Category: Blogs on dogs
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Teaching Ted eye contact
Teaching your dog to make eye contact on request is extremely useful because it is an easy behaviour that you can reward with any of your reward options (food, interaction or activities – see Guide & Control for an explanation). It can be variously described as teaching a “look” or “watch me”, or simply paying […]
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Ted
Those of you who have been to one of my seminars will have seen video of our last dog Fox stooging for me (that’s her on the front of the Bite & Fight book). She was a fantastic communicator and helped many dogs. When she died we knew we couldn’t replace her, and we won’t […]
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Why I hate “Socialisation”…
I hate socialisation. Well, not socialisation, but “socialisation”. You know, puppy “socialisation”; that thing where you take your pup to three “puppy socialisation classes” on consecutive Tuesdays in the village hall when they are twelve weeks old, unless the last one coincides with a specially gripping episode of your favourite soap, when you can officially […]
This week we went to the Galleria Dell’ Academia in Florence to see a statue of Dave by one of the Ninja Turtles. I can see why he named it after me, because some of the physical attributes are clearly modelled on mine (no, I was thinking of the feet). Anyway, go see it if […]
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New Dog Law Powers
The DEFRA draft practitioners’ manual “Tackling irresponsible dog ownership” outlines the measures that can be taken to deal with people and their dogs, introduced and consolidated by the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014. This is the same act that extends the Sec 3 Offence of “dog dangerously out of control” to private places […]
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What is “dangerous”?
People ask “Are dogs dangerous?” On a recent holiday in Italy I came across a peculiar phenomenon that illustrates the answer. All over the town different species were calmly going about their own business, without any interference from humans. They differed in their level of dependency on humans for a living. There were some that were sometimes fed […]
On the day when the law changes to criminalise the owners of dogs deemed to be dangerously out of control on private, as well as public, property it is interesting to note that the 2013 NHS figures for hospital admissions as a result of dog bite (or strike) show another an annual increase of 6% […]
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Yet another fatal dog attack
It is with horrible irony that whilst the press were reporting another fatal dog attack on a baby, I was in Court all day, explaining why a five year old collie that had never before shown any aggression to anyone, had bitten the face of a two-year-old girl. I only have press reports to go […]
Once again we hear of a tragedy in which a human being has lost their life through the actions of a dog. I have the greatest heartfelt sympathy for anyone whose lives are affected by such a traumatic event. I can only imagine the heartache and sorrow, not to mention the guilt, that one must […]