On All Fours

15/04/2023

Excellent webinar from Kim Kei Nosey barkers on Seperation Anxiety 👏

04/09/2022

17/06/2022

13/04/2022

All our dogs are social. Usual. Research finds interactions with humans to often be a primary reinforcer. Science finds puppies will continue to approach humans despite applied aversives. Most dogs, without intervention, will mostly either like or be ambivalent towards people and dogs. All my own dogs are social and all work around people and dogs.

How do I get that result?
Well, generally I trust that domestication has, in that main, done a good job of making most dogs naturally fairly social. And thus the majority of errors I see (usually in adolescence) occur as a result of people being paranoid their dog will be antisocial and so pushing them to be over social, and the creating or over dramatising the natural changes that occur when a dog is a teenager.

Unless a dog gives me a reason to, I won’t particularly encourage interactions with strange people or strange dogs. I’ll trust the my dogs have given me no signs not to trust the domestication process and instead simply allow them to ebb and flow through changes. Infact ill usually encourage ambivalence. I’ll teach them to work anywhere around other beasts and try to persuade them that other beasts aren’t that interesting. Today, the latest family member Fiasco did a cracking job in a very busy restaurant with running screaming kids in and out of a soft play and lots of people. She was friendly but not particularly interested, happy to work and then ok just sitting under the table. It was happy, easy ambivalence in the main with a dash of puppy excitement and friendly interest here and there.

There are a 100 ways to socialise a pup but I like this lazy approach best of all.

02/04/2022

Ahead of the first national Don't Walk Your Dog Day tomorrow, dog trainer Niki French, 53, from Twickenham, reveals how skipping your daily dog walk can actually benefit your pet in many ways