October 4th, 2009 by admin

For many there seems to be a real barrier to training their Dogs successfully. Hopefully this course of Dog training online posts will go some way to help once it is completed. Most of us want well trained Dogs but do we know what we are doing? Are we ever going to be successful in our endeavours?

If you have ever thought “I can’t train my Dog” then here are a number of reasons why you were right. All Dog owners will be guilty of a few of these (me included) and if you can rectify at  least some of these reasons then you will be on the road to having much better trained Dogs and a happier more controlled relationship.

11 Reasons Why You Can’t Train Your Dog

1. You completely fail to give adequate exercise. Do you take your Dog for two good walks each and every day? You should. The main factor in successful Dog training is adequate exercise. If a Dog has lots of energy it will never respond as well to your training.
2. You have a completely unsuitable Dog. This is tough but often true. You have a Dog but it is totally unsuited to the life you lead. If you have a Dog thats nature is to hunt but you live in a flat on the sixth floor maybe the Dog is not for you. It is harsh but you must be realistic or accept the consequences. Certain breeds need certain stimuli to keep the happy and well rounded. If your home life prevents you allowing the Dog to express its natural instincts you will always be fighting a losing battle.
3. You are too lazy. You just can’t gather the enthusiasm to do what you know you should. You find it a chore to teach your Dog to behave and would rather shout at it without doing anything constructive. No matter how much you read on this Dog blog you will simply never get around to spending the time needed to train your Dog properly. Your choice.
4. Your Dog is too lazy. You have a Dog that is simply too cool for school and simply does not want to be involved in activities that will benefit its behaviour. Some Dogs are simply lazy and, although rare, it does happen.
5. Your Dog is too fat. Unless it has a serious medical condition then this is entirely your fault. My largest Dog Faye would be fat if I did not monitor her food very carefully. She eats less than the other two Dogs by a large factor. Here genetics have simply made her a naturally heavy set Dog.If you feed scraps at meal times or have allowed your Dog to beg then it is your fault. Stop doing it and turn it in to part of your training.
6. You don’t let your Dog express its natural instincts. Some Dogs simply need to retrieve. It is at the core of what they are. You must use appropriate training that centres around your Dogs natural instincts. Use its natural tendencies and preferences to your advantage by basing training exercises around what it loves to do best. You will be much more successful this way.
7. You don’t stick with it. You try training your Dog for a while to perform a certain task but give up too soon. Always remember that some Dogs may take to training very quickly while others will take a seriously long time. If you don’t give up you will get here in the end.
8. You lose your temper. There is not a single person who lives with Dogs who has not totally lost their temper with them. Try keeping chilled when your Dogs have just eaten your Chickens that you allowed to escape. Even though you know they are bred from a mix of Spanish hunting hounds and who knows what else. You will always lose your temper on occasion but if all you do is shout and give off negative vibes you will not succeed as well. Try to keep calm whenever you can and things will go better in the long run.
9. You give off an air of defeat. You slump your shoulders, give a sigh and practically tell your Dog “I know this won’t work but lets try it anyway”. Dogs are very sensitive to moods and the energy you give off will greatly effect the success of your Dog training.
10. You simply aren’t very good at training Dogs. We can’t all be good at everything. Some people simply aren’t suited to training Dogs. This is, however, only the case for more advanced training. Anyone can get a Dog to be obedient to basic commands. Don’t use the “I’m no good at it” excuse to give up. That is your call and you live with the results.
11. You have a mad Dog. Dogs are bonkers at the best of times. Some Dogs, however, are inherently unstable and will never be what we would call normal. You may have to simply admit to the fact that you live with a mad mutt that has serious mental issues.

We will all be guilty of some of these and if we can find a way to improve on these negatives when it comes to training Dogs then life will be a lot better.

Stay tuned for the next round of Dog training online tips.

May the Doggie Force be with you all,

Help support this site. When shopping on Amazon please do so via the US link or the UK Amazon links. It really does help, and costs you nothing more.

Related posts:

1. Dog Training Online Episode 5 – Dog Training For Dummies
2. Online Dog Training Tip 12
3. Online Dog Training Tips Number 7 – Training Never Ends

August 19th, 2009 by admin

I was just browsing through my Statcounter stats at what led people to the site today and to be honest I was quite surprised. I wanted to see what online Dog training related questions people were searching for and being directed to me for.

Not all of the following are training related but I couldn’t resist. I will give the questions or terms that people wrote exactly as they typed them in to a search engine and then provide the answers they were looking for. Please bear in mind that these are real and I am not making them up. It really goes to show what a funny world we live in.

how long after you lose a dog should you wait before getting another one?

