Tag Archives: dogs

Love that word of mouth, too

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It’s a thrill when the dog training book I co-wrote gets a mention in the press, of course, but I also love when someone says something like this, which I just found in a dog training forum (Terry Ryan is the trainer I teamed up with to write Outwitting Dogs):

I second Sandra on the Terry Ryan book, i just bought it and im hooked.

It’s hard to assign a value to writing quality, and it happens that Terry (her website is here) is a gifted and experienced dog trainer; there’s no question that the enthusiasm shown by people who read it are in large part due to the quality of the content. The lady knows what she’s doing when it comes to dogs!

But I like to think that my contribution — in terms of the organization, clarity of the writing, and tone of the book — are playing a part in the book’s success as well ;-)

/end shameless self-promotion

Another reason I love the British

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As if I needed any more — I just found out that this fellow (bloke??? lol) Michael Wright mentioned Outwitting Dogs in a February piece in the Telegraph [Update: link no longer good…] and what a delightful piece — I got a wonderful belly laugh from it, which was all I needed, I’ve just ordered his book, C’est la folie, more of that please, sir!

Fox is to henhouse as dog is to stuffed bear collection

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Okay, I know this is tragic on some level, but it still made me laugh because this is EXACTLY what my dog would do!

A dobie guarding a stuffed bear collection went on a “rampage” (yeah, quite the choice of words there guys — try “exuberant spree”) and ripped the bears to shreds.

He chewed up “hundreds” of bears and “left fluffy stuffing and bears’ limbs and heads on the museum floor.”

The collection was valued at $900,000.

(I wonder if this was captured on surveillance video?)

Corgis and children

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Some years ago, a Corgi rescue organization asked permission to reprint a post I wrote for a Yahoo forum on their website.

They folded my post into an article they published for people who wonder if Corgis are a good breed for families with children.

Every once in awhile I get emails from people who have read the article. Unfortunately, most of them come from people who have realized, too late, that they have a heart-breaking problem on their hands.

I got one of those this weekend. Woman’s Corgi bit her three-year-old daughter on the face. The plastic surgeon is hopeful that the scars won’t be too bad.

These emails share something else in common: between the lines, what people want is for me to show them how to make it better.

Unfortunately, there is no way to make it better.

Once a dog has snapped at someone, let alone bitten, your options are very limited. If you’ve purchased the dog from a “reputable breeder,” you can probably ship the dog back. You’ll be out whatever you paid for the dog, but at least the problem is no longer yours.

If you got the dog from a “backyard breeder” (someone you found in the classifieds, for example) or a pet shop, or a neighbor whose dog had puppies, things are much more grim.

You can try to find a behaviorist who can help you learn to modify the behavior. Unfortunately, that’s no panacea. If you happen to choose a lousy behaviorist, you may end up with a dog that is more aggressive and less predictable than before.

Behaviorists cost money.

Behaviorists also don’t actually “fix” a dog. They help you learn how to modify a dog’s behavior. You are going to have to do a lot of work. It’s going to take time, consistency, and focus.

And no matter how much work you do, you can’t erase the fact that your dog has bitten. You can’t ever leave your dog unsupervised around children, for example.

So you’ll end up sinking money and time into a situation that, at best, is somewhat manageable.

Oh, and by the way, you may be in for another expensive surprise when it’s time for you to renew your homeowner’s insurance policy.

Hopefully you’ve got the cash on hand to self-insure.

Your only other option, sadly, is to have the dog put to sleep. Rescue organizations won’t take dogs that have bitten (they are glutted with dogs that haven’t bitten — and taking a dog that has bitten opens them to liabilities, should the dog bite again).

Unfortunately, people really really don’t want to hear this. When I wrote to the woman who last emailed me, I got an angry email back, accusing me of being cruel.

Cruel?

Give me a break. Cruel would have been to tell her she’s an idiot for not getting her dog neutered, for failing to train the dog properly in the first place, for allowing a dog that had begun to snap anywhere near her children.

Cruel would be asking her what kind of a mother would keep a dog in her home after it had bitten her daughter’s face.

Cruel, yeah, I could have been cruel. But I wasn’t.

Here’s how she closed her email to me:

I would hate to hear your response to someone you knew and really cared for.

Now, that is cruel.

But is a bark ever just a bark?

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In England, that country’s Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is now offering a course in barking for dog owners, reports Nicola Woolcock for the London Times.

The course doesn’t teach people to bark. It teaches people how to interpret their dogs’ vocalizations.

The different noises made by dogs have been identified as grunts, whines, yelps, screams, howls, growls, coughs, barks, tooth snapping and panting.

While this cacophony might sound overwhelming to the untrained ear, dog owners will learn whether the sounds mean that their pet wants a walk, a wee or a fresh can of food.

The authorities hope that if people understand what their dogs are trying to tell them, they’ll find ways to keep their dogs quiet, and thereby reduce noise complaints.

The training is being offered by Peterborough City Council in an attempt to cut down on complaints about antisocial noise. The council’s pollution control team receives more than 1,300 noise complaints a year. Of those, 15 per cent relate to the barking of dogs.

Nationally, the figure is even higher at 25 per cent of all complaints.

