* Before anyone gets started, I'm not saying that dogs never need to be under control - they very definitely should be under control out in public, in areas where other dogs/people/livestock/wildlife may be or anywhere that they could be in danger.
So what do I mean by cooperation, not control? I'm talking about the way in which we train our dogs, teach them the cues that we need them to know and follow.
That title up there started its existence as part of a conversation with a friend about the fundamentals of dog training and the methods that we use, and evolved into that final phrase in a handwritten message in a signed copy of a book. (The fact that people want signed copies of things I have written is still prone to causing massive grins and occasional disbelieving chuckles. 😂)
One truth that becomes readily apparent once anything you have written is out and available to anybody in the wider world is that people will often have opinions on what you have created. They will then share those opinions if the mood takes them, and nothing the writer can do may stop that. It can be intimidating, but it is not something an aspiring writer should let hold them back. Bad reviews can be hard to swallow early on, but there is no reason to become obsessed with them, and certainly not to let them restrict any future writing plans.
Dogs process their world in a way that is fundamentally different to humans. We are largely a visual species, relying on our eyes first to make sense of the environment around us. Dogs gather information mainly by the use of their nose. For around 6 million scent receptors in the human, dogs have somewhere in the region of 300 million. Brain area dedicated to analysing scent is approximately 40 times larger in the dog than in the human.