Easy. 3 weeks and 4 days. Next.

funny places puppies sleep

In boxes under stairs. Next.

how to stop dogs from eating your food

Stop eating on the floor. You are making it too easy for them. Next.

online dog training tips

Ta da. Next.

dog is going into heat after being spayed is it worth it to go have it done again

Now that is worrying. Talk to your Vet. It is impossible to have a female Dog spayed twice and I am worried by this question. Um, next.

stop vizsla from digging

You will have to ask Dennis about this one. I am sure he will be around at some point. Next.

Is force training a dog cruel

Are you being cruel to the Dog? You know if you are or not. Next.

dog blogs that make money

Not this one. next.

training shy dogs

If you search this site there are lots of articles on shy Dog training. Next.

Why can’t dogs eat chicken bones?

They can. Just NEVER give them cooked bones. Dogs can eat raw bones only. Next.

three dog blog

Yeah baby. Next.

what do you do for a gassy dog?

I wrote a few articles about that here. Do a search and you will find them. Basically I made sure that the dried food was left for ten minutes after I added water. It worked a treat. Next.

will nuts harm my bichon frise

I have never mentioned the bichon frise so how I got that one I don’t know. Yes they may harm your Dog, especially if you throw them at it. Next.

how many pounds can my dog carry

16.5. Next.

what some action dogs do mean

It do mean that they do want a biscit innit. Next.

how to get started feeding your dog once a day

Stop giving it two meals and give it one large one. Next.

Why do dogs beg is they have never had human food?

Ooh, a good question. At least you are on the right track by not giving human food. Keep it up and the Dog will eventually give up its begging. Just stick with the good practices you are using. Next.

weird dog facts

All these questions came in today. I am glad I don’t look at these type of things too often, it could send me CRAZY IN THE BRAIN AREA.

This has been more like online Dog training number 5.5 so rest assured normal business will resumed tomorrow with some more sensible online Dog training.

May the Doggie Force be with you all,

Help support this site. When shopping on Amazon please do so via the US link or the UK Amazon links. It really does help, and costs you nothing more.

Related posts:

1. Dangerous Food For Dogs – Your Questions Answered
2. Online Dog Training Tips Number 4
3. Dog Training Online Episode 5 – Dog Training For Dummies

May 17th, 2009 by admin

I have written a few posts about shy Dog training and my very slow efforts to make Daisy a much more confident Dog. It has been a long time, but she has become much more confident both in herself and when interacting with other Dogs and people.

She is by no means a super confident Dog and I doubt she ever will be, but she has come a long way and it is great to see her enjoying life so much more. Anyway, a few days ago I got an email from a reader who asked for my opinion on how to curb some unwanted behavior in her Dog. The email authors Dog ( I won’t give her name) has come an awful long way and has gained tremedous confidence since she has been under her care. Below is the email and my response. Please take a few minutes to read them and see if you can help.

Readers  Request

We need help.

We purchased a very shy puppy from an ad on craigslist.
She is very similar and size and shape your Daisy.  She is a red border collie, shepherd with some cattledog..definately a heinz 57 of farm\herding dogs.

She was 9 weeks old, the people were older and she was living with her mom in a kennel outside in a trailer house\autobody shop.  She was so shy that my husband was not sure about getting her but he felt so bad for her living conditions that he could not leave her behind.  I do not think the people were mean, but I do think she was completely unsocialized and her mom clearly was not well socialized either.  Had all the same issues as your pup.  Submissive urination, would hide behind my husband, TERRIFIED of new people.

So, we went to obedience school, have buckets of treats available so when people came over they could give her treats.  Made sure she alway had an “exit”, told people to ignore her and let them approach her.  Worked on confidence with the “Everything in life is free” method.  Adopted a confident well adjusted year old Newfie\Golden retriever mix from a local rescue to teach her about what being a confident dog is all about.

Fast forward 9 months…We have made light years of progress she is AMAZING with our family. Loves her doggie companion. She is the smartest dog I have ever owned.  Affectionate and incredibly playful, not at all shy with us.  Fabulous with my 6 year old. Good with the people she knows, good with the farm animals (we are on a hobby farm with about 20 acres).

So you are asking what is the problem.  Well here it is.  When people come over that she does not know she barks and barks and runs in circles around them at about 15 feet out.   She ceases to listen and will try and avoid getting caught by me. Sometimes even the hair on the neck goes up.  I tell the people to ignore her.  This will go on a good 5 minutes if I cannot catch her.   She very much knows the command “leave it” and I use it to extinquish any behavior that I do not approve of and in any other situation, including chasing chickens, she responds.  Not in this one though.

Normally, if people are coming over and I know it, I have control of the situation before hand.  It is the people that are just dropping by that throw us.

Anyways any tips would be really helpful.

Thanks

My Reply

Hi

She sounds like a lovely Dog and you have defintely come a long way. Like you, we have had to take it very slowly to get Dasiy to be more confident. It does work, as you know, it just takes time.

It sounds to me like her natural herding instincts are taking over and she wants to be in control of the situation to ease her own mind. She probably is just going by her natural instincts, is a little afraid and her body is telling her to “round ‘em up and get rid of ‘em”.

That is just a guess mind you. Daisies puppy who is now about 10 months old, is very wary of new people and although she doesn’t run around them, her hackles go up and she barks at them. All Dogs seem to handle their wariness differently.

To be honest I think the best advice is that of simply overloading her with new people constantly. She will soon get used to it then. I have definitely found that the more you confront these type of things the quicker the Dog will simply see it as part of everday life.

I am sorry I can’t be more helpful but I think if you can get more strangers (friendly ones) who will ignore her, to pay a visit, the quicker she will get over it.

I hope this helps a little, and I wish you all the best.

If you would like, I can put your email up as a blog post and see if anyone responds with any better ideas. Just a suggestion, someone may have had the same experience.

What Can You Do?

As any regular readers know I am not a Dog trainer. I write about what I have learnt from experience or Dog related topics that interest me. I tried to answer as best I could but I know my reply was sorely lacking in any real helpful way.

If you have had a similar experience or know of a good solution then I am sure the author of the email would appreciate your help. Please leave a helpful comment if you can or just what you believe may be of some assistance.

May the Doggie Force be with you all,

Related posts:

1. Shy Dog Training

April 25th, 2009 by admin

The following is an interview my good friend Maggie graciously spent the time to answer. She and her partner feed their Dogs homemade Dog food. They feed what would be considered an “all natural Dog food diet”. In my post on homemade Dog foods I questioned many aspects of making food at home for the Dogs. I wondered just how much work it actually involves, how expensive it is, and just how time consuming is it to prepare yet another set of meals.

Maggie has been preparing healthy Dog foods for their two Dogs (hey dudes), for quite some time now. If you have ever wondered just what goes in to preparing homemade Dog foods, should it be cooked or raw, and the many questions that surround it then read this fascinating interview and a lot of your questions will answered.

Tell us a little about your Dogs
We have two – Gnasher and her son Spit. Our friend Nat the Leg found Gnasher in the road with 11 puppies and over 200 ticks, she had nasty chain marks around her neck too. She was quite difficult in the early days but always polite and affectionate. She is still assertive but thankfully now much more relaxed in her new life. Spit is a lean machine, always on the look out and just as affectionate but he has to pick his moments or else Gnasher will come and gnudge him out of the way!

Firstly what inspired you to make homemade Dog food?
We had had the dogs for about 6 months and I was (unusually!) browsing in the charity shops when I spied a book called “Give Your Dog a Bone” it was priced at 50pence so of course I could not leave it on the shelf.

The logic inside was irresistible:
• although dog behaviour has changed dramatically their entire digestive system and most importantly the way they utilise the food is fundamentally the same as it was when they were wild scavengers,

• that by serving cooked food you not only destroy most of the goodness available to your dog but you can convert parts into dangerous chemicals which promote cancer and other degenerative diseases over time,

• and finally that you would not expect to eat a perfectly balanced meal each time you sit down to a plate of food and nor should your dog.

Dr Billinghurst reckons pretty much any commercially manufactured dog food falls down on all these points (and more but don’t get me started!) It is cooked not raw so it’s a product your dog is not designed for and nor does it provide a balanced diet over a period of time as the dog would do in the wild.

Also as everything is mixed in one big dollop you may find too much of some essential elements and not enough of others and in any-case which ones will/can the dog digest with so much bombardment? It’s like a Russian roulette of feast or famine on a plate, every day. Would you do that?

Do you feed mostly raw food or a combination of the two?
We feed mostly raw food as recommended in the book. They call it BARF – Bones and Raw Food. He suggests 60% raw meaty bones balanced by a combination of lots of raw vegetables, some offal and meat, eggs yoghurt, brewers yeast, small amounts of grains and legumes and some table scraps. We do sneak in the odd bit of cooked food. For example they love chicken stock (no salt !) so I use that to mix in with lots of raw veg on the basis the veg is more important. I have a funny feeling Sir Alph knocks up the odd Dogbetti Bolognese when I’m not looking and one Christmas we made them a goats head stew (with eyes and tongue – dude, it was green!) and I have to tell you they went WILD.

Just a note re the raw veg, Spit has eaten it since early days and views it as normal grub but Gnasher is more suspicious so we have to disguise it more for her!

Was it easy to learn how to make all natural Dog food?
Yes! The difficulty is tracking the raw meaty bones. In England most butchers get their meat pre-prepared (don’t be fooled by those stripey aprons they probably have no idea how to gut a chicken!) and here in Spain they sell the bones for quite a lot of money. We rely heavily on chicken carcasses and whole chickens. Luckily our butcher is generous with their bones and they usually give us a doggy sack. In England we buy a product called Duck which is frozen raw food and then have to root around for bones to supplement it.

Does it take a lot of time to prepare homemade Dog foods?
Longer than shaking croc out of a bag. Depending on the meal it might take 10 or 15 minutes. We always remove the spikey bit (Do you want a video??** Mrs. Three Dog Blogger could oil us) from the leg bone of the chicken and although it’s tempting to chuck ‘em a carcass each we tend to chop them up a bit first. The veg meal is more of a palava. Dr Billinghurst says that the veg (or indeed fruit) should resemble to contents of a wild animals stomach –i.e.raw and totally crushed.

You have to break down the cellulose walls because dogs don’t digest cellulose so they get little to no value from the veg and they simply pass straight through (ever seen a bit of carrot in their poo after left over stew?) This means using a juicer, an old fashioned hand meat mincer (I have two!) or a food processor (providing you run it for long enough so it is crushed not just chopped). Other than that it can be like making mud pies which I have always enjoyed!

How long have you been feeding a non commercial diet to the Dogs?
About 5 years now and I cannot see us changing back.

Have you seen an improvement in Gnasher and Spit since you began feeding them
homemade Dog food recipes?
Well it’s tricky to say as we have been feeding it to them pretty much the whole time. People (and vets) often remark how good their teeth look, especially Gnasher who is about 8 now and could be the star player in any toothpaste advert that you care to mention. When we go to England I’m surprised at the number of times people say how fine they look and what do we feed them – but perhaps this is being doggie polite UK style?

At 6 months old Spit caught Lischmania which is a horrible degenerative disease of the Mediterranean. He is now 5, completely recovered and despite the life-long essentially toxic, treatment necessary to keep the parasites at bay he is fit and healthy and displays none of the long-term side effects such as slow to heal or skin problems.

One other thing – poo. Often people say to me, I can’t give my dog liver/bones/eggs as it will give them the runs. Never a problem here, all very consistent and easy to deal with, their system is used to a variety and can cope!

Do you think it is more expensive to feed the Dogs natural homemade Dog food
recipes?
It shouldn’t be but for urbanites it generally is, depending of course of how much you pay for your commercial food. It takes a bit of investigation but it is usually possible to find an inexpensive source of raw meaty bones and the rest is pretty cheap. I doubt if there is any data to support how much you might save on vet and especially dental bills by providing a BARF diet but there will be a balance somewhere there. Also as the book says, the commercial food gives out enough for the dog to get by on but it is later in life that things begin to tell. So I guess it’s a bit of an insurance against the future too.

Can you give us some examples of recipes for Dog food?
Well I use the book quite a lot, there are plenty in there and even a section for vegetarians. Other than raw meaty bones and chicken my standbys are:
• Chicken stock, crushed raw veg topped by a few speckles of mincemeat
• Yoghurt and raw egg
• Raw egg, veg and mincemeat (A.K.A Steak Tartare –Alphas pay good money for this in restaurants I tell them)

To all of the above I add a crushed kelp tablet and a teaspoon of brewers yeast which are the two supplements I use.

Would you recommend feeding homemade dog food for other Dog owners?
Yes, yes and yes and at the very minimum some raw meaty bones every week. When we do mess up and have to feed them some croc they are noticeably hyper-active afterwards, bit like kids after burgers and coke.

Anything you would like to add?
Thank you Mr Billinghurst for writing such a fab book – buy it!

Many thanks to Maggie for taking the time to answer my questions. As any regular readers know I have talked about the benefits of raw meaty bones for your Dogs teeth and the fact that it stops bad Dogs breath, as well as the many heath benefits. Maggie only confirms this with her experiences over the last five years.

It was Maggie who graciously opened our eyes to the benefits of raw bones by lending us the above mentioned book. We have not, however, switched to only making all natural Dog food. Learning how to make Dog food at home does not seem quite as complicated as I once thought and I am sure that after a few attempts it will become easier and easier. I am also quite surprised that the actual time taken to prepare the food is not longer, which definitely makes it easier to consider as an option.

Do you think preparing all natural Dog food that consists of mostly raw food is something you may now consider?

How about making sure you at least supply some raw meaty bones once a week?

May the Doggie Force be with you all,

Help support this site. When shopping on Amazon please do so via the US link or the the UK Amazon links. It really does help, and costs you nothing more.

Related posts:

1. Homemade Dog Foods. Natural Homemade Dog Food
2. Dogs Eating Chicken Bones. Facts and Fables
3. Chicken Dog Treats