Conversations with a Dog Trainer

I wish there was one special quick to read book that told all the secrets that it takes dog trainers years to learn, and no I've not learned them all yet.  A store place of knowledge that tells us, humans, all the things we need to do in order to make our dogs happy, lazy (and by lazy I mean tired on a regular basis), and well-behaved pups.  Sadly there is not, maybe I'll write some of it one day, but for today I just want to talk about a few of the things that we SHOULD be doing on a regular basis for our pups.  Our dogs need a stable environment with boundaries and rules that they need to follow.  It makes their lives much easier.  If we as humans didn't have any rules or Laws that we needed to live our lives by, think of how much chaos we would be in.  Those boundaries should only be things to help improve their behavior.  Such as: If you are out walking your dog, and you know your dog is going to bark at a stranger that you pass along ...

It has been almost a month since I have been working from home.  My own pups have come a long way in their behavior at home.  We still have our challenges, don't get me wrong, they are in no way perfect and they never will be.  Yadi still barks at the neighbors and runs the fence with the neighbor's dog barking at her in a playful way thankfully.  I've tried to keep Kona from picking up that habit as well.  Kona has her bad habit of counter surfing that we are still working on, but all and all they are really great dogs.   I've been working on several things in my down time.  Most of it has been to make my training better for everyone else.  I have been wanting to make an online portion of training for a long time.  There are things I feel that are really important to teach that we just don't have time to go over when we are working with the dogs in a session.  So this gives us that chance to do it.  The problem ...

There are days when my own issues get to me and get in the way of training.  It's all I can do something to hold it together, something causes me to cry and I can barely hold back the floodgates.   Yesterday one of those days.  Our training was mostly centered around the issues that we have been having at home. We started off this morning with having a battle of wills for lack of a better word with Riley.  When I'm fixing everyones breakfast I put their bowls on the counter and put their food in the bowls then add the probiotic and then a hip and joint supplement for the Corgis.  Then everyone has to go to their places and then I put their food bowls down and they get to eat.  Well Ms Riley decided she didn't want to wait this morning and barked at me the whole time.  She jumped up and knocked her food bowl off.  But instead of letting her eat any of it off the floor, I told her to "Leave it" every time she went near it.  I gave Yadi his bo...