There are many things to consider when choosing to bring a puppy into a home with children. One thing to think about is what type of dog will be gentle and tolerate the child’s behavior.

You may have heard of crate training your dog, buy maybe you don’t really understand what it is or how to do it correctly.

Crate training is not the same thing as confining your dog in a crate. When you are trying to housetrain a puppy or dog, the crate enables you to set your dog our puppy up to be successful in housetraining, instead of setting them up to fail.

If your dog is digging in the backyard, this can be a hard habit to break if you don’t understand the cause and some simple but effective cures. Dogs digging in the yard is one of the most common behavior problems, but as with all dog training, consistency, repetition and patience are part of the solution.

So why do dogs dig in the yard to begin with? The most common reason is boredom. Dogs are intelligent creatures and they are pack animals. If you stick your dog out in the back yard, your dog does not get any intellectual stimulation, he will also have barrier frustration because he can hear and smell things beyond the fence but he can’t investigate them, and he’s lonely. Dogs need to be part of your family, they are pack animals. Try to imagine how you would feel if you were isolated all the time with nothing to do.

As a groomer, what types of products do you use for bathing the dogs and cats?

Major separation anxiety was the focus of a private lesson with a client today. While there are many reasons why dogs develop separation anxiety, this particular case started because a client was home bound for an extended period of time due to medical issues. She had just adopted her dog Woody, a 5 month old mix breed from the shelter about 4 weeks prior to her illness. She adored this dog “to the max” because of his soft gentle nature.

One way dogs communicate is to growl. A dog’s growling is not always a bad thing. Some dogs that tend to be rather vocal will growl
when they need to go outside, or they may have a gutteral growl when they are trying to tell you they are hungry.

These types of growls are very different from a dog who growls to tell you to back off his space, his food, his toy. These incidents of
growling need to be dealt with immediately. This type of growling is your dog’s way of telling you that he believes he is the “in charge” and that
it is HIS toy, HIS bed, HIS food. This is a dominant dog. This will escalate into something more harmful if not immediately addressed.

Here’s a list of why dogs fight. Competition for resources, including your attention Status-related conflicts – that would be housemates of the same sex fighting over social status to name a few.

Hundreds of thousands of dogs have been turned into animal shelters because their owners didn’t know how to deal with behavior problems and couldn’t find a reliable resource to help them.  We, at the Association of Pet Dog Trainers, think it is long overdue to dedicate a month where we can bring awareness to the importance of socialization and training, and most of all, to inform the public that training your dog can be simple and fun! The APDT has selected January as the perfect month because, as we all …

Does your dog whine? Irritating isn’t it. But before you loose your patience, you need to make an evaluation of why your dog is whining. Is there something wrong? Does he need something like– to go out to the bathroom? Or, is he demanding something, like your attention?

Since our dogs can’t talk, their only forms of communication are barking and whining. When a dog consistently whines, the very first thing to check for are any medical issues. If your dog is in some type of pain, his way to deal with it is to whine. Especially if you have an older dog, arthritis can be very painful and the dog’s only way of telling you it’s in pain is to whine.

Find out how and when to start training your new puppy.