Suppose you were a TV producer charged with launching a new dog training show on your network. Or in this day and age, your medium might not be television but any kind of video streaming service.
How would you go about doing that?
Which criteria would be important in outlining the show?
Some may say: you need to find a charismatic trainer, to serve as host.
True.
That’s not all, though. I wouldn’t even start there.
Do animals have emotions: can they experience the same subjective feelings of fear, rage and joy that humans can?
A seemingly straightforward question, and one that I recently asked on Facebook.
Here’s what you answered, Facebookers:
Revised August 2022.
Destructive behaviour from your beloved pet can be a nuisance. Assuming there’s not an underlying medical condition or the behaviour isn’t anxiety-related, let’s look at some ways of addressing these types of behaviour, regardless of whether you’re a dog dude, a cat gal or a parrot person.
There’s a debate raging in Sweden about whether choke collars are potentially dangerous to dogs.
Several influential dog coaches on TV use and recommend them, other experienced dog professionals argue against them. It’s currently causing all kinds of shock waves to ripple across social media, which inspired me for a blog post.
It took me years to realize this, but there are some approaches that really propelled my learning about animal behaviour management in general, and animal training specifically.
Here are the four tactics or concepts that I’ve found most useful:
This post is part of a series on addressing animals’ fear in the veterinary clinic.
Why feed treats? The technical term is counterconditioning (CC), and it’s about feeding fabulous treats in order to reduce fear.
