All publications (537)
Today we talk to Trish McMillan about her experience working in shelters and with shelter dogs, as well as about some of the most overlooked dog body language cues you need to know!
Trying to put together how consent and behavior modification and positive training all work together? Leslie explains, in this week's episode of the FDSA podcast!
A lot of time in dog training, we hear about the 4 D's: Duration, Distance, Distraction and Diversity.
For example, in teaching Stays. Can your dog stay for a certain amount of time, at a certain distance from you, under certain distractions and in new places? It's easy to understand the 4 D's in this context. Nosework isn't any different!
In fact, the 4 D's are essential to the foundational quality of odor obedience. Let's explore!
Picture a search dog looking for narcotics. His sole focus in on finding the "dope." He works with intensity, ignoring things like dropped food. His only desire is the search. He's never been to that location, but he doesn't care; his focus is incredible. He leaves the handler because he's caught scent of some heroin in the garbage can. Now, his focus changes to the alert, signaling to the officer that he's made a find.
This episode is a little different than our usual weekly interviews; this time we turned to three long time FDSA students to talk to them about their training journeys and biggest training takeaways!
Dr. AmyCook, PhD., joins me to talk about dogs with noise sensitivity. What can you do about it? Is it treatable? We talk about all that and more!
Today we talk agility - and specifically weave poles - with Barbara Currier! Whether you're just getting started or stuck and need to problem solve — this is episode for you!
Julie Daniels comes back on the podcast to talk about teaching the hard things to our dogs - things like choosing new things and learning to like waiting for a reward!
Dogs are fun right? Showing, and seminars and workshops should be a time to relax and enjoy – the time we get paid back for all the hard work we do the rest of the time.
A celebration of all that is good, as it were.
We are learning, and sharing our passion with our best friends. Even through the stress and worry it's often glorious and educational and all the things we love most about having dogs in our life.
Sometimes though it feels like we have Pavlov sitting on one shoulder ( aka bob bailey) and nerves and anxiety sitting on the other.
Why not tackle the ring nerves and show stress head on and see what you can do to reduce them?
Welcome to the Science Cafe! On December 10, 2018, three FDSA instructors with science PhDs hung out for an hour or two and talked science online.
The docs:
The subject: Hartley, Catherine A., and Francis S. Lee. "Sensitive periods in affective development: Nonlinear maturation of fear learning." Neuropsychopharmacology 40.1 (2015): 50.
(You don't have to have read the paper to appreciate the chat, but a lot of people did!)
Today we talk to canine nutrition specialist and research enthusiast Linda P Case about how to figure out what's right for our dogs... and to have her debunk a few training myths for us while she's at it.
If you've been in dog training for a while you've likely come across the learning models of Operant Conditioning and Classical Conditioning. You can hardly pick up a training book anymore without either one or both being mentioned — and that is a great thing!
However, if you aren't sure what each of these models is, you aren't alone.
Each has potentially confusing concepts, and each governs a different part of our teaching experience with dogs. You're using them both all the time whether you understand them well or not, so let's get them sorted out, shall we?
Chrissi Schranz shares how you can find time to train your dog while still successfully tackling even complex behaviors... often without even leaving your couch.
Each month here on the FDSA blog we'll bring to you a sampling of excellent resources on a variety of topics posted by our instructors around the web. These are free tools, articles, and content for you to read and enjoy. However, it will not be *every* post they write, so be sure to click through and see what else they have to offer!
Lucy Newton worked for years as a police dog handler, SAR handler, and teaches Tracking at FDSA while also training Service dogs for veterans with PTSD. We get into all the details in this episode of the podcast!
So, you have a training problem….
You are training your dog for obedience or agility competition and a problem erupts. How do you go about solving it?
Let's say you have been training your dog in obedience and all the Open exercises have been progressing smoothly. But now your dog has started to miss the drop cue on the drop on recall exercise. Or you have a dog competing in agility at the Open level. He had good performances in Novice. But recently your dog has been missing weave entries, after having nice weaves in Novice and in practice. How do you go about solving these problems?
Yet!
You see, getting this new website up and running was a bit of a project and it took all hands on deck. That didn't leave much time or energy left over to figure out stuff like blog posts. But don't worry, that will change. Here are some of the things you might find here in the near future:
- Instructor blogs - and we'll ask you for topics!
- Guest blogs - maybe you'd like to write one?
- Student blogs - yeah, we definitely want to hear from our students!
- Links to Facebook lives
- Learning quizzes on a variety of topics.
- Recipes. Probably for dog treats but really, who knows?
- Surveys to help you make better decisions about your dogs. For example, which health insurance for dogs is best anyway?
- Random jokes, games
and puzzles. Because what's life without a bit of humor? - Inspirational quotes.
Are you getting the idea? Anyway, the details have yet to be worked out, but we certainly hope you'll check back here frequently because we have plans. Big plans! We just don't know exactly how those will play out.
So like I said earlier, welcome!