The Good Sniff

11/09/2025

03/08/2025

Myra all day every day

Bu****it

31/07/2025

Let’s practice more acceptance.

Acceptance doesn’t mean you can’t still work toward your long-term behavior goals for your dog. It just means you’ll spend less time ruminating and loosen your grip on the expectations you had for them.

When you do that, you’ll start to see your dog for the beautiful, unique, and perfect being they already are.

It’s an important lesson for life with dogs and for us in general, especially these days.

What are some things that you've learned to accept in your dog?

04/02/2025

We're back!

16/10/2020

The problem a lot of people have with ‘Stay’ as a cue, is they often use it to practise recall as well, so they get the dog to 'stay', and then call their dog to them. However, dogs tend to learn to a series of cues, and in order to efficiently earn their reward, they often predict what the next one will be. This is why lots of dogs seem to forget 'sit' and start going straight to the 'down' position, as 'sit' has been used as a stepping-stone to teach 'down', and they have only been rewarded on the 'down' for many repetitions. So similarly, if a dog is called after a 'stay' and are rewarded when they successfully get back to their owner, they will see that as the 'end-goal' of the cue; as such they will be more likely to break the 'stay' to get to their final-goal and earn their reward.

In our classes we teach 'Stay' and 'Wait' as two separate cues; this is because we want one cue - ‘Stay’ - to be sacred. So with ‘Stay’, you ALWAYS go back to the dog to reward them, whereas with ‘Wait’ you can call the dog to you. This creates two versions of the cue: where ‘Stay’ always means ‘Stay’, until you go back to them, and 'Wait' means 'Wait' until my next instruction! 👍

21/09/2020