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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

By Dianna Young You probably already are aware that whatever your dog learns from you he learns through repetition. What you may not be aware of, however, is that he may learn a lot of things from you that you had not  intended to teach. Take, for example, Max. He’s a pleasant, intelligent, medium-sized dog [...]