Whether this training will help is debatable, although not because the idea doesn’t have merit. It does, in theory. It’s a topic covered in Outwitting Dogs, the dog training book I co-wrote, in fact. Dogs bark for different reasons, and sometimes you can figure out the cause by paying attention to everything from the bark’s pitch to how repetitive it is, to whether there are identifiable triggers that get it started. Then, once you know the cause, you can take steps to eliminate it, or train an alternative behavior.

But the real problem is: how do you get the people who have “problem dogs” to attend the class?

Maybe it will be mandated if a dog’s noise has resulted in a formal complaint.

But if not, it’s a good solution — to the wrong problem.

A lonely, poorly-socialized, or poorly-trained dog often ends up that way because his human is ignorant, busy, or clueless.

And ignorant, busy, clueless humans aren’t going to be the ones who show up to take a class in interpreting barks . . .

The nose knows

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In this case, it was a Golden Retriever’s nose. Her name is Wrigley, and she knew something wasn’t quite right with her human companion, Steve Werner.

Steve’s doctor hadn’t been able to figure out why he’d been experiencing some troubling symptoms like ringing in his ear and a feeling of unease.

Then in July, Wrigley started to behave strangely.

Every day when Werner would curl up next to his beloved canine at his Brentwood home, she would turn, focus on his right ear and sniff doggedly.

“I thought it was just a friendly sniff,” Werner said. “But after four or five days, I realized she seemed to be focusing on something. At some point, I noticed she was always sniffing at the opening of my right ear. She would set herself up and intently smell my ear.”

One day, Werner was watching TV when a feature about cancer-sniffing dogs grabbed his attention. What he heard propelled him back to his doctor’s office.

A subsequent MRI revealed a non-malignant tumor that has since been surgically removed.

You may have heard similar accounts, or that some people are training dogs to screen people for cancers. The thinking is that cancerous cells emit chemicals that are not present in healthy cells.

I had to laugh at one part of the article, though. It describes a study conducted by the Pine Street Foundation in California. For the study,

[R]esearchers collected breath samples in plastic tubes from 83 healthy volunteers, 55 lung cancer patients and 31 breast cancer patients.

The tubes were numbered and placed in plastic boxes and presented to the dogs, five at a time. If the dog detected cancer, it was trained to sit or lie down. Researchers determined that the dogs were accurate 99 percent of the time in detecting lung cancer and 88 percent of the time in detecting breast cancer.

But then the article goes on to say “Not everyone is wagging their tails about the dog studies.”

The results of the lung and breast cancer study were too good to be true, said Donald Berry, chairman of the department of applied biostatistics and applied mathematics at the University of Texas-M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

“It’s essentially impossible that anything could be that good,” he said.

lol

I dunno, Don. I’ve definitely encountered some things that are that good!!!

They liked it (Outwitting Dogs review)

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Another nice review of Outwitting Dogs, in this PUW Prints newsletter from Green Acres Kennel Shop in Bangor, Maine (pdf file).

Except:

So, what exactly do the authors mean by “outwitting” dogs? Basically, the key to successfully outwitting a dog lies in recognizing the fact that we as dog owners do have bigger brains (proven once again by the fact that you reading this book re-view and your dog is not), and then choosing to use our brains to manage, train, and shape our dogs to fit appropriately into our worlds.

The review was originally published last year, however, so I don’t think it explains last week’s Amazon bump.

Closer to Vivi?

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Champion Bohem C’est La, aka Vivi, the whippet that escaped from her crate at the JFK airport right after the Westminster dog show, has been spotted in Flushing. More than once.

There’s now a Newsday blog dedicated to all things Vivi. It’s got some interesting information, including why they can’t use a tranquilizer gun to catch her (low stores of body fat on this breed make her potentially too sensitive to barbiturates — unlike coyotes!) and why a sight hound on the run may be harder to catch than a dog of another breed.

Dog book news

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Over the weekend, I finished reviewing the page proofs for 101 Dog Training Tips, which is coming out in June.

The book is substantially different from Outwitting Dogs, which I co-wrote with Terry Ryan, a professional trainer. Tips is shorter — 12,000 words — and includes 50 photos, most of which I took myself. Outwitting Dogs came in at around 90,000 words, if I remember correctly.

So I was a bit taken aback when I read my publisher’s description of the new book. They’ve made it sound like it’s a comprehensive training book. It’s not. It’s . . . tips. Sigh. Outwitting Dogs is a comprehensive training book. Tips, on the other hand, is something you’d pick up when you need just a quick idea, or to brush up on your training. It’s more like a checklist. A good checklist, mind you ;-)

It’s funny to feel uneasy and excited at the same time. I’ll be awfully happy when I am actually holding a bound copy in my hand. I remember the thrill when my copies of Outwitting Dogs got here, and somehow, I don’t think that thrill ever goes away.

Dog sense

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After someone gets bitten by a dog — especially if the incident is a lurid one — communities often demand their lawmakers act. Sometimes, legislators respond by outlawing certain breeds of dog within their jurisdiction. But is that a wise tactic? Probably not. Here’s a post I put up on the subject; it has a link to a New Yorker story on the subject by Malcolm Gladwell, who writes that the strongest predictor that a dog will become dangerous is not the dog’s breed, but the choices and behavior of the dog’s owner.

Now Oregon has passed legislation that apparently avoids banning breeds, while strengthening penalties for people whose dogs bite someone. This is the only article that I can find on it, though, so I’m not sure what the law’s exact wording is. If anyone knows more, drop me a link by email or in the comments, okay? Thanks :-)