By Dianna Young
 
            If I were to visit Italy or Greece, I would be lost because I don’t have the skills for adequate verbal communication there.
 
            But if I sent my dog to Italy or Greece, my dog would be able to communicate just fine with every dog that lives there. That’s because dogs don’t [...]

By Dianna Young
 
        A common complaint that I hear from dog owners is, “My dog consistently breaks a ‘stay.’”
 
            The stay is a very valuable command to have in your repertoire, and it’s worth teaching your dog how to do it right. We want the animal to understand that “stay” means no movement; none whatsoever. [...]

By Dianna Young
 It often surprises people who bring their dogs to us for training, but we spend at least as much time training people as we do training dogs.
            Why? Because people don’t instinctively know how to think like dogs. And if we are to succeed with dogs, we have to meet them on their [...]

By Dianna Young

In my last two columns, I talked about the canine learning process. Dogs are not capable of deductive reasoning, and thus not very capable of figuring things out for themselves. Rather, they learn by experience and by repetition. In those columns, I talked about some of the things that can go wrong [...]

By Dianna Young
In our last column, we talked about Max, a pleasant, mixed-breed dog whose owner had taught him lessons she hadn’t intended. By failing to require immediate compliance with commands the first time she gave them, she had taught Max the entirely obvious lesson that he didn’t have to comply until she had repeated [...]