There are many important skills that are important to being effective in your training with your dog. These include your handling skills, controlling your own body language, understanding your dog’s body language and many other essential traits/skills. However, when you are first starting training, or even if you have been training for some time, this post will cover what we consider to be essential to gaining success in training your dog.

Patience

It can be a frustrating and...

At dogma, our approach to training is reward based. You may have heard this referred to as positive reinforcement training. The basic concept is that dogs learn primarily through association. So this means that if you reward them for a behaviour, they will perform this behaviour more.  Rewards can be anything and everything that your dog perceives as a positive. This includes food, toys, walks, getting to go through a door, your attention and affection, the opportunity to play with...

One of the biggest obstacles all dog owners have in common is training their pets. It can feel like an intimidating, mentally trying battle, but it’s well worth the effort.

Training a puppy gives you a chance to mold her manners and behaviour in the best possible way to fit into our human world. However, training an adult dog is another thing altogether.

You may have adopted an adult dog, or you’ve found that your dog has fallen into some bad habits. Regardless of the situation,...

Sometimes it feels like an evil magic wand was waved over your puppy changing him or her from a loving well behaved little pup into a completely unruly dog! Welcome to the teenage stage!

Adolescence usually starts around 7 months of age and extends to about 18 months of age. This is when your dog’s brain moves into a new stage of development and hormone levels increase because they progressing into sexually maturity. During this time they’re becoming more independent and...

Summer is a wonderful time of year! The days are longer, the weather is warmer, and you get to spend more time outdoors. However, things get busier, we can get distracted and there are new hazards for our dogs. With a few extra precautions and a bit of training, you can ensure your canine family members stay safe and stress-free during the Summer months!

Hot Weather: One of the biggest safety risks to our pets during the Summer is that warmer temperatures. Exposure to heat for too long...

If you struggle with your dog reacting too often out on walks or find each venture outside too stressful, you are being reactive vs proactive with your training. We must understand how to set our dog up for success and become proactive in our training! This not only allows your dog to progress through the program faster, but also makes it much more enjoyable for yourself and your dog!

Go to the Right Environment

As we discussed, you need to go to a space that sets your dog up for success....

We have discussed how to make our dogs calmly accept handling and to enjoy it, but what about how we handle them? Let’s face it: we can be jerks when we have our dogs on leash through yanking or keeping constant tension on the leash, and we can be very reactive as well! We often begin to anticipate that our dogs will react in certain situations, so we begin to react. This may be through pulling up on the leash, we may raise our shoulders with tension, we may begin breathing...

Unleash your dog’s spirit. This has been a tagline of dogma’s for over 15 years and was inspired by my dear friend and mentor, Jennifer Buchanan. She shared it with me as we were discussing my work years ago and it instantly clicked. It summed up perfectly what my goals were in training dogs and developing our relationship with them. I was reflecting on this shortly after we said goodbye to our dog, Deja. She spent 16 wonderful years at my side and as I thought back on our time...

Hello, my name is Megan, and yes, I hug my dog.

It may seem like a silly statement, but we are at a time when people do not want to admit this and don’t dare post a picture of themselves in an embrace with their dog. And if they do, they will likely be attacked and ridiculed for doing so.

Before I write too much more, I must start with two disclaimers. First off, I had no idea this was going to be such a hot topic this month. I presented this subject at an ...