Is your dog afraid of people?  Afraid of men, or maybe men with beards?  How about men or anyone wearing hats?  Experience with  people is often neglected with young dogs.  Maybe they grew up in isolation at a breeder’s, or at a previous owner before they were rescued.  We often wonder why dogs have issues with strangers, but they may truly lack any experience and have had to deal with strangers and the situations they present, completely on their own without guidance.  [More...]

We face fear flooding all the time in normal life as people.  Every time we do something new.  Maybe it is the first time you take your new puppy to puppy class, or maybe that first Dog Agility Trial.  How good you are at handling stress of this nature will certainly impact how easily and quickly you adapt to the circumstances around you.  This is also true of your dog and in fact, if they sense the apprehension in you, it will [More...]

My Bullseye View comes from detailed and objective observation of behavior and the accurate determination of cause and effect, or rather, stimulus and response. When I see something occur, I believe it occurred for a reason, always. If it was not as expected I wonder and try to determine why. If things repeatedly re-occur that way, then I am sure. Then as I see obvious patterns in behavior, I can do two things. One is to rewind the video of what I [More...]

You don’t have to look very far to see what stress can do in a dog.  I walk a mile around my neighborhood and I will face at least three dogs who bark and scream at me and my dogs with amazing intensity.  I often wonder how long it will be before they are in for a hernia. There are a few more who bark incessantly, but are not necessarily blowing a gasket to do so.  Then, in that same mile, there [More...]

A dog is not looking at the world and thinking about other things. They are not thinking about the agility trial next weekend, or training in the yard later. They are not thinking about the view, or how nice the weather is or how great it is to get out and stretch their legs. They are thinking about what they smell, what they hear and what they see. If they were swimming, they might be thinking about what they feel and what [More...]

So I asked my friend Joe (Joe More), not to be confused with my dog Joey, what he thought the chances of Joey eating the kidney in his meal today were after refusing to eat it yesterday; he hummed and hawed.  In the end he gave in to my hints that he should go with Joey eating it. From my perspective, the answer was obvious.  All of my dogs eat their raw meat and bone dinner as though they are eating an [More...]