Quadrants of what now?

“Oh, I don’t want to use FOOD to train my dog. They should obey me because they WANT to.”

I have no idea how many times I have heard something like the above statement, and it puzzles me every single time. Why should your dog want to obey you? What is in it for them? (Disclaimer – I do realise that some dogs are not as motivated by food as other forms of reward, but food does work for the majority.

What is trigger stacking?

Not trigger stacked!

Imagine a scenario for me. You are in the supermarket and get into a queue to pay for your shopping. You may not have much, and anticipate getting out of there smoothly, without hassle. Someone cuts in line in front of you. It’s annoying, but they only have a couple of items and give you a big friendly smile. It really is not that big a deal, so although it could be considered annoying, you leave it and avoid the aggravation.

Let us rewind now to earlier in the day…

Why loose dogs can be a problem

It happened again the other day.

I was talking to someone about my dogs and was interrupted with the statement ‘You need to get that reactive dog trained.’ Obviously the scales fell from my eyes immediately. If only I’d thought of that before. Some magical training and my dog would no longer be reactive!

Yes, that’s sarcasm. I’m sorry, it’s sort of what I do some of the time. Sometimes when you live with a reactive dog you have to find ways to laugh as otherwise you would spend half of your life in tears.

Anyone that has read my blog in the past has met Finn, but just in case anyone is new,

A Sunday silly

Just having some fun with a picture of Finn during his muzzle training 😁

A musing on ‘canine comedy’

I have recently picked up my first canine related job – finding pictures, videos and articles to post on a canine business related Facebook page. There are some amazingly funny and informative pages around and I have been learning a lot in my searches. However, I keep seeing pictures and videos posted all over the place claiming to be showing ‘hilarious’ images or clips of dogs. There is one single thing that links all of these posts, and it is not any kind of hilarity.

Cute only goes so far

Today in a Facebook group I am a member of someone posted a link to a news article reporting the fact that dogs that are ‘not cute enough’ are being left in shelters as people only want particular breeds (link at the bottom of this entry for anyone interested).

That alone is enough to rankle, but the list of most requested breeds also pricked at my irritation levels. Pugs, French Bulldogs and miniature Dachshunds. All of these breeds have serious genetic health issues prevalent in their breeds. Pugs and French Bulldogs are both bracycephalic. They are short snouted, giving them that apparently ‘cute’ appearance. In the cases of many examples of these breeds, they are also given an extreme difficulty in breathing and many require surgery to be able to manage a normal biological survival process. Their skulls are so shortened that their brains can actually be physically rearranged.

A Pondering on Reactive Dogs

As I have said on a number of posts, I have a reactive dog. His name is Finn, he is an adolescent Border Collie and he is scared of a lot of the world. His fear manifests as barking, growling and lunging. I have lost count of the times people have looked down their noses at me for having such an ‘aggressive’ dog. I used to spend a lot of time saying ‘Sorry, he’s reactive,’ which made no difference at all.

That has got me thinking now. Are we being unfair to our reactive dogs by using that label? Yes, it is a logical one – a dog demonstrating fear aggression is reacting to a trigger. My question is does everyone else out in the wider world understand what is meant by reactivity?