trixie was to him and his wife a manifestation of the Divine. Here is one such bit:

I believe that Trixie, in addition to being a dog and a child and an inspiration and a revelation, was also a quiet theophany, a subtle manifestation of God, for by her innocent joy and by her actions in my life, she lifted from me all doubts of the sacred nature of our existence.

(can’t quote a page because Kindles don’t show them but it is at 88%)

That captures so well what brings me back to dogs again and again. If that point is not your cup of tea, I think you’d still like the book.

Trixie  has her own part of her dad’s website: Trixie Koontz.

Click on the image above to go to Amazon, where you can get it for the Kindle, as a hardback, as a paperback, or as an audiobook. Highly recommended!

A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog, by Dean Koontz is a post from: Training Dogs Blog

2. I will remember to be silly more more often.

3. I will get enough rest.

4. I will get plenty of exercise.

5. I will eat healthful foods and make sure I get plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables.

6. I will write more stories about my dogs, the ones I live with and the ones who have crossed the Rainbow Bridge.

7. I will love life with all my heart.

Thanks to all the dog lovers who uploaded their photos to photo sharing sites. The only photo here that is of our dogs is #6, showing our LarryDog as a young fellow; he is now 15 and a half. The little Basenji next to him was our Sunbeam, and she crossed the Rainbow Bridge some years ago. We full-timed in a large RV for a while, and in the photo they are fixated on my dinner.

New Year’s Resolutions, Dog-Inspired is a post from: Training Dogs Blog