Conversations with a Dog Trainer

So most of you, that read my blog, know who my kids are. Connor 16,  Ian 3 1/2 years old, Loki a 1 1/2 year old Australian Cattle Dog (blue heeler) and Yadi a 3 month old Corgi.  I’m sure some of you that have been my students for a while have noticed that Loki has not been in class much lately.  Well, we had an accident with Loki and I have a mental block over working with him.  Though I can see the ways I need to get over this problem I thought it might be helpful for others that have experienced issues with their own dogs and how hard it is to overcome a problem with working with them again.  We have had  problems with Ian being afraid of Loki because he is so hyper (which is normal of his breed) but had been working with him training Loki and we were making a lot of progress. About a month ago, we got a swingset for Ian and while Tim and I were outside putting it together I noticed that Loki had started chasing cars.  While we were working on th...

A poll of my facebook group   Showed that the things that pet parents feel challenge them most are Potty Training and Leash Walking.  So this will be a 2 part post. Photo by Adam Kontor on  Pexels.com Potty Training?? Or Habit Training?? You have brought home this little bundle of joy and now every few minutes your finding your puppy peeing or pooping on your floor, and you are ready to pull your hair out.  What do you do?  Try not to listen to everything you have heard. Way back during the 1950’s a dog trainer named Milo Pearsall wrote this training protocol where when your dog poops or pees in the house you, once discovering it, promptly rub your dog’s nose in it. Well, actually what he wrote was you put your dog’s nose NEAR it so they could smell the accident.  You know that game Chinese Whispers, where you tell someone something and they tell someone else and someone else and so on?  10 people down the line and the original story has b...

10 years ago after finding a therapist that I felt I could actually talk to and pouring my heart and head out to her, I was diagnosed with PTSD as a result of some things that happened in my childhood. I grew up with an alcoholic mother and an emotionally absent father.  Now before anyone makes any split decisions about my parents, let me say they were/are good people, they loved me but their own problems got in the way sometimes.  My mother was a police officer and we have all heard of the stresses that can come from being in the line of duty.  From what I have been told, my mother started drinking because of her own depression and started self-medicating when I was very young. My Dad in Vietnam She lost her battle with addiction 16 years ago. My father a Vietnam Veteran, closed off a lot of his own self, trying to forget the horrors he faced in war.  My dad is, by the way, the reason I started training PTSD dogs for others, and why the program I do with th...

A post from Oct of 2018 One of the things I’ve always tried to do is to be totally transparent with my training.  I’ve shared with you all the struggles I have had training my own dogs and in my own life.  It’s one of the things I have always prided myself on. So you guys all know the issues that my son was having with Loki, some of that is carrying over to Yadi.  Most everything with Yadi is easier because he is so much smaller than Loki was.  However, he still gets nervous when Yadi is trying to herd him or get’s in his face in the car. Ian and his best buddy Yadi One morning this week,  I had a thought since our biggest issues are in the car when Ian is strapped in and can’t get away, we should do some training in the car.  Ian loves to give treats to the puppies, he always has so this morning as we were getting ready to go out to the car, I grabbed a handful of treats and stuck them in my pocket.  I put Yadi in the back seat and buckled ...

Yadi laying down behind me while I work Hello, I hope everyone is doing well today.  If you have ever been in class with me you have heard me say… “Don’t try to train for 30 whole minutes”.  I don’t know about you but my life is very hectic.  I have a 17-year-old stepson (Connor), a 4-year-old son (Ian), &  year old Corgi pup (Yadi).  Between our jobs, housework, laundry… oh my word at the laundry…  trying to find 30 minutes a day to train my puppy is just insanity.  Even if I could find those 30 golden minutes, my puppy wouldn’t have the attention span to focus on me the whole time. So here is what I do instead.  While typing this blog post, my puppy Yadi is chasing the Ian who is running through the house laughing and teasing Yadi with a toy to get him to follow him.  Every few minutes I call Yadi to me and reward him for coming and then release him to go play.  This looks a little like this: I say “Yadi” When I hear h...

Trying to Potty Train Yadi definitely made me want to pull my hair out!!  When he came home, from his breeder at AJ's County Corgis he was litter box trained, and that was great.  It made having him at work with me so much easier. Our other dog at the time an Australian Cattle Dog named Loki, made that really hard to use at home. Kong Wobbler   Kong Wobbler so he he was used to hitting everything with his paws to get the food out.  I had to end up getting him elevated bowls because he kept flipping his food and water bowls.  Well as Yadi got bigger and I needed to move his littler box outside of his crate Loki would flip it thinking it was some sort of puzzle that would give him food. When Loki was a puppy I fed him out of a We had just bought our house 5 months before we got Yadi so I didn't know if Parvo was in the yard or not and I did not want to risk it so I didn't start working on taking him outside until he was 12 weeks old and had had all o...