Books
Doggie Language: A Dog Lover’s Guide to Understanding Your Best Friend
This is a book every single human who lives with a dog should own! It’s useful for families with children, adults, and even those of us who work with dogs everyday. Our dogs are trying to communicate with us all the time through their body language. Often, their communication falls flat when we fail to read and understand their body language. Lili Chin has beautiful, fun illustrations with excellent, brief explanations of what your dog may be feeling and trying to communicate. Get this book now!!!
Puppy Start Right: Foundation Training for the Companion Dog by Kenneth and Debbie Martin
This book has all the basics of providing foundation training to your new puppy, but the training principles are also great for adolescent or adult dogs. It has clear illustrations, step-by-step instructions, and a whole section on the stages of puppy development and socializing puppies during their developmental stages. It also lists the basic principles of clicker training.
For my clients: I highly recommend Puppy Start Right if you have brought a puppy into your life or just want a practical training manual to refer to anytime. If you’re working with me, you’ll probably recognize similarities to the training approaches you read about in this book. Of course, working one-on-one allows us to tailor our approach, and for you and your dog to receive hands-on practice and coaching. In other words, I’m not suggesting that the book is a good replacement for private training with me!
Canine Enrichment for the Real World by Allie Bender & Emily Strong
Allie Bender and Emily Strong of Pet Harmony Training define enrichment as “meeting your dog’s needs.” They go into depth around various forms of enrichment for your dog, including physical exercise, safety and security, foraging, mental stimulation, calming enrichment, providing the right environment, and more. This book has so many great ideas that I share with my clients. It’s recommended by trainers and behavior experts with decades of experience such as Susan Friedman and Ken Ramirez. Check this book out – you won’t regret it!
The Eye of the Trainer: Animal Training, Transformation, and Trust by Ken Ramirez
This book is a collection of insights about behavior and learning, training tools and techniques, creative solutions, and fascinating stories from Ken Ramirez. So much to learn from him! In his introduction, Ken says “For me, good training has become inextricably linked with the effective application of positive reinforcement. It embodies the ideals of trust, choice, and welfare that make great animal care possible. This collection of my writing is designed to help others see animal training through this lens, through the eye of a trainer.” I loved this book but pet parents may find some of the other books on this list more directly relevant to your dog’s training and care.
Plenty in Life is Free by Kathy Sdao
When I adopted my dog Kempie, I was given a handout by the shelter describing the “Nothing in Life is Free” training protocol. Boiled down to the bare minimum, the approach says that you should train your dog by making her work for all good things in life. While I began my life with Kempie trying to follow these principles, there were things about it that just didn’t “feel right” to me. Did I really need or want to make her do something for me every time just to show her affection? I realized that the answer was a resounding no! I love it when my girl comes and nudges me to say hello or to request a little back scratch.
Plenty in Life is Free spoke to me because Kathy Sdao, a renowned dog trainer, addresses many of the questions I had about NILIF that I was not experienced enough to articulate or answer myself. Her training philosophy emphasizes “developing partnerships in which humans and dogs exchange reinforcements and continually cede the upper hand to one another.” Sdao’s approach (along with many other respected trainers) helps push us to be more generous and creative in our approaches in order to get the behavior we want, without the “stifling rules that constrain our ability to share affection and attention with our dogs.” Those of us who buy into a Sdao like approach can still train well-behaved dogs and even highly skilled service animals, but the philosophy allows for a more natural relationship to form between you and your dog.
For my clients: Plenty in Life is Free may not be the right approach for everyone, but I encourage you to read the book if what I wrote about it speaks to you too. Most importantly, decide what your priorities and rules for your dog will be. If you don’t mind if your dog gets on your bed, or nudges you for a little affection, I don’t have any problem with it. It doesn’t mean your dog is trying to dominate you! A lot of dog training is about teaching our dogs to “fit” into our human world and meet our expectations. I don’t keep a list of “good” and “bad” behaviors. If what your dog is doing doesn’t bother you or hurt other people or animals (and isn’t likely to turn into a larger problem in the future), I probably won’t have an issue with it.